I agree with Kenneth Wain (February 21) about liberalism's pervasive influence on Western culture and political order; one cannot disagree without making a fool of oneself.

My disagreement concerns the view that he attributes to me.

In my column (January 29) I did not state, as he says I did, either that liberalism's "influence" or that its "relevance" is today restricted to academe. What I wrote was: "The best of liberalism (US and EU) today is ensconced in academe."

That sentence initiated a paragraph that indicated that I believe this academic work is of considerable relevance to western societies.

However, in my judgment it is not having the influence that it should have on practising politicians.

But to say that is hardly the same as saying that the liberal canon does not exercise a decisive influence on the nature of western political order. Despite discussing only two meanings of liberalism, I spoke of its "multiple" (not two) meanings, precisely because the semantic range is wider and permits one to speak of western democracies as liberal orders (in contrast, say, to authoritarian regimes).

I did not explicate this so as not to over-complicate my argument. As Prof. Wain says, "the parties of the west have become liberal parties" (in the broad sense). But for me to write, in my column, that when the Deputy Prime Minister said that his party is not a liberal party, what he had in mind was laissez-faire liberalism and not progressive social policy (which is what I wrote, stopping there) but that nonetheless his party is really a liberal party in a third, broader sense... well, that struck me as unbearably convoluted for a single newspaper article, even one written by me.