The magazine was founded in 1843, to disseminate the doctrine of laissez-faire.
Illustration by Mark Long
“Liberalism made the modern world, but the modern world is turning against it,” an article in The Economist
lamented last year, on the occasion of the magazine’s
hundred-and-seventy-fifth anniversary. “Europe and America are in the
throes of a popular rebellion against liberal élites, who are seen as
self-serving and unable, or unwilling, to solve the problems of ordinary
people,” even as authoritarian China is poised to become the world’s
largest economy. For a publication that was founded “to campaign for
liberalism,” all of this was “profoundly worrying.”
The crisis in liberalism has become received wisdom across the political spectrum. Barack Obama included Patrick Deneen’s “Why Liberalism Failed”
(2018) in his annual list of recommended books; meanwhile, Vladimir
Putin has gleefully pronounced liberalism “obsolete.” The right accuses
liberals of promoting selfish individualism and crass materialism at the
expense of social cohesion and cultural identity. Centrists claim that
liberals’ obsession with political correctness and minority rights drove
white voters to Donald Trump. For the newly resurgent left, the rise of
demagoguery looks like payback for the small-government doctrines of
technocratic neoliberalism—tax cuts, privatization, financial
deregulation, antilabor legislation, cuts in Social Security—which have
shaped policy in Europe and America since the eighties.
Attacks on liberalism are nothing new. In 1843, the year The Economist
was founded, Karl Marx wrote, “The glorious robes of liberalism have
fallen away, and the most repulsive despotism stands revealed for all
the world to see.” Nietzsche dismissed John Stuart Mill, the author of
the canonical liberal text “On Liberty”
(1859), as a “numbskull.” In colonized Asia and Africa, critics—such as
R. C. Dutt, in India, and Sun Yat-sen, in China—pointed out
liberalism’s complicity in Western imperialism. Muhammad Abduh, the
Grand Mufti of Egypt, wrote, “Your liberalness, we see plainly, is only
for yourselves.” (Mill, indeed, had justified colonialism on the ground
that it would lead to the improvement of “barbarians.”) From a different
vantage, critiques came from aspiring imperialist powers, such as
Germany (Carl Schmitt), Italy (Gaetano Salvemini), and Japan (Tokutomi
Sohō). Since then, Anglo-American thinkers such as Reinhold Niebuhr and
John Gray have pointed out liberalism’s troubled relationship with
democracy and human rights, and its overly complacent belief in reason
and progress.
Yet the sheer variety of criticisms of liberalism
makes it hard to know right away what precisely is being criticized.
Liberalism’s ancestry has been traced back to John Locke’s writings on
individual reason, Adam Smith’s economic theory, and the empiricism of
David Hume, but today the doctrine seems to contain potentially
contradictory elements. The philosophy of individual liberty connotes
both a desire for freedom from state regulation in economic matters (a
stance close to libertarianism) and a demand for the state to insure a
minimal degree of social and economic justice—the liberalism of the New
Deal and of European welfare states. The iconic figures of liberalism
themselves moved between these commitments. Mill, even while supporting
British imperialism in India and Ireland, called himself a socialist and
outlined the aim of achieving “common ownership in the raw materials of
the globe.” The Great Depression forced John Dewey to conclude that
“the socialized economy is the means of free individual development.”
Isaiah Berlin championed the noninterference of the state in 1958, in
his celebrated lecture “Two Concepts of Liberty”; but eleven years later
he had come to believe that such “negative liberty” armed “the able and
ruthless against the less gifted and less fortunate.”
Because
of this conceptual morass, liberalism has, to an unusual degree, been
defined by what it wasn’t. For French liberals in the early nineteenth
century, it was a defense against the excesses of Jacobins and
ultra-monarchists. For the free-trading Manchester Liberals of the
mid-nineteenth century, it was anticolonial. Liberals in Germany, on the
other hand, were allied with both nationalists and imperialists. In the
twentieth century, liberalism became a banner under which to march
against Communism and Fascism. Recent scholars have argued that it
wasn’t until liberalism became the default “other” of totalitarian
ideologies that inner coherence and intellectual lineage were
retrospectively found for it. Locke, a devout Christian, was not
regarded as a philosopher of liberalism until the early twentieth
century. Nor was the word “liberal” part of U.S. political discourse
before that time. When Lionel Trilling claimed, in 1950, that liberalism
in America was “not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual
tradition,” the term was becoming a catchall signifier of moral
prestige, variously synonymous with “democracy,” “capitalism,” and even
simply “the West.” Since 9/11, it has seemed more than ever to define
the West against such illiberal enemies as Islamofascism and Chinese
authoritarianism.
The Economist
proudly enlists itself in this combative Anglo-American tradition,
having vigorously claimed to be advancing the liberal cause since its
founding. In “Liberalism at Large”
(Verso), Alexander Zevin, a historian at the City University of New
York, takes it at its word, telling the story not only of the magazine
itself but also of its impact on world affairs. Using The Economist as a proxy for liberalism enables Zevin to sidestep much conceptual muddle about the doctrine. His examination of The Economist’s
pronouncements and of the policies of those who heeded them yields, in
effect, a study of several liberalisms as they have been widely
practiced in the course of a hundred and seventy-five years. The
magazine emerges as a force that—thanks to the military, cultural,
and economic power of Britain and, later, America—can truly be said to
have made the modern world, if not in the way that many liberals would
suppose.
In terms of its influence, The Economist
has long been a publication like no other. Within a decade of its
founding, Marx was describing it as the organ of “the aristocracy of
finance.” In 1895, Woodrow Wilson called it “a sort of financial
providence for businessmen on both sides of the Atlantic.” (Wilson, an
Anglophile, wooed his evidently forbearing wife with quotations from Walter Bagehot, the most famous of The Economist’s
editors.) For years, the magazine was proud of the exclusivity of its
readership. Now it has nearly a million subscribers in North America
(more than in Britain), and seven hundred thousand in the rest of the
world. Since the early nineties, it has served, alongside the Financial Times, as the suavely British-accented voice of globalization (scoring over the too stridently partisan and American Wall Street Journal).
According
to its own statistics, its readers are the richest and the most
prodigal consumers of all periodical readers; more than twenty per cent
once claimed ownership of “a cellar of vintage wines.” Like Aston
Martin, Burberry, and other global British brands, The Economist
invokes the glamour of élitism. “It’s lonely at the top,” one of its
ads says, “but at least there’s something to read.” Its articles, almost
all of which are unsigned, were until recently edited from an office in
St. James’s, London, a redoubt of posh Englishness, with private clubs,
cigar merchants, hatters, and tailors. The present editor, Zanny Minton
Beddoes, is the first woman ever to hold the position. The staff,
predominantly white, is recruited overwhelmingly from the universities
of Oxford and Cambridge, and a disproportionate number of the most
important editors have come from just one Oxford college, Magdalen.
“Lack of diversity is a benefit,” Gideon Rachman, a former editor who is
now a columnist at the Financial Times, told Zevin,
explaining that it produces an assertive and coherent point of view.
Indeed, contributors are not shy about adding prescription (how to fix
India’s power problems, say) to their reporting and analysis. The pieces
are mostly short, but the coverage is comprehensive; a single issue
might cover the insurgency in south Thailand, public transportation in
Jakarta, commodities prices, and recent advances in artificial
intelligence. This air of crisp editorial omniscience insures that the
magazine is as likely to be found on an aspirant think tanker’s iPad in
New Delhi as it is on Bill Gates’s private jet.
Zevin, having
evidently mastered the magazine’s archives, commands a deep knowledge of
its inner workings and its historical connection to political and
economic power. He shows how its editors and contributors pioneered the
revolving doors that link media, politics, business, and finance—alumni
have gone on to such jobs as deputy governor of the Bank of England,
Prime Minister of Britain, and President of Italy—and how such people
have defined, at crucial moments in history, liberalism’s ever-changing
relationship with capitalism, imperialism, democracy, and war.
A capsule version of this thesis can be found in the career of James Wilson, The Economist’s
founder and first editor. Wilson, who was born in Scotland and became
the owner of a struggling hatmaking business, intended his journal to
develop and disseminate the doctrine of laissez-faire—“nothing but pure
principles,” as he put it. He was particularly vociferous in his
opposition to the Corn Laws, agricultural tariffs that were unpopular
with merchants. The Corn Laws were repealed in 1846, three years after
the magazine first appeared, and Wilson began to proselytize more
energetically for free trade and the increasingly prominent discipline
of economics. He became a Member of Parliament and held several
positions in the British government. He also founded a pan-Asian bank,
now known as Standard Chartered, which expanded fast on the back of the
opium trade with China. In 1859, Wilson became Chancellor of the Indian
Exchequer. He died in India the following year, trying to reconfigure
the country’s financial system.
During his short career as a
journalist-cum-crusader, Wilson briskly clarified what he meant by “pure
principles.” He opposed a ban on trading with slaveholding countries on
the ground that it would punish slaves as well as British consumers. In
the eighteen-forties, when Ireland was struck with famine, which was
largely caused by free trade—the British insisted on exporting Irish
food, despite catastrophic crop failure—Wilson called for a homeopathic
remedy: more free trade. With Irish intransigence becoming a nuisance,
he advised the British to respond with “powerful, resolute, but just
repression.” Wilson was equally stern with those suffering from rising
inequality at home. In his view, the government was wrong to oblige rail
companies to provide better service for working-class passengers, who
were hitherto forced to travel in exposed freight cars: “Where the most
profit is made, the public is best served. Limit the profit, and you
limit the exertion of ingenuity in a thousand ways.” A factory bill
limiting women to a twelve-hour workday was deemed equally pernicious.
As for public schooling, common people should be “left to provide
education as they provide food for themselves.”
The Economist
held that, “if the pursuit of self-interest, left equally free for all,
does not lead to the general welfare, no system of government can
accomplish it.” But this opposition to government intervention, it
turned out, did not extend to situations
in which liberalism appeared to be under threat. In the
eighteen-fifties, Zevin writes, the Crimean War, the Second Opium War,
and the Indian Mutiny “rocked British liberalism at home and recast it
abroad.” Proponents of free trade had consistently claimed that it was
the best hedge against war. However, Britain’s expansion across Asia, in
which free trade was often imposed at gunpoint, predictably provoked
conflict, and, for The Economist, wherever Britain’s “imperial interests were at stake, war could become an absolute necessity, to be embraced.”
This betrayal of principle alienated, among others, the businessman and statesman Richard Cobden, who had helped Wilson found The Economist,
and had shared his early view of free trade as a guarantee of world
peace. India, for Cobden, was a “country we do not know how to govern,”
and Indians were justified in rebelling against an inept despotism. For
Wilson’s Economist, however, Indians, like the Irish,
exemplified the “native character . . . half child, half savage,
actuated by sudden and unreasoning impulses.” Besides, “commerce with
India would be at an end were English power withdrawn.” The next editor,
Wilson’s son-in-law Walter Bagehot, broadened the magazine’s appeal and
gave its opinions a more seductive intellectual sheen. But the
editorial line remained much the same. During the American Civil War,
Bagehot convinced himself that the Confederacy, with which he was
personally sympathetic, could not be defeated by the Northern states,
whose “other contests have been against naked Indians and degenerate and
undisciplined Mexicans.” He also believed that abolition would best be
achieved by a Southern victory. More important, trade with the Southern
states would be freer.
Discussing
these and other editorial misjudgments, Zevin refrains from virtue
signalling and applying anachronistic standards. He seems genuinely
fascinated by how the liberal vision of individual freedom and
international harmony was, as Niebuhr once put it, “transmuted into the
sorry realities of an international capitalism which recognized neither
moral scruples nor political restraints in expanding its power over the
world.” Part of the explanation lies in Zevin’s sociology of élites, in
which liberalism emerges as a self-legitimating ideology of a rich,
powerful, and networked ruling class. Private ambition played a
significant role. Bagehot stood for Parliament four times as a member of
Britain’s Liberal Party. Born into a family of bankers, he saw himself
and his magazine as offering counsel to a new generation of buccaneering
British financiers. His tenure coincided with the age of capital, when
British finance transformed the world economy, expanding food
cultivation in North America and Eastern Europe, cotton manufacturing in
India, mineral extraction in Australia, and rail networks everywhere.
According to Zevin, “it fell to Bagehot’s Economist to
map this new world, tracing the theoretical insights of political
economy to the people and places men of business were sending their
money.”
The pressures of capitalist expansion abroad and rising
disaffection at home further transformed liberal doctrine. Zevin
fruitfully describes how liberals coped with the growing demand for
democracy. Bagehot had read and admired John Stuart Mill as a young man,
but, as an editor, he agreed with him on little more than the need to
civilize the natives of Ireland and India. To Bagehot, Mill’s idea of
broadly extending suffrage to women seemed absurd. Nor could he support
Mill’s proposal to enfranchise the laboring classes in Britain,
reminding his readers that “a political combination of the lower
classes, as such and for their own objects, is an evil of the first
magnitude.” Not surprisingly, The Economist commended Mussolini (a devoted reader) for sorting out an Italian economy destabilized by labor unrest.
Nonetheless,
by the early twentieth century, the magazine was groping toward an
awareness that, in an advanced industrial society, classical liberalism
had to be moderated, and that progressive taxation and basic
social-welfare systems were the price of defusing rising discontent. The
magazine has since presented this volte-face as evidence of its
pragmatic liberalism. Zevin reveals it as a grudging response to
democratic pressures from below. Moreover, there were clear limits to The Economist’s
newfound compassionate liberalism. As late as 1914, one editor, Francis
Hirst, was still denouncing “the shrieking, struggling, fighting
viragoes” who had demanded the right to vote despite having no capacity
for reason. His comparison of suffragettes to Russian and Turkish
marauders—pillaging “solemn vows, ties of love and affection, honor,
romance”—helped drive his own wife to suffragism.
As more people
acquired the right to vote, and as market mechanisms failed, empowering
autocrats and accelerating international conflicts, The Economist
was finally forced to compromise the purity of its principles. In 1943,
in a book celebrating the centenary of the magazine, its editor at the
time acknowledged that larger electorates saw “inequality and
insecurity” as a serious problem. The Economist
disagreed with the socialists “not on their objective, but only on the
methods they proposed for attaining it.” Such a stance mirrored a
widespread acceptance on both sides of the Atlantic that governments
should do more to protect citizens from an inherently volatile economic
system. Since the nineteen-sixties, however, The Economist has steadily reinstated its foundational ideals.
In
the process, it missed an opportunity to reconfigure for the
postcolonial age a liberalism forged during the high noon of
imperialism. The emergence of new, independent nation-states across Asia
and Africa from the late forties onward was arguably the most important
development of the twentieth century. Liberalism faced a new
test among a great majority of the world’s population: Could newly
sovereign peoples, largely poor and illiterate, embrace free markets and
minimize government right away? Would such a policy succeed without
prior government-led investment in public health, education, and local
manufacturing? Even a Cold War liberal like Raymond Aron questioned the
efficacy of Western-style liberalism in Asia and Africa. But The Economist
seemed content to see postcolonial nations and their complex challenges
through the Cold War’s simple dichotomy of the “free” and the “unfree”
world. In any case, by the seventies, the magazine’s editors were
increasingly taking their inspiration from economics departments and
think tanks, where the pure neoliberal principles of Milton Friedman and
Friedrich Hayek were dominant, rather than from such liberal theorists
of justice as John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Amartya Sen.
In the nineteen-eighties, The Economist’s
cheerleading for Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s embrace of
neoliberalism led to a dramatic rise in its American circulation.
(Reagan personally thanked the magazine’s editor for his support over
dinner.) Dean Acheson famously remarked that “Great Britain has lost an
empire and has not yet found a role.” No such status anxiety inhibited The Economist
as it crossed the Atlantic to make new friends and influence more
people. After the Second World War, when the U.S. emerged as the new
global hegemon, the magazine—despite some initial resentment,
commonplace among British élites at the time—quickly adjusted itself to
the Pax Americana. It came to revere the U.S. as, in the words of one
editor, “a giant elder brother, a source of reassurance, trust and
stability for weaker members of the family, and nervousness and
uncertainty for any budding bullies.”
This meant stalwart support
for American interventions abroad, starting with Vietnam, where, as the
historian and former staff writer Hugh Brogan tells Zevin, the
magazine’s coverage was “pure CIA propaganda.” It euphemized the war’s
horrors, characterizing the My Lai massacre as “minor variations on the
general theme of the fallibility of men at war.” By 1972, following the
saturation bombing of North Vietnam, the magazine was complaining that
Henry Kissinger was too soft on the North Vietnamese. A policy of fealty
to the giant elder brother also made some campaigners for liberalism a
bit too prone to skulduggery. Zevin relates colorful stories about the
magazine’s overzealous Cold Warriors, such as Robert Moss, who
diligently prepared international opinion for the military coup in Chile
in 1973, which brought down its democratically elected leader, Salvador
Allende. In Moss’s view, “Chile’s generals reached the conclusion that
democracy does not have the right to commit suicide.” (The generals
expressed their gratitude by buying and distributing nearly ten thousand
copies of the magazine.) Zevin relates that, when news of Allende’s
death reached Moss in London, he danced down the corridors of The Economist’s
office, chanting, “My enemy is dead!” Moss went on to edit a magazine
owned by Anastasio Somoza, Nicaragua’s U.S.-backed dictator.
After the fall of Communist regimes in 1989, The Economist
embraced a fervently activist role in Russia and Eastern Europe, armed
with the mantras of privatization and deregulation. In its pages, the
economist Jeffrey Sachs, who was then working to reshape “transition
economies” in the region, coined the term “shock therapy” for these
policies. The socioeconomic reëngineering was brutal—salaries and public
services collapsed—and, in 1998, Russia’s financial system imploded.
Only a few months before this disaster, The Economist
was still hailing the “dynamism, guile and vision” of Anatoly Chubais,
the politician whose sale of Russia’s assets to oligarchs had by then
made him the most despised public figure in the country. In 2009, a
study in The Lancet estimated that “shock therapy” had led to the premature deaths of millions of Russians, mostly men of employment age. The Economist was unrepentant, insisting that “Russia’s tragedy was that reform came too slowly, not too fast.”
“Who can trust Trump’s America?” a recent Economist
cover story asked, forlornly surveying the ruins of the Pax Americana.
The political earthquakes of the past few years perhaps make it lonelier
at the top for the magazine than at any other time in its history; the
articles celebrating last year’s anniversary were presented as a
manifesto for “renewing liberalism.” Ten years before, when the
financial crisis erupted, the magazine overcame its primal distrust of
government intervention to endorse bank bailouts, arguing that it was “a
time to put dogma and politics to one side.” It also continued to
defend neoliberal policies, on the basis that “the people running the
system, not the system itself, are to blame.” Now, finally chastened, if
not by the financial crisis then by its grisly political upshot, the
magazine has conceded that “liberals have become too comfortable with
power” and “wrapped up in preserving the status quo.” Its anniversary
manifesto touted a “liberalism for the people.” But soul-searching has
its limits: the manifesto admiringly quoted Milton Friedman on the need
to be “radical,” resurrected John McCain’s fantasy of a “league of
democracies” as an alternative to the United Nations, and scoffed at
millennials who don’t wish to fight for the old “liberal world order.” A
more recent cover story warns “American bosses” about Elizabeth Warren’s
plans to tackle inequality, and revives Friedmanite verities about how
“creative destruction” and “the dynamic power of markets” can best help
“middle-class Americans.” The Economist is no doubt sincere about wanting to be more “woke.” It
seeks more female readers, according to a 2016 briefing for
advertisers, and is anxious to dispel the idea that the magazine is “an
arrogant, dull handbook for outdated men.” Whereas, in 2002, it rushed
to defend Bjørn Lomborg, the global-warming skeptic, this fall it
dedicated an entire issue to the climate emergency. Still, The Economist
may find it more difficult than much of the old Anglo-American
establishment to check its privilege. Its limitations arise not only
from a defiantly nondiverse and parochial intellectual culture but also
from a house style too prone to contrarianism. A review, in 2014, of a
book titled “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism”
accused its author of not being “objective,” complaining that “almost
all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains.”
Following an outcry, the magazine retracted the review. However, a
recent assessment of Brazil’s privatization drive—“Jair Bolsonaro is a
dangerous populist, with some good ideas”—suggests that it is hard to
tone down what the journalist James Fallows has described as the
magazine’s “Oxford Union argumentative style,” a stance too “cocksure of
its rightness and superiority.”
This insouciance, bred by the
certainty of having made the modern world, cannot seem anything but
incongruous in the rancorously polarized societies of Britain and the
United States. The two blond demagogues currently leading the world’s
two oldest “liberal” democracies bespeak a ruling class that—through a
global financial crisis, rising inequality, and ill-conceived military
interventions in large parts of the Middle East, Central Asia, and North
Africa—has squandered its authority and legitimacy. The reputation,
central to much Cold War liberalism, of England as a model liberal
society also lies shattered amid the calamity of Brexit.
For the
young, in particular, old frameworks of liberalism seem to be a
constraint on the possibilities of politics. It should be remembered,
however, that these new critics of liberalism seek not to destroy but to
fulfill its promise of individual freedom. They are looking, just as
John Dewey was, for suitable modes of politics and economy in a world
radically altered by capitalism and technology—a liberalism for the
people, not just for their networked rulers. In that sense, it is not so
much liberalism that is in crisis as its self-styled campaigners, who
are seen, not unreasonably, as complicit in unmaking the modern world. ♦
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