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Abstracts
over the last two decades, in which
polarisation of the PP and the PSOE has
gradually established itself, have taken on a
role of undeniable political centricity, both
with regard to their actions in Spanish
politics and also by opting for an ideologically
central position.
Liberal Ideas and Renewing Politics
Monique Canto-Sperber
Monique Canto-Sperber, moral and political
philosopher (L’inquiétude morale et la vie
humaine, 2001), is a member of the CNRS and
of the Centre de Recherches Politiques
Raymond Aron of the École des Hautes Études
en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Although she has
sometimes been considered as being akin to
the more social-democratic positions of
Dominique Strauss-Khan and Michel Rocard,
Canto-Sperber has dedicated a significant
part of her most recent work to renewing and
defining a social-liberal line of thought based
on political theory. In this respect, Canto-
Sperber is the author of work such as Le
socialisme libéral. Une anthologie: Europe-Etats-
Unis (2003), Les règles de la liberté (2003) and
Faut-il sauver le libéralisme? (2006). In this
article, she talks about what she considers to
be the essence of a social-liberal movement
and point of view: the conflation between the
active defence of individual freedom and the
awareness that it is in a community, within a
cohesive society, that personal autonomy can
be made manifest.
The Complicated and Exciting Future
of Liberalism
Antonio Garrigues Walker
Liberalism has been capable of adapting to
the major transformations of past and
present with much more speed and efficiency
than socialism or conservatism, both of
which have often limited themselves to taking
on the liberal ideas that have convinced them
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most at any particular time, to define and
apply to certain public proposals and policies.
This is just one of the conclusions that the
author defends in an article with a marked
tone of assessment and the summarising of
his own life and experiences in the political
arena. Today, liberalism is a trend of thought
that is capable of providing suitable responses
at a time when dogmatic pretexts are lacking.
However, the ideological triumph of
liberalism has never been translated, not even
today, into perceptible political profit on the
part of political parties of a reformist, liberal
or centrist nature. There are various ways of
providing an explanation, more or less
reasoned, for this phenomenon and
Garrigues Walker deals with each one
explicitly. In the case of Spain, however, the
problem is more complex, with certain
singularities that the author outlines in
detail, such as the country’s difficulty in
overcoming a political debate that is couched
exclusively within left-right dialectics,
resulting in the political centre, rather than
being a position in its own right, representing
a particularly unstable point of balance.
Tony Blair: Ten Years of New Labour
Montserrat Guibernau
This new article by Montserrat Guibernau can
be considered as the second part, or
continuation, of the article she published in
VIA 01 entitled Tony Blair: Leadership as Vocation.
On that occasion the author focused on the
figure of one of the undeniable leaders of the
last decade in Europe. In this new text she
weighs up and reviews in detail the broad
lines established by New Labour and on which
it based itself, the origins of which lie in the
Third Way, as outlined by Anthony Giddens,
author of Beyond Left and Right: The Future of
Radical Politics (1994) and The Third Way: The
Renewal of Social Democracy (1998). Although
she states that, sometimes, New Labour
appeared merely to be doing the opposite to
what Old Labour would have done, Guibernau