In this episode of Somewhere, Anywhere, we step outside the studio and into the home of one of Europe’s most important classical liberal thinkers: Pedro Schwartz. What follows is less an interview than a conversation across generations about freedom, institutions, and the intellectual life of modern Spain.

Schwartz’s life traces the arc of European liberalism in the twentieth century. As a young Spaniard coming of age under Franco, he left a closed country and found himself at the London School of Economics, studying under Karl Popper and alongside some of the great figures of modern economic thought. Those formative years exposed him to a cosmopolitan intellectual environment that would shape his lifelong project: bringing the traditions of classical liberalism —Popper, Hayek, Friedman, Robbins — into Spanish intellectual and political life.

Over the decades, Schwartz became not only a scholar but also a conduit of ideas. He translated, introduced, and debated liberal thought in Spain when it was still intellectually marginal. His influence extends through generations of economists, journalists, and policymakers, many of whom first encountered liberal ideas through his seminars, essays, and public interventions.

The conversation moves fluidly between intellectual history and lived politics. Schwartz reflects on the intellectual atmosphere of the LSE in the 1960s, the role of the School of Salamanca in Spain’s liberal tradition, and his encounters with figures such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. At the same time, we revisit decisive moments in modern Spanish history: the democratic transition, the 1981 coup attempt, Spain’s entry into NATO and the European project, and the reformist wave of the 1990s.

Schwartz also speaks candidly about his own brief experience in politics —founding a liberal party, serving in parliament, and influencing the policy debates that helped shape Spain’s market reforms. Yet he ultimately returns to the role he values most: that of the public intellectual who helps societies clarify their principles.

Throughout the episode, one theme recurs: liberalism is not simply a set of policy preferences but a civilizational inheritance. It requires institutions, intellectual seriousness, and a broad cultural horizon — one that ranges from economic theory to philosophy, history, and literature.

At 91 years old, Pedro Schwartz remains engaged in that project. This conversation is both a reflection on a remarkable intellectual life and a meditation on the enduring challenges of defending freedom in democratic societies.

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Madrid didn’t become “Madrid” by accident. The late nights, the density, the sense that the city is competing for talent rather than managing decline. In this episode, Diego and I sit down with Esperanza Aguirre, former President of the Community of Madrid, and treat her not as a personality but as a case study: what happens when a politician is a seriousdefender of classical liberalism and then gets enough power to try implementing it.

Aguirre’s liberalism isn’t a retrospective brand. She traces it to a specific intellectual and institutional pipeline: the Liberal Club of Madrid under Pedro Schwartz, weekly immersion in The Economist when it was more explicitly liberal, and Hayek’s argument about the Industrial Revolution’s brutal optics but longer-run moral arithmetic. She even gives a wonderfully concrete “de-programming” moment: a 1979 trip where seeing telecom competition in the U.S. made the “natural monopoly” story feel less like economics and more like Spanish administrative instinct.

From there, Madrid becomes the application layer. Her version of liberalism is not just lower taxes, but choice plus speed. Choice in schooling and in health care, where she describes making it normal to pick schools, hospitals, doctors, and specialists, and bluntly frames the political resistance as a preference for “captive clients.” Speed in how a city allows people to build and open: she explains the pivot from slow, permission-first licensing to declaración responsable, an ex post enforcement model that lets small businesses start operating without waiting a year or two for a stamp. Layer in the other pieces: hospitals built quickly by giving land and contracting private construction and sometimes operation, with reversion later; an aggressive metro expansion; and finally liberalized opening hours and Sundays, turning Madrid into the “always open” city tourists now take for granted.

If you think “classical liberalism” is too abstract for real politics, Aguirre makes it concrete: it’s a set of institutional defaults about who gets to decide, how fast they’re allowed to act, and whether the public sector can be made to behave as if citizens are customers rather than assignments.

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