IN THE next couple of weeks, the cardinals will elect a new pope. He will be a holy man because the cardinals understand the nature of prayer; he will have been a capable bishop, because the cardinals understand the nature of Church administration; he will have a powerful personality, if not as charismatic as that of Pope John Paul II. It is unlikely that the same lightning will strike the papacy twice running.

What more can one say about his likely views? The next pope will be a socialist; no doubt a democratic socialist, but a socialist all the same. Almost every cardinal and bishop in the Roman Catholic Church, and probably every bishop in the Anglican Church, is a socialist. They are socialists in the same sense as Tony Blair, or Gerhard Schröder, or Jacques Chirac, or Bill Clinton. They are all socialists because they have never studied the liberal argument. That is a pity; liberalism may not be enough, but it is the basis of our culture.

On Saturday I was a member of the congregation at St George’s Chapel for the Service of Prayer for the marriage of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall. I admire the Prince’s openness to unorthodox ideas, which were well represented in the congregation. But he, too, is an unconscious socialist, like almost everyone else. And this is a pity, because socialism is morally sympathetic, but intellectually mistaken.

I have been thinking how to put this right, a small task of conversion of a largely socialist world. I thought first of the next pope. I’ve often noticed that bishops, of all Christian denominations, have never read Adam Smith, but know intuitively that they disagree with him. My first thought, therefore, was that I might send a copy of The Wealth of Nations as an inaugural present to the next pope, whoever he might be.

I then reflected that Adam Smith is only a step in the liberal argument. On so great an occasion as the election of a new pope, might it not be more helpful to send the whole argument, as it has developed between 1689 and the present day? Then I thought of doing the same for the Prince of Wales, as a belated wedding present; with his intellectual curiosity, he might enjoy it.

I am in a good position to do this because I have spent the past 20 years as a quiet academic publisher. In 1983 I refounded the publishing business of Pickering & Chatto, which had been a bookseller since William Pickering started the firm in 1820, and was an important publisher in the early 19th century. One great attraction in being a publisher is that one can publish the books one admires most. We have published several of the classics of English liberalism; that is the philosophy which created modern science, modern society, modern economics, the modern world.

Liberalism starts, as many good things have, with a Somerset man, John Locke. (The English monarchy also starts with a Somerset man, Alfred the Great.) Locke’s works on Toleration (1689) Human Understanding (1690), Civil Government (1690) and Education (1693) are the foundation of English liberalism. Like Shakespeare, Locke forms part of the mindset of British and American people, whether they have read him or not, though it is much better to have read him.

Thomas Jefferson used Locke to draft the American Declaration of Independence, the liberal document I am most sure that both the next pope and the Prince of Wales have read already. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is the combination of two of Locke’s phrases. If one wants to know what Locke meant by “the pursuit of happiness” — he is thinking of virtue rather than hedonism — one should read Human Understanding.

Pickering has not published an edition of Locke, though I would much liked to have done so, but we have published some of the 18th-century reactions to Locke, including the American. The United States is the product of Locke’s thought, both through the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Adam Smith applied the liberal argument to economics, and thereby founded modern economic thought. He is to modern economics what Plato was to the Neo-Platonists; he is the master. Adam Smith’s view was that every man should be free to pursue his own interest in his own way, without encouragements or restraints, “upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice”. That is how William Playfair, his first editor, summarised the doctrine.

This doctrine of free competition influenced Thomas Malthus, who was the founder of population studies. Malthus’s theory of population became the link between Adam Smith’s idea of free competition in trade, and Charles Darwin’s more far-reaching discovery of free competition in the survival of species. Pickering has published all three authors.

How did this principle of selection by free competition change our economic world? One substantial reason is to be found in a pair of postwar papers, which neither the next pope nor the Prince is likely to have read, by the Austrian philosopher Frederick Hayek; they are The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945) and Competition as a Discovery Procedure (1968).

These papers come very early in modern information theory — the first before the development of advanced computers, and the second early in the information age. They are remarkably prescient. Hayek’s argument is that information is diffused, and can be used efficiently only if economic systems respond to the knowledge available to individual bodies. Hayek’s view was validated by the subsequent victory of the personal against the giant computer and by the free interactions of the internet. These are liberating discoveries. “Competition is important as a process of exploration in which prospectors search for unused opportunities that when discovered, can also be used by others.”

Free economic competition is not a zero-sum game. Free competition creates complex mutual benefits, by what Adam Smith called “the hidden hand”. Liberalism has changed the world because it works and socialism does not. The history of liberal theory explains why that is so.

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