The danger of being misunderstood is always in ambush comparing different cultures. During a very interesting conversation with the Singalese writer Rajiva Wijesinha I realised how words which are now widely accepted could have different meanings according to the latitude where they are spoken. Talking about free trade, liberalism (Wijesinha even quoted the old Malagodi), globalisation we both realised the danger of building, without any intention, the Gramsci’s linguistic Babel not so much because we were speaking different idioms as for giving different meanings to the same words.
This meeting with a Sri Lankan writer renewed in me, even if it wasn’t the first interview in my life, the amazement towards the spell of writing, the ever-new discovery that starting from a novel you could end up talking about history, politics, economy, geography, mass psychology and much more in confirmation of the fact that a book can contain several universes.

You are the President of the Liberal Party of Sri Lanka, and a historian and writer in addition to your academic career. So you can be considered as an intellectual devoted to politics. Or on the contrary do you consider yourself as a politician?
If you consider yourself as an intellectual devoted to politics, this may sound strange in a period when most politicians are businessmen or showmen. What do you think about it considering that in the past the philosophers were to be the politicians?
I certainly do not see myself as a politician, though for various reasons I have found myself involved in active politics. I had seen myself rather as an analyst and commentator from a particular point of view.
As for my own politics, within the Liberal Party of Sri Lanka, I should note that it developed from a think tank called the Council for Liberal Democracy, at a time when private enterprise was once again becoming acceptable in a country that had, since independence, been dominated by the socialist consensus springing from British influence in the period before and after the Second World War.
Unfortunately the 1977 government which brought in an open economy had no intellectual underpinning for its policies. This meant that it moved towards crony capitalism, which in turn promotes authoritarianism, as people begin to resent a system that is clearly not concerned with benefits to the majority or to the worse off. Liberalism, on the contrary, believes in private enterprise precisely because in the long run it will benefit all sections of society. However Liberalism, at least in the British tradition, exemplified by Mill and most recently by John Rawls, believes in state intervention to ensure a level playing field, which means for instance representative democracy, legislation to prevent exploitation and of course social welfare measures in fields such as health and education.
Unfortunately think tanks were not taken seriously at the time in Sri Lanka and my colleagues, against my wishes at the time, decided to establish a political party. On balance I think this was the right decision, and we were able to advance our ideas more effectively. Several things we proposed at the time, which seemed alien to the centralized colonial mindset at the time, increased devolution, the mixed German electoral system for instance, are now widely accepted.
At the same time I think that intellectuals, unless extremely ambitious, are not going to make good politicians. In a modern democratic dispensation, given the relentless need to project a public persona, it is precisely showmen and businessmen who are likely to do well, and to have the finances necessary to succeed. Otherwise one has to spend vast amounts of time in fundraising, which creates obligations. The problems you face in Italy with Mafia and other involvement in politics is inevitable in a modern democracy unless you are very careful.
This is why I believe we need to revert more carefully to Montesquieu’s doctrine of the separation of powers, which is ignored on the British system, which is also the system in Italy.