In both political and intellectual terms, liberalism is at present in the midst of a powerful advance. The word revival is deliberately not being used in this context. Certainly, the recent flowering of liberal writing in Western Europe and North America, which has made the intellectual running in this respect in the modern era, testifies to the revival of interest in a form of ideological writing that had been surpassed in influence during the very different intellectual debates of the 1930s and after. But at the directly political level, that is to say with regard to direct influence in terms of political parties and political programmes, ‘revival’ is an inappropriate word because the last decade has seen, in fact, an advance of liberal ideas and values in areas where they had seldom or never existed in the past.

In a sense the process initially began as an enterprise at the highest level of ideas to combat the apparent mastery of the Marxist left and its intellectual, though bitterly hostile kinsman, the Fascist right. But the process was undertaken with a power of thought and expression which, though slow to make converts, has at last impacted upon the intellectual consciousness of the world with an unvanquishable authority: the writings of Friedrich Hayek, of Karl Popper, of Isaiah Berlin have now flowed into and become the mainstream of ideas. And thus today an explicit interest in liberalism as an ideology accompanies an advance of liberalism across the political agenda and at the ballot box.