zevin end

Conclusion
Liberalism’s Progress
Any sense that ‘true progressivism’ had a clear path in front of it vanished in June 2016, as the first in a series of hammer blows struck the Economist. Brexit, which David Cameron had pledged to put to the British people as a simple in-out vote on remaining in the European Union, returned a shocking verdict when a majority opted to leave – against the advice of economists, all the major party leaders, and personal warnings from President Obama, the heads of the IMF, NATO and JP Morgan. In the rather more diverse and competitive media landscape in Britain, no outlet was more clearly pro-Remain than the Economist, with an anti-Brexit cover on the eve of the referendum its best performing in years, a newsstand sell-out.1
That edition warned against the ‘illusion’ promoted by ‘liberal Leavers’ that Britain could become a ‘Singapore on steroids’ outside the EU: half of all exports went to the European single market, which was also vital to the City, in the form of passporting rights for its foreign-owned banks. The last point loomed largest, as it had ever since the Economist first made the case for turning towards Europe and away from the sterling area: the American, Japanese, Swiss and other non-EU financial firms based in the City, gaining access to customers in all twenty-seven member states, had made London supreme – with 70 per cent of the market for euro-denominated interest-rate derivatives and 90 per cent of the prime brokerage market servicing hedge funds. Nor would free trade suddenly take a step forward, since ‘the slow, grinding history of trade liberalisation shows that mercantilists tend to have the upper hand’; besides, ‘obstacles to growth’ had less to do with Brussels bureaucrats than Britain, with ‘too few new houses, poor infrastructure and a skills gap’.2 A week on, the outcome was ‘a senseless, self-inflicted blow’ and ‘tragic split’ – ‘the tumbling of the pound’ presaging a recession, ‘a permanently less vibrant economy’, ‘extra austerity’, and the potential breakup of the EU as well as the UK. Stiffening its upper lip, the paper called for a second referendum to approve the terms of Brexit, preferably on the Norwegian model guaranteeing full single market access (which ‘might be easier to win than seems possible today’ as ‘the economy will suffer and immigration will fall of its own accord’). To contain a similar backlash elsewhere, the EU must boost growth by ‘completing the single market in, say, digital services and capital markets’ and creating a ‘proper banking union’.3
In the US, the ‘truly terrifying’ Donald Trump was quick to see the parallels between his own presidential bid and Brexit – hailing the latter as a ‘great thing’ on a visit to his golf course in Scotland that June. The Economist had asked Republicans to steer clear of the real estate mogul since the primaries in 2015 with little success. It did not warm to him afterwards: in one interview, a bewildered New York bureau chief surveyed Trump in his office, an ‘Aladdin’s cave of celebrity puff’, desk stacked with magazines like a ‘dentist’s waiting room’, a ‘mound of Trump-covered copies of The Economist’ and the assurance, ‘I put you up front’.4 Above all, it objected to his pessimism as unworthy of Reagan (a man he professed to admire) and a ‘caricature’ of America – which was neither as hateful nor as badly-off as he made out, ‘and on most measures is more prosperous, more peaceful and less racist than ever before’. The economic recovery was ‘now the fourth-longest on record, the stock market is at an all-time high, unemployment is below 5% and real median wages are at last starting to rise’.5
If race and economics were ruled out, what was wrong with America? Trump himself, ‘who has done most to stoke national rage’, with his Muslim ban, Mexican wall, anti-China tariffs, NATO-bashing – all to chants of ‘lock up’ Hillary Clinton.6 In a fulsome endorsement of her in November, the paper portrayed Clinton as a canny incrementalist, who could shepherd bills on parental leave or sentencing reform through congress and show ‘that ordinary politics works for ordinary people’; in foreign affairs, she had the right ‘judgment and experience’, as exemplified by her early support for US involvement in Syria. Trump, in contrast, was ‘horribly unsuited’ to lead ‘the nation that the rest of the democratic world looks to for leadership’, or to be ‘commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful armed forces and the person who controls America’s nuclear deterrent’. With so much at stake, the ‘choice is not hard’, a point it drove home, declaring, ‘We would sooner have endorsed Richard Nixon – even had we known how he would later come to grief.’7 (In fact, it did support Nixon.) Chastened by the result, a week later the Economist wondered aloud if it had misunderstood the whole arc of history since the fall of the Berlin Wall. ‘The election of Mr Trump is a rebuff to all liberals, including this newspaper.’8
Despite this moment of introspection, however, the shocks continued for the Economist, which was no more far-seeing after Brexit and Trump than before. In Britain, it welcomed the 2017 snap election called by the new prime minister, Theresa May, to ‘strengthen her hand’ as savvy – freeing her to pursue a softer Brexit, and to annihilate Labour, which opinion polls showed her trouncing by over 20 points in April. In lockstep with the rest of the British media, it was certain that Jeremy Corbyn – ‘witless’, a ‘loony leftist’, ‘soft’ on Putin, Chávez and terrorism – would suffer a crushing defeat, making way for a sensible Labour leader in the mould of Tony Blair. That left it to guess at the scale of the impending rout: more like 1983, when Labour won only 209 seats under its leftwing leader Michael Foot, or 1935, when it held just 154?9 In fact, Corbyn steered his party to the biggest electoral swing in its favour since 1945, eliminating the Conservative majority, to deliver a hung parliament. To cling to power, May would have to rely on the tiny, far-right Democratic Unionist Party from Northern Ireland. Corbyn achieved this, moreover, on the back of a manifesto promising to renationalize the rail, water and postal services, raise the minimum wage, revive collective bargaining, increase taxes on wealthy individuals and businesses, and make university free again – each of which the Economist vehemently opposed as ‘backward-looking’ and ‘dangerous’.10
This latest assault on liberalism was the final straw, provoking unusual signs of fissiparity and fracture at the paper. As May’s ‘strong and stable leadership’ campaign faltered, the Economist switched horses in mid-stream, advising a vote for the Liberal Democrats that June as a ‘down-payment’ on a future ‘party of the radical centre’ – à la France, where Emmanuel Macron had demolished old left-right oppositions with En Marche, inspiring ‘France, Europe and centrists everywhere.’11 At one moment ‘Bagehot’ bitterly compared Britain’s political class to a second-rate cricket team whose best batter was ‘a crypto-communist who has never run anything but his own mouth’; the next, he paid Corbyn a compliment, saluting him as a disruptive innovator.12 Months earlier in Italy, a similar schizophrenia was on display. When Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, a devotee of Blair’s third way, submitted constitutional changes designed to entrench him in power, the Economist came out against them. This provoked consternation from its own correspondent in Rome, who ventilated it off the record to La Repubblica. Fuming at this ‘brutal anti-Renzi affidavit’ and ‘slap in the face’, the liberal Italian daily ran it as a front-page story, reporting the decision had split the Economist staff, with Beddoes and younger editors against backing the constitution, the Europe section in favour. ‘We supported Remain and Hillary’, explained its unnamed source. To back Renzi’s referendum when it too risked going down in defeat, as it subsequently did, ‘could have been considered the kiss of death’. This at least was the view of John Hooper, the leaker of these tidbits, who then wrote in favour of Renzi’s reforms in The World in 2017.13
Observing these tergiversations, a former senior editor called it a moment of identity crisis for the paper. ‘The Economist believes in free trade capitalism, sure, but it also believes in America.’ What to do when both are stumbling? ‘Since Knight, the editor’s role has been to pull a center, or even center-left staff, to the right’ – think of Knight and Reagan, Pennant-Rea and the First Gulf War, Emmott and Iraq, Micklethwait and the neo-cons and religious right. That worked, so long as the paper was out in front of the neoliberal wave, coasting it, or on the offensive. But now, in the age of Trump? ‘In the past, the Economist would have tried to shock respectable opinion, to somehow support him … but it’s been forced to take the same line as the New York Times. For thirty years it captured the zeitgeist but the zeitgeist seems to have moved on.’ Another, old-guard editor still at the paper complained that meetings had descended into a millennial farce of trigger warnings, gender-neutral bathrooms and #MeToo.
And then there are the circulation figures, which no longer defy gravity. Print circulation has fallen to 1.25 million – though 300,000 digital subscribers have steadied readership at about 1.5 million.14 Much of the loss stems, executives claim, from weeding out discount and bulk subscriptions to lounges and clubs, as part of a focus on premium readers that included a 20 per cent price hike in 2016; as a result, a new metric – of revenue per copy – has risen, even as print advertising collapses, accounting for just 18 per cent of Economist Group sales in 2016, down from more than 40 per cent in 2009 (though at £35 million it still outpaces digital ad revenue at £23 million).15 This is why Micklethwait took to describing premium pay TV-services like HBO and Sky as models; and it is the rationale for pumping millions into acquiring new subscribers – peddling insect ice cream and civet faeces coffee from food trucks on city street corners, and beaming into Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook and Apple News, with podcasts and a virtual reality app, to grab the attention of ‘72 million globally curious’ potential readers. Whether the Economist can withstand that degree of curiosity, while preserving its special identity, is another story.
Liberalism, a Love Story

As if to underscore the sense that liberalism itself is at a crossroads, an Economist journalist produced a serious historical study of it for the first time in 2014. Edmund Fawcett, a former correspondent in Washington, Paris and Berlin, who also edited the European and books sections, set out to write a ‘biographically-led, non-specialist chronicle’, drawing on his own three decades of service to what he terms – in contrast to communism – the ‘God that succeeded’. In range and erudition, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea is an intellectual cut above any previous book by a post-war Economist staffer. Yet it is also clearly the work of one, marked by wit, brio and a rough-and-tumble feel for events. Its author sets thinkers alongside politicians and theory next to practice, to sketch liberalism ‘naturalistically, as a norm-governed adaptation to historical circumstances’, defined by four ‘broad ideas’: acceptance of inescapable ethical-material conflict; distrust of power; faith in human progress; and civic respect for others, whatever they think, as a ‘democratic seed in an otherwise undemocratic creed’. Their combination is, Fawcett maintains, what sets liberalism apart from socialism and conservatism, communism and fascism, competitive authoritarianism, national populism and Islamic theocracy.16
From this starting point, Fawcett departs from convention in two important ways. First, in a break with Anglophone parochialism, he sketches the defining traits of liberalism across a four-fold grid of Britain, France, Germany and America. Though the exclusion of Italy – given the eminence of Benedetto Croce as a philosopher, Guido De Ruggiero as a historian, and Luigi Einaudi as a practitioner of liberalism – is conspicuous and the grid is stretched to cover minor figures in France and Germany to maintain its consistency, the scale of the enterprise is impressive. Second, in Fawcett’s account, liberalism was born not with seventeenth century political theory or eighteenth century economic thought, but with early nineteenth century capitalism, and as a reaction to it. Nor were its first significant progenitors British. Neither John Locke nor Adam Smith set this story of liberalism going, but two continentals – Alexander von Humboldt and Benjamin Constant – and its ensuing impetus comes less from originating notions of liberty than an ongoing need to manage industrial change after 1815. Liberalism then moves through three distinct historical phases: from the confidence of its youth in 1830–80, through difficulties and setbacks in the time of its maturity in 1880–1945, to recovery and triumph in the epoch from 1945 to 1989.
In the first of these, liberals stood firm against absolutist rule on the one hand, and plebeian masses on the other, defending the rights of the propertied and the educated against both. In France, François Guizot and Alexis de Tocqueville personified the vigorous youthful unity of this liberalism, as major thinkers and politicians. Guizot, a historian at the Sorbonne and ‘liberal of the first rank’, who argued for ‘the radical illegitimacy of all absolute power’, served as the dominant prime minister of the constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe after 1830, making sure it was not weakened by extending the vote to those incapable of using it responsibly: the only acceptable sovereigns in politics were law, justice and reason. Tocqueville, author of the sociological classic Democracy in America, who served as foreign minister under the Second Republic, developed the idea of voluntary associations of civil society as a counterweight to both a despotic state power and popular democracy. In Germany, Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch, a judge and legislator, popularized mutual banks and cooperatives, so that workers might help themselves to rise into the golden middle ranks of society. Britain had an abundance of comparable figures – poor law and sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick, free trade tribune Richard Cobden, self-help adviser Samuel Smiles, and above all, the political philosopher, economist and MP for Westminster John Stuart Mill, who combined the finest liberal values of the period better than anyone, cherishing them all, but recognizing the ‘dangers and complexities’ of each.17 Towering over this landscape were the two greatest statesman of the time – Abraham Lincoln, who gave immortal expression to the aims and ideals of American liberalism at Gettysburg, and William Gladstone, champion of free trade and frugal budgets, whose language of rights and sympathy, international decency and self-determination, gave moral focus to liberals in England and beyond.
In a second phase, liberalism groped towards ‘an economic compromise with democracy to save capitalism’, marking a passage to adulthood that was far from easy, since most liberals dreaded democracy. As Guizot put it in 1851: ‘You can put down a riot with soldiers and secure an election with peasants’, but to govern, ‘you need the support of the higher classes, who are naturally the governing classes.’18 But as time went on, pressure for expansion of the franchise grew steadily, and rejection of it increasingly impolitic, with liberal opposition to a wider suffrage becoming ‘at most a holding operation’. Liberal parties might suffer, for various reasons, from the rise of mass politics, but ‘as liberalism conceded to democracy, democracy conceded to liberalism’. In this give-and-take, ‘liberalism stood to gain in one large way more than it lost. For at the heart of the historic compromise was a commitment to compromise itself.’ With liberalism’s triumph, ‘the idea of politics as total control was pushed to the margins’, protecting society from socialist longings and conservative resentments.19
Not simply a wider suffrage, but some shielding from hardship was part of the bargain. In finding a ‘common roof for the House of Have and the House of Want’, France was first with its democratic republicanism after 1870, followed by Germany with its welfare provisions under Bismarck, and then the arrival of New Liberalism in Britain and Progressivism in the US. Social reform was the hallmark of each; and here, Germany was most liberal, with sickness and old-age insurance and industrial accident coverage by 1889. Liberal thinkers worked to justify the new responsibilities of the state. In Britain, philosopher T. H. Green moved beyond laissez-faire, arguing that public authorities should not just protect the negative freedom of individuals from arbitrary power or interference with their lives, but foster the positive conditions of freedom to act according to their worth. In France, Radical Prime Minister Léon Bourgeois adapted the leftwing term ‘solidarity’ to describe the debt each citizen owed society, to be acquitted by paying income tax. In the US, Herbert Croly pursued a similar line as founding editor of the New Republic, exhorting vigorous intervention from Washington to promote science, efficiency and social justice.
The First World War came as a shock to the progressive liberalism of this time. But by 1917 it had produced a trio of ‘outstanding leaders’ – Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Wilson – who proved capable of winning the war for the better side. This setback overcome, worse was to follow. The Great Depression was the most acute disappointment yet for liberals, who struggled to diagnose its causes or prescribe its cures. Keynes at Cambridge, Fischer at Yale and Hayek at the LSE differed in their attempts at each – underconsumption, to be countered by pump-priming; debt-deflation, corrected by central bank action to raise prices; over-investment, leaving markets to clear – but at a deeper level they were united in seeking liberal solutions to the crisis of the epoch.20 So too, in testing these ideas by trial and error, Hoover and Roosevelt were both liberals, if Roosevelt with much greater success as the better politician. His New Deal inspired alarm at its infringement of the principles of the free market among thinkers who gathered in Paris in 1938 to honour the journalist Walter Lipmann. The reaction produced a powerful, if overstated antidote, with Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom in 1944, ‘a noir classic’ in which ‘a misunderstood liberal walks the mean streets of a collectivized world’. But in practice it supplied an exemplary case of the ‘piecemeal social engineering’ upheld as the antidote to communism by Karl Popper in his complementary classic The Open Society and Its Enemies a year later.21
Liberalism’s third period after 1945 would draw from each of these opposite reactions to the inter-war crisis, in successive phases. For three decades, it leant far more towards Keynes than to Lipmann and his circle, as Western societies transformed themselves into fully-fledged democracies based on universal suffrage and mass consumption, deploying the counter-cyclical instruments of fiscal and monetary policy he had urged, to secure full employment and high wages. Consumer spending now represented the economic side of liberalism’s compromise with democracy, in a more equal sharing of wealth, while in Britain the no less liberal William Beveridge pioneered a modern welfare state, with interlocking forms of insurance, and a National Health Service at its core. Politically, too, liberalism rebuilt itself on a firmer foundation of rights. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, on which Fawcett’s father worked for the British Foreign Office, was inspirational; civic associations like Amnesty International, founded by Peter Benenson in 1961, strove to ensure it was respected. In Germany, another legal pillar of the post-war order was laid with the Grundgesetz of 1949, ‘liberal democracy’s exemplary charter’, approved without need of any direct or popular vote.22 In the wings, the philosophers Michael Oakeshott and Isaiah Berlin were eloquent exponents of the quiet virtues of negative liberty and a diversity of ends, while John Rawls upheld rights rather than consequences as a standard of value for liberals, stimulating countless like-minded responses.
In these years, in Fawcett’s account, a set of pragmatic liberal politicians plied their trade with admirable post-ideological skill and determination to bore through hard boards, just as Max Weber had recommended. In France, Pierre Mendès-France was a passionate ‘liberal centrist’. Next door, Willy Brandt persuaded the German Social Democrats to discard the pretence they were socialists rather than liberals, which paid off at the polls by 1969. In the US, Lyndon Johnson championed civil rights legislation and enacted sweeping social reforms to create a Great Society. But by the late seventies, a reaction had set in, as stagnation and inflation showed there were limits to Keynesian recipes for growth. Since the Second World War, and a deepening division of social labour, liberalism had become professionalized into separate branches. Politicians were no longer thinkers, while thinkers rarely became politicians. But ideas still counted, and those who developed them included a set of theorists, heirs of Lippman and his colleagues, whose arguments now had a notable practical impact on politics. In the US, the public choice economist James Buchanan pushed for legal limits on taxes and spending, while Milton Friedman led the charge for deregulation and privatization. Broader and more encompassing than either was the post-war body of work produced by Hayek, linking political, epistemological and economic arguments against state intervention into the operation of free markets and the distribution of incomes in a compelling, if in the end overly utilitarian, synthesis.
In grappling with the novel problems of stagflation, liberal politicians took heed of the counsel of these liberal thinkers. By 1979, a group of outstanding leaders began to act on their visions. With Hayek in her handbag, Thatcher showed great courage and charisma in restoring free market vigour to British society, although paradoxically concentrating political power in Whitehall and economic power in big business.23 The next year, Reagan rode to office on the disappointed liberalism of Democratic voters and, slashing taxes and red tape, restored buoyancy and prosperity to America. In France, Mitterrand was elected as a socialist, but confronted with the realities of the European Community in the eighties, ruled out any Albanian-style isolationism to become the first liberal president of the Fifth Republic. In Germany, Helmut Kohl pulled off the unification of his country, a historic achievement of rare political imagination and decisiveness. In sum, ‘credit to the captains’, who ‘learnt from past mistakes, made liberalism universal not just Western, embedded liberalism in fairer institutions, accepted social rights but corrected their subsequent costs, conquered inflation, and brought peace and unity to a fratricidal continent’. If liberal thinkers of the period ‘left lessons in what not to do and what not to think’, the politicians ‘left strong results. They created a globalized world’. By 1989, ‘liberal confidence had returned’.24 With the final collapse of the God that failed, there could be no shadow of doubt which God had succeeded.
Though the mood for liberalism has darkened since, Fawcett sees little reason for despondency. The anti-Western attack on the Twin Towers in 2001 and the financial crash of 2008 were certainly, each in their different ways, sobering events. But liberals should bear in mind that liberal self-confidence has always had its ups and downs, and that its strength lay in its proven capacity for self-criticism. With plenty of that today, its underlying vitality seems assured. The growth of income inequality and fiscal overstretch are also worrying problems, which need to be addressed. But it would be a mistake for liberals to abandon their values in the face of them. A seductive belief in spontaneous economic order, or reliance on providential narratives of the end of history, should be avoided. Rather, politics remains the priority – which means managing contingency and chance, as liberals have always done. In the West, there may be a touch of melancholy in wondering what more is to be accomplished, but that is not true of Brazil, China, India or Iran, where liberals ‘can afford to be more forward-looking and zestful. They have work for many life-times.’25
Liberalism: The Life of an Idea stands out in the literature on its subject, mostly thin philosophical musings of intellectually provincial scope, as a historically informed and comparatively executed account of what has become the ruling political idiom of the West. It starts out on a fresh note, avoiding customary Anglophone clichés, and is not short of critical asides. Yet despite these virtues, it remains an exercise in the higher apologetics. Conceptually, the weaknesses of the ensuing construction stem from the loose, all-purpose definition of liberalism presiding over it – acceptance of inescapable ethical-material conflict; distrust of power; faith in human progress; and civic respect for the opinions of others: a quartet of pieties that represents few if any of the figures arrayed in the book. Did Humboldt or Constant believe conflict inescapable? Did Guizot or Weber distrust power? Bagehot respect the opinions of others? Tocqueville firmly believe in progress? Simply to pose such questions is to be reminded how poorly most of Fawcett’s practitioners embodied his precepts, however impressionistic.
A merit of this definition of liberalism, nevertheless, is that it does not include the term democracy. On this, Fawcett is clear: historically, democracy and liberalism were distinct. In 2014, now retired, he wrote a letter to the Economist chiding it for equating them. ‘Liberalism is about how people are to be shielded from undue power’, he rebuked it, whereas ‘democracy is about who belongs in that happy circle’, adding that liberals like Schumpeter and Hayek understood ‘voter democracy was commonly at odds with economic prosperity’.26 But although the two are never equated in his own writing, liberal attitudes and policies toward democracy are consistently euphemized. At worst, liberals ‘dragged their feet’ over extensions of the franchise, or were not ‘natural’, ‘born’ or ‘electoral’ democrats, so tacitly rank as some other, meta- or crypto- kind. Symptomatically, no alternative political force that actually pushed for democracy, as distinct from reluctantly adjusting to it, is ever specified: the labour movement is blanked out. What liberalism pushed for, on the other hand, is made clear enough. For Fawcett, liberalism’s great achievement and grounds for congratulation was to force democracy to accept capitalism. After all, he writes, ‘if the few were to share with the many, the many should accept the existence of the few’.27 What could be fairer? Just what the sharing was in this bargain, and why liberals even felt it necessary, are left discreetly unspecified. For explanation, the internal dynamics of liberal reason and respect for others suffice. What counts is that ‘capitalism was here to stay’. As for the century or so since the advent of manhood suffrage (votes for women or blacks don’t detain the narrative), Fawcett notes that liberals ‘consented with little question to the claims of the national security state’, a formulation suggesting they were not themselves responsible for it.28 From the passage by the Wilson administration of the US Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917–18 to the Patriot Act in the time of Bush and surveillance under Obama, this secret world now comprises some seventeen agencies with an annual budget over $60 billion. Fawcett’s distinction between liberalism and democracy might account for this enormous expansion of the security state, but he never criticizes it even as a violation of his fundamental liberal ‘right to be left alone’.29
If democracy has its place in the narrative, empire is predictably confined to the margins. On the rare occasions it figures in the years of confidence, it is minimized or excused in the profiles of his leading liberals. Tocqueville’s zealotry in the conquest of Algeria goes unmentioned. In twelve pages on Mill, his stance on British rule in India gets two half-sentences – a ‘temporary imposition to teach Indians to govern themselves’ and ‘masters might be needed for a time in order to teach self-mastery’; and of Mill’s support for colonial repression in Ireland, not a word.30 Gladstone is in favour of the self-determination of peoples, but ‘accepts’ the seizure of Egypt, as if he were a mere spectator of it, not British prime minister. Vice versa Cobden, who was a resolute foe of all Britain’s imperial wars, but is nevertheless enlisted by Fawcett in the cause of ‘humanitarian intervention’, an unctuous hypocrisy he would have detested.31 As it becomes adult, liberalism is allowed some traffic with imperialism, and opportunistic responses to jingoism, but its record is downplayed by selecting two failures – Chamberlain and Bassermann, whose schemes came to nothing – to illustrate it, rather than the far more consequential likes of Jules Ferry, Theodore Roosevelt or Winston Churchill. After partitioning the planet in a fit of absent-mindedness up to 1914, the Great War naturally came as a surprise to those who had taken their spoils for granted. ‘It shocked liberals that such a war could be fought at all’, since ‘warfare was a liberal nightmare at its blackest’.32 What liberals were these? Lloyd George and Clemenceau, pledged to fight to the last man, and Wilson – spared any blushes for his record on colonialism, race or red-baiting – were hardly among them.33
Fawcett makes no attempt to account for the outbreak of the First World War, declaring: ‘In 1914 came an unexpected and inexplicable world war’, and remarking that for liberals ‘it was all very puzzling’. For him the puzzle lies in its consequences, not its causes, even if liberals had some vague – never specified – part in its origins. ‘A terrible war that liberalism largely brought upon itself contributed to a great expansion of that liberal bugbear, unchallenged state power.’34 The war, then, was an enigma: it had nothing to do with empires. Liberals created or extended these in the nineteenth century, to be sure, but not in a deliberate sense. Empire was a ‘happenstance creation of missionaries, teachers, buccaneering adventurers, and capitalists no doubt’ – not soldiers or gunboats, thankfully. Though, once acquired, ‘ruthless force’ might be used to hold them, empires were almost always better than what came before them in darkest Africa and Asia, where ‘precolonial masters were commonly crueler, more exploitative and more domineering than the imperialists.’ Later, doubts arose about ‘the obviousness of the moral claim that the great benefits for the many outweighed the grievous or terminal harm to a few’, and after 1945 liberals abandoned their overseas possessions ‘out of overstretch and exhaustion’. But the empires they had built brought benefits often welcomed by colonial peoples: progress and modernity, rule of law and property rights.35
With a view of modern imperialism as rosy as this, Fawcett logically pays little attention to the struggles of the colonized peoples for their independence, and can remark briskly of the Western powers repressing them that they were ‘not running global charities’. It was a pity that the career of Mendès-France as prime minister, father of liberal centrism in modern France, was cut short in 1955 when the war in Algeria caught him ‘unawares’, obliging him to react with a mixture of coercion and conciliation. In the US, the war in Vietnam rates one sentence, to absolve Lyndon Johnson, ‘unfairly’ denied credit for his domestic achievements by this foreign entanglement – which ‘the American left blamed him for continuing, the right for losing, and Wall Street for fighting without raising taxes’. In the new century, Bush’s good intentions were also unjustly criticized, for America ‘waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq against a genuine but elusive foe, extreme Islamism’, even if operations in Iraq were unhappily less well informed and prepared than in Afghanistan.36
As an economic doctrine, liberalism is scarcely less sanitized. In the nineteenth century, laissez-faire is dismissed as an urban legend, without mention of Jean-Baptiste Say, Thomas Malthus or James Wilson, let alone the famines in Ireland or India that its doctrines justified. Rather, Liberals were eminently practical arbiters of the mutable borders between the state and the market, rivals that also needed one another – resisting the supremacy of either, viewing both as variable instruments to be used according to the changing needs of ‘human betterment’, and by the mid-twentieth century getting the balance right. The effect of this retouched group portrait is to leave key economic debates and turning points unexplained. When the interwar slump hits, no statesmen or set of ideas is responsible for it. Like the Great War, the Depression falls like a meteorite in the liberal cosmos, whose origins are no concern of this historian. Keynes argues in a vacuum, transfigured into an advocate of ‘worker’s democracy’ because he emphasized effective demand, though Hayek was still more of an economic democrat, since – less of an aesthete – he celebrated shopping. Post-1945, liberal democracy achieved an equilibrium between state and market forces of unprecedented success. But thirty years later, as mysteriously as the onset of the slump, it fell out of whack, at which point Hayek and Friedman – respectively ‘wholesaler’ and ‘retailer’ of ideas – had the right remedies. After another quarter-century, these too were adrift amid growing instability and inequality. The answer? Certainly, among other things, a dose of austerity – fiscal retrenchment to rein in state spending. Keynesianism and Neo-Liberalism are thus imperturbably underwritten, their guiding thinkers at one in seeking ‘to limit capitalism’s disruptive instabilities without injuring liberal principles’.37 Whatever that might mean, the realm of finance and its crises are nowhere to be found in this story of liberalism as artful balancing act.
The closer to the present, the more jarring this papering over of intellectual disagreement becomes: by the 1960s, almost no Western ruler or thinker is left out of Fawcett’s omnium gatherum of liberalism, with results bordering on parody. ‘Most liberals have called themselves something else’, he confesses at the outset.38 Indeed. Thus not only Hoover and Roosevelt, Nixon and Johnson, Brandt and Thatcher, Reagan and Mitterrand, not to speak of Kohl – only Andreotti and Blair are missing – but the Hegelian Oakeshott and the Kantian Berlin (who could not abide each other), the anti-communist Orwell and the pro-communist Sartre, the catholicizing Alasdair MacIntyre and the enlightener Eric Hobsbawm, all become liberals malgré–soi – with ‘forgotten’, ‘hidden’, ‘closet’, ‘centrist’, ‘Marxist’ and other qualifiers to rope them in. The inflation of the term is a self-undoing: liberalism becomes such a catch-all, it ends up as little more than a stand-in for the West and all that is good and varied about it. In this sense, even one of the Economist’s most independent minds of recent years is unable to shake off the paper’s impregnable self-satisfaction.
Four years later, the current editor drew on Fawcett’s history in her own ‘manifesto for renewing liberalism’ in the Economist’s 175th-year anniversary issue – in a striking indication of the paths open to the magazine under her, for now ‘championing a creed on the defensive’. Two features of her prospectus stand out. First, the word ‘capitalism’ has all but vanished. ‘Liberalism’ is instead ubiquitously substituted for it, with only two shyly euphemistic references to ‘the rougher edges of capitalism’ – a hint not just of the reputational damage the latter has suffered since 2008, but a possible way of coping with this, by downplaying the centrality of capital in the political formation and forward march of the liberal creed. Second is the unshakable permanence of the imperial core of the Economist outlook, which has not budged even semantically. If the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are now deemed ‘misguided’, the real danger is Americans drawing the wrong lessons from them, retreating behind their borders, and the ‘astonishing’ fact that so few millennials think it ‘important for America to maintain its military superiority’. As an antidote, the manifesto calls for a ‘League of Democracies’, invoking the neoconservative historian of international relations Robert Kagan and the late senator John McCain as authorities: ‘it will always be easier and wiser for liberals to trust America to do the right thing in the end.’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, this Economist moved briskly past the less sightly landmarks that might have explained the need for liberalism’s resuscitation.39
Actually Existing Liberalism

Since 1843, the Economist, viewed as a continuous and unified project, illuminates a different history of liberalism – dispelling some of the mellow mists that normally surround it. Bracingly direct, with James Wilson adamant that his journal would aim for the ‘landed and monied’ and be ‘nothing but pure principles’, the paper had what one of its later writers saw as an enlightening candour in addressing its readers: you opened it, he observed, to ‘hear the bourgeoisie talking to itself, and it could talk quite frankly’.40 A powerful fraction of that class, which Marx called the ‘aristocracy of finance’, has indeed spoken through the Economist, first in Britain, and then also in America – not as the only, or purest, expression of liberalism, but as the dominant one, with the greatest global impact for 175 years.
Liberalism has, of course, always come in different strands and hues. Fawcett’s indiscriminate expansion of the term to cover anything useful for his purpose obscures these, and the need – ignored not only by him – for an adequate taxonomy. Economic liberals, political liberals and social liberals are distinct species, but hybrids have been common enough. Finer distinctions abound. At one end, there was long a liberalism that gravitated towards socialism, of which the most striking case is that of Mill – who reversed his judgment in Principles of Political Economy that schemes to abolish private property were ‘chimerical’ just a year after he published it, in the wake of the 1848 revolutions. ‘The social problem of the future we now considered’, wrote Mill in his Autobiography, was ‘how to unite the greatest individual liberty of action with a common ownership in the raw materials of the globe’.41 In the second half of the twentieth century, the gamut of liberalism has run from a mild social-democratic reformism all the way to a hard-boiled libertarian hostility to the state verging on anarchism – of late, Rawls versus Nozick. In the space between jostle free-market zealots (Bastiat to Tullock), apostles of civil society (Tocqueville to Bellah), tutors of moral sensibility (Arnold to Trilling), guardians of law and order (Porfirio Díaz to Giolitti), dreamers of perpetual peace (Angell to Habermas), each with their own intellectual genealogies and political tics. Across the public sphere today, much of the media articulates a bien–pensant consensus, posted as progressive, that is generally regarded as liberal. In political clarity, coherence and throw weight, the Economist stands above this ruck. As in classical composition, subdominants recur beneath the dominant, in a tonal balance that distinguishes the Economist with respect to the rest of the liberal press. From centre-left to centre-right, few of the weeklies or dailies approach it, simply in terms of print circulation: not the Nation, with around 100,000, or the Guardian, with 150,000; not Le Monde or the New York Times, with 330,000 and 590,000; not the New Republic at 50,000, the Atlantic at 500,000, or the New York Review of Books at 135,000. (Often, the Economist circulates as widely in print as these journals outside its Anglo-American home base, with close to 150,000 in Europe, 90,000 in the Asia Pacific and 15,000 in the Middle East and Africa region.) Even when digital viewership is added – making the Times and Guardian among the most popular on the planet – or if the New Yorker with its 1.2 million readers is thrown in – the contest is not close, and each falls short of the Economist by measures other than circulation. Likewise, individual writers may have greater wattage than any at the Economist, and express some of the same ideas: David Runciman, in the London Review of Books, praising the muddled middle, and lamenting deviations from it, in Corbyn, Brexit or Trump; Stephen Holmes, denouncing ‘Putinism’ in Foreign Policy; Timothy Garton Ash, fighting populism from a perch at the New York Review of Books. Yet none of these journals or thinkers, on their own, can match the Economist – with its longer, deeper history, closer connection to power, and far greater global presence and reach.
In considering that success, ideas have mattered most. If the Economist never became the ‘grave de fortune’ of which Cobden warned (in garbled French), this was because it addressed three questions left unanswered by classical liberalism, but which proved decisive to its spread in the age of global capitalism: how could liberals navigate democratic challenges from the industrial working class at home, imperial rivalries and rule abroad, and the ascendency of finance within an economic order once focused on agriculture, trade and industry? No other paper has offered up such a ‘precious collection of facts, doctrine and experience’, as Bastiat put it, to guide liberals through these shoals – allowing the historian to extrapolate dominant themes of the dominant liberalism from it. These did not come unadulterated at all stages of its career. As we have seen, there were episodes when other strands – Cobdenite pacifism under Hirst at the outbreak of the First World War, Durbinite reformism during the Second World War under Crowther, blips of Anglo-legalism under Tyerman, or sporadic criticism of US actions during and after the Cold War, from Midgley, Smith and Grimond – deflected it from a perfectly consistent path. But such divagations were brief, each followed by resolute course correction. Swiftly reasserting itself, the dominant was always a liberalism whose lodestars were two: the universal virtues of capital and, where they arose, the particular necessities of empire. The most enduring embodiment of the former was finance; the most important of the latter, Britain and then the United States. Other considerations had to be taken into account; among them, in due course, the will of the people. But, where they conflicted, that will was not to stand in the way.
So democracy: for the whole length of the nineteenth century, the Economist resisted it. Bagehot was adamant, writing extensively on ‘what securities against democracy we can create’ in the reform bills that popular pressure was pushing the House of Commons to consider: multiple votes for the propertied, with variable franchises depending on town or borough size, were the barest safeguards.42 ‘True liberalism’ was simply opposed to the ‘superstitious reverence for the equality of all Englishmen as electors’ – which absurdly claimed ‘the lowest peasant and mechanic are the measure of the electoral capacity of the most educated man in the land.’43 If you still had doubts, chat to your footman; this would confirm what Bagehot knew for a fact – that ten thousand educated, propertied men alone were fit to vote, the rest as ‘narrow-minded, unintelligent and incurious’ as two millennia ago.44
After 1877, the tone changed, since the Reform Acts of 1866 and 1884 were so far from enacting that ‘pure democracy’ Bagehot feared. But the underlying hostility to the vote as a natural right, as opposed to a privilege tied to property and education, remained: till 1907, payment of MPs and one-man-one-vote were ‘inexpedient’ and Home Rule in Ireland was anathema, while under Hirst some of the old fire against the franchise returned – this time directed at the ‘virago’ suffragettes, who were too irrational to be entrusted with the political powers they demanded. After the war, which had forced the issue of universal male suffrage, the problem of democracy remained, but took a new form, as a question of economic control. This was a very serious matter, since the new mass electorate coincided with the mass unemployment of the Depression. With the barbarians at the gate, the gold standard and Bank of England were barriers to politicizing currency and credit; in 1931, Layton made it clear that in the crisis confronting the Labour government, ‘sound finance’ must and would win out over democracy.45 Since then, the question of sound finance versus democratic will has recurred again and again.
After 1945, it was joined by another development: the national security state, which the Economist did more than endorse. From the onset of the Cold War, it was an energetic side-car of that secret state in the battle against Soviet communism – with editors routinely accepting material from the Information Research Department, set up covertly for propaganda purposes out of the British Foreign Office in 1948. Between 1954 and 1980, Brian Crozier and Robert Moss spread ‘disinformation’ from a still wider array of sources, including MI6 and the CIA – not just in the intelligence gossip sheet they ran, Foreign Report, but directly in the Economist. Along with Brian Beedham, they attacked those – congressmen, journalists, whistle-blowers – who dared shine a light on the national security apparatus. ‘There are powerful reasons democratic governments are seldom particularly open with their people on the brink of war’, it explained on the publication of the Pentagon Papers.46
So empire: the Economist has supplied a consistent, case-by-case justification of liberal imperialism, from the nineteenth century to the present. That run began with the Crimean War in 1854, when Wilson broke with Cobden and Bright over the issue of free trade and peace – which, until then, all three saw as mutually reinforcing. But as French and British soldiers laid siege to Sevastopol, and with Wilson at the Treasury, the Economist turned against this notion with a vengeance, as a ‘hideous and shallow doctrine’. Cobden was a ‘demagogue’, Bright ‘a tool and sycophant of the Czar’, and war against ‘Muscovy’ was for ‘human rights, civil liberty, enlightened progress’ and ‘freedom of trade, freedom of movement, freedom of thought and freedom of worship’.47 ‘We may regret war’, mused the paper in 1857, in an article that urged the use of force to pry open China to trade, but ‘we cannot deny that great advantages have followed in its wake’.48
The Economist rarely looked back – from the bombardments of Canton, Kagoshima and Alexandria to the campaigns in India, Afghanistan, Zululand, Sudan or Burma, on to the Second Boer War. Only once did it veer seriously off-script: in August 1914, when Francis Hirst channelled the traditions of Cobden to criticize the government for its secret diplomacy and the financial press for docility, and campaigned for a negotiated peace. But this lasted two years; and so discordant was it that even Walter Layton, one of his successors – committed to collective security through the post-war League of Nations – temporarily quit the paper in disgust. After 1916, the litany in favour of the liberal empire resumed, continuing past even decolonization from emergencies in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus on to the Falklands in 1982.
The difference in the second half of the twentieth century has been the focus on the US version of liberal imperialism – with a wink and a nod from its leading practitioners and theorists. Under the banner of anti-communism, the paper provided a running rationalization for interventions as far afield as Greece and Korea, Guatemala and Iran, Vietnam and Laos, Chile and Indonesia, Angola and Ethiopia, Nicaragua and Grenada. It greeted the end of the Cold War with huzzahs to the new world order, and calls for bombers for the Balkans, invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and for NATO to expand to the borders of Russia – all on a fresh gust of democratic optimism. Internationalism of the sort espoused by Hirst or Layton went silent, with a few editors left to make that case as best they could. In a rollicking account of life at the Economist since 1956, Barbara Smith admitted that she had often disagreed with its policies – ‘when we supported third-world anti-communist monsters’, during Vietnam, or ‘when, as at present, we seem too closely identified with official America’. Did she or the other dissenters resign over these disagreements? ‘We did not. Shameful that, I agree.’49 In 2012, Johnny Grimond gave a speech at his retirement party announcing that in all his time there, the Economist ‘never saw a war it didn’t like’ – a memorable barb, eliciting nervous laughter from his colleagues and a riposte from Bill Emmott.50
So, finally, to finance. A ‘friend to the investor’ since the railway mania of the 1840s, the paper has made some of its most storied contributions of all to this field. Wilson championed unlimited and unregulated competition in banking, including when it came to the printing of notes. Bagehot, a banker before he was a journalist, tamped down this celebration of unbridled competition – pointing out that what was wanted in the currency was fixity of value, not competition, especially in the event of commercial crises, when many of these rival notes would turn out to be worthless. Under him, the Economist came around to central banking, as crucial to a complex financial sector, laying down practical rules for its conduct, and shifting the focus to foreign flotations and loans. In subsequent years, it never lost sight of these flows of investment, becoming at times itself indispensable in resolving crises occasioned by the City’s global role: as editor at the fin-de-siècle, Johnstone was the bondholders’ advocate in Egypt, whose ‘assistance was secured in straightening out affairs after the Argentine crisis’ when Baring Brothers went bust in 1890.51
In the twentieth century, even when bankers came in for criticism under Hirst, ‘free trade finance’ continued to be the motor of peace, prosperity and reform, with the hegemony of the City as ‘the banking and financial center of the world’ jealously defended. And once Hirst was out of the way in 1916, this self-identification took a more straightforward turn: Withers’s emphasis on the heroic sacrifices of the City during the First World War, and the rejection of any capital levy on profits from it; or Layton’s efforts to restore confidence in the pound with a return to gold in the interwar years. After 1945, the standing of sterling as international and imperial currency and British power were even more closely linked – with Labour, according to the paper under Crowther, culpable for the fragility of both, ‘its guns unmasked against the City and all its works’. The loosening of what restrictions there were on finance capital came gradually in the post-war years, through the pooling of offshore Eurodollars in London from the late 1950s, then in a rush with the collapse of Bretton Woods in the early 1970s and finally with a Big Bang in 1986 – hailed by Pennant-Rea as a shot in the arm for financial services, before he left for the Bank of England in 1993. Under Emmott and Micklethwait, the neoliberal drive for the insulation, light regulation, privatization and globalization of markets, reached its apogee – culminating in the crash of 2008, and the editors’ breathtakingly unrepentant response to it.
A long way from the wishful images of popular parlance in Europe or philosophical discourse in America, this is the record of actually existing liberalism, at its most powerful. Averting their gaze, liberals have scratched their heads at the political volatility of the present, unable to recognize their handiwork. The tripartite structure is intact – with democratic dissatisfactions, imperial conflicts and debt-fuelled financialized capitalism as far as the eye can see. It is rare for a ‘newspaper’ that describes the world to shape its possibilities, but for over 175 years such has been the case of the Economist.