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Hello and welcome to your radical questions. This is where I put your questions to one of

our magnificent radical guests. He's shuffling in his chair. He's so nervous about having to take

these questions. It's your chance to engage very directly with the supremely smart and

interesting and influential people that we have on this podcast and ask them about their ideas for the future. And joining me today, and I very much hope you heard the main episode with him last Thursday, is Adrian Woldridge. He's a writer at Bloomberg. He's a, I think they call you, is it a global business columnist? That's the pompous title, is it? But you write about absolutely everything, basically.

Righter of many, many, many books, including the aristocracy of talent.

And most recently, centrists of the world unite, the lost genius of liberalism.

And basically, Adrian is trying to make a pretty trenchant defence of not just liberalism, but the idea of centristism, not as a form of equivocation, but as an active attempt to basically fix some of the big problems in the world while staying true to liberal principles. And I strongly recommend the book, but I strongly recommend that podcast as a prime. I mean, the danger with podcasts, Adrian, is that people listen to the podcast and they don't need to read the book. But in your case, they should definitely read the book, shouldn't they? Absolutely. There we go. Look, we've got the easy questions out to begin with. This is our first question. It's from a friend of the podcast, a former guest on this podcast, a political theorist and a teacher of critical theory, a young academic called

Louisa Munch. Louisa is fantastic to hear from you. She has sent us this voice note.

Hi, Adrian. Hi, I'm all. Louisa here. I was wondering, Adrian, how do you think of liberalism

in an age where people feel so lonely and disconnected from each other.

How do we think of individualism when people feel so atomised in society now?

And also, Amul already knows how skeptical I am of nostalgia.

So how do we go about returning to old ideas like liberalism without repeating the past. Thanks guys. Bye.

Thank you Louise. If that very windy voice, don't she's probably on campus as a motorbike

went past there. Two things really. One is how do you reconcile your belief in liberalism

starting off with the individual rather than the collective and the problems that we have today of atomisation, kind of alienation, people feeling very atomised, and then I'll come on to

the one about nostalgia. So yes, where does your liberalism leave room for connection and belonging?

One of the interesting things about liberalism is that the best critics of liberalism as a philosophy

have almost always been

other liberals. And the classic criticism of liberalism as an over-individualistic philosophy comes

from Tockville. And Tockville, when he's writing democracy in America, says that liberalism

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