[D66] Liberalism According to The Economist | newyorker.com

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Liberals critiquing liberalism:

"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."


Liberalism According to The Economist
Books
November 11, 2019 Issue
Liberalism According to The Economist
Founded in 1843 to spread the doctrine of laissez-faire, the magazine
has wielded influence like no other. But at what cost?

By Pankaj Mishra

November 4, 2019
By
Pankaj Mishra
newyorker.com
18 min
View Original
The magazine was founded in 1843, to disseminate the doctrine of
laissez-faire.

“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.”
Cartoon by Liza Donnelly
Cartoon by Liza Donnelly

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.”
“And, for being careless with the environment, put tiny, hard-to-remove
stickers on all their fruit.”
“And, for being careless with the environment, put tiny, hard-to-remove
stickers on all their fruit.”

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.
“Uh-oh—we can’t both be dreaming.”
“Uh-oh—we can’t both be dreaming.”

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.