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Liberalism at Large The World According to the Economist
Alexander Zevin
London & New York: Verso, 2019 Hardcover. 544 pages. ISBN 978-1781686249.
Reviewed
by Osama Siddiqui Providence College, Rhode Island
The history of Victorian liberalism
has been one of the more prominent strands of British intellectual history in recent
years. It has also been, in many ways, a notably self-reflexive one, as debates
over method have been at the forefront of its literature. So much so, that the
question of how one should study liberalism
has become nearly inseparable from the question of what liberalism was. Was liberalism, for instance, a set of
political arguments that are best studied in the texts and writings of its most
illustrious theorists, such as John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and others?(1) Or, was it instead a conceptual
formation that ought to be examined within the socio-historical structures of
the societies in which it was articulated?(2) To think along another
axis, should one study liberalism through its institutional career in parliamentary
politics and popular movements?(3) Or, is the individual
liberal subject the crucial site for understanding the rule of liberalism?(4) And, what of
nineteenth-century liberalism’s colonial and extra-European incarnations? Were
there indigenous liberalisms, or were British liberal ideas borrowed and adapted
to indigenous contexts?(5) To be sure, these
approaches are not always mutually exclusive, nor necessarily conflictual, and
the differences in focus reflect, in part, different disciplinary priorities
and interests. But, the lack of consensus on how to study liberalism also mirrors nineteenth century liberalism’s
own heterogeneity – what Nils Jacobsen called its “bewildering array of guises”
in the Spanish American context – as well as the fact that it remained contested
in its time both in practice and in principle.(6) It is within this lively set of
debates that I read Alexander Zevin’s deeply rewarding and superbly argued
book, Liberalism at Large : The
World According to the Economist (2019). Zevin mostly takes an
institutional-intellectual history approach to studying liberalism (while
attending carefully to political and economic contexts), but rather than
focusing on individual thinkers or political parties, the focus of his inquiry
is the Economist magazine. The famous
news and current affairs magazine – practically required reading in corporate
boardrooms and airport business lounges the world over – has been, Zevin
contends, a leading voice of Anglo-American liberalism over the last nearly-two
centuries, while also being something of a training ground for multiple generations
of liberal politicians and policy makers in Britain. As Zevin puts it, the Economist is the “lodestar of liberalism,”
widely seen as an influential and authoritative source that week after week expounds
the prevailing liberal orthodoxy on politics, finance, global business, and international
relations [7]. Narrating a history of liberalism through
the extraordinary life of the Economist is
an effective strategy that works in multiple ways. First, it allows Zevin to
avoid what he sees as one of the persistent methodological problems in histories
of liberalism, which is assembling a “grab-bag” of thinkers ranging across
different historical contexts and attributing to them an ostensibly unified
ideological agenda [15]. The Economist,
on the other hand, with its consistent editorial voice (to this day there are
no by-lines in the magazine) does seem to have a sense of ideological coherence
and purpose. Indeed, as Zevin shows, the Economist
has explicitly professed itself to be a defender of what it sees as the classical
liberal values of freedom and free trade. And, so, by tracing how this magazine
has interpreted the world allows us to see what Zevin calls a “continuous
record” of “actually existing liberalism” [15, 16]. The result is an important,
timely, and thrilling new history of liberalism, one which also doubles as a critical
history of liberal political economy as well as a fascinating intellectual
history of laissez faire thinking. Zevin’s method also offers the
advantage of an engaging narrative strategy: the book is organized
chronologically, with each chapter covering the tenure of one or more Economist editors (remarkably, since
1843, there have only been seventeen people to hold the position, with sixteen
of them being men and the overwhelming majority being Oxbridge graduates). As
Zevin takes us through their tenures and how they reported the major events of
the time, we are treated to a lively tour of some of the key political and
economic developments in British, American, and World history from the
mid-nineteenth century to the present. Indeed, the book could be read
fruitfully as an ambitious and incisive survey of nineteenth and twentieth
century history, organized around the question of how liberals have encountered,
responded to, and shaped the modern world. This nexus of banking, empire, and laissez faire opinion that defined
Wilson’s career reflects the broader set of forces that, according to Zevin, shaped
liberalism from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. In particular, the book’s critical
intervention focuses on three major historical developments that he argues were
central to liberal concerns: the rise of finance; the growth of democracy; and,
the expansion of empire. How liberals responded to each of these historical developments
is, for Zevin, the key to understanding the path taken by liberalism in much of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and, indeed, even in our own times. In
many ways, this is a story not just of how liberals came to embrace finance, empire,
and state power, but also of how a liberalism borne of those forces triumphed
over other competing ideological visions of liberalism. Of these three developments, finance
is the area that commands most of Zevin’s interest, and the book offers a compelling
look at how the Economist became an
important player in the emerging world of high finance. Starting with the
editorships of Wilson’s successors, Walter Bagehot and then Edward Johnstone, the
Economist not only pioneered new ways
of reporting financial news and stock market data but also cultivated close
ties to the finance sector. As the City of London became the center of the
world’s capital markets, the Economist established itself as its premier
interpreter. Such was the magazine’s influence, Zevin shows, that investors and
bankers looked to it as a singular authority on market forecasts and investment
analysis. At times, the magazine seemed to be acting almost as an intermediary
between the government and the City, such as when Johnstone helped to craft the
Bank of England’s bailout of Barings Brothers during the financial crisis of
1890, even while his magazine was reporting on the crisis itself [122]. What
emerges in Zevin’s narrative is that the Economist did not merely report
on the world of finance capitalism; it also played a role in creating that
world. In recent scholarship on liberalism, it
is almost taken as a given that nineteenth-century liberalism was complicit
with empire. Zevin not only adds to this charge sheet, but also gives us a
persuasive and historically specific account of the liberal turn to empire. The
book identifies a crucial moment in this direction in the 1850s, when the Economist broke with other liberals like
Richard Cobden to support the Crimean War along with a series of other military
ventures in India and China. For Zevin, the decisive shift in rhetoric was represented
by Wilson’s use of free trade as a justification for war, in sharp contrast to
the older Smithian view of free trade as a preventive against war. From then
on, there was scarcely an imperial war that the Economist did not support in the name of keeping markets open and
trade flowing. The Economist’s support for
empire overseas went hand-in-hand with a deep skepticism for democracy at home.
In a masterful reading of Walter Bagehot’s work and legacy, Zevin shows that
Bagehot’s view of the English constitution, and his preference for strong
executive power shielded from the whims of popular democracy, were developed in
part during his association with the Economist. Writing in the pages of
the magazine, Bagehot railed against the dangers of unchecked democracy. In
1867, when the Second Reform Bill passed, expanding the electorate by a million
voters, Bagehot criticized it as a pernicious influence on politics. At the
same time, he and the Economist looked across the English Channel with
praise for the modernizing agenda of Napoleon III’s autocratic regime, seeing it
as a necessary “firm hand to force down the bitter medicine of political
economy” [92]. A notable exception to these views
emerged in the figure of Francis Hirst, who became editor in 1907. This was a
moment when ‘New Liberalism’ with its agenda of greater state intervention in
welfare and social reform was ascendant, and the Liberal Party had just won a
resounding majority in parliament. New Liberals like Hirst were also critical
of imperialism and militarism, but, as Zevin shows, the governing reality
proved to be much different. Zevin offers a tour-de-force reevaluation of New
Liberalism, arguing that the policies often lauded as landmark achievements of liberal
governance in the early twentieth century – social welfare, graduated taxation,
and national insurance – went hand-in-hand with increased military spending and
an escalating arms race with Germany, as well as historic and unprecedented
bailouts of the City. New Liberal social progress, in other words, was inextricably
intertwined with finance and empire. And, although the Liberal Party itself
lost power after World War I, never to regain it again, these core elements of
liberalism remained dominant, maintaining their “intellectual grip” on Britain’s
ruling establishment well after the war [181]. The latter half of the book takes the narrative
through the twentieth century, tracing the shift from ‘Pax Britannica’ to ‘Pax
Americana’. Zevin covers a lot of ground quickly, showing how after World War
II, the Economist’s primary concerns shifted towards championing the
liberal international order in the Cold War battle against communism; enthusiastic
support for globalization; and, importantly, a robust defense of American military
and imperial power, much in the same way that it had defended British imperial
power in an earlier era. The broad thrust of this story is essentially one of
continuity. Zevin shows that through the upheavals of the twentieth century, liberalism’s
ideological commitments to finance and empire, as well as skepticism towards
democracy, remained in place, and even deepened in some ways. In a trenchant
conclusion, Zevin looks to the present day and sees this “tripartite structure…
intact.” The world we have inherited, he writes, is rife with “democratic
dissatisfactions, imperial conflicts and debt-fuelled financialized capitalism
as far as the eye can see.” This, he concludes, is the damning record of
“actually existing liberalism, at its most powerful” [397]. Some of the most stimulating parts of
the book, and ones also which invite further reflection, are where Zevin explores
the Economist’s relationship with other
Victorian liberals. Zevin is careful to note that the Economist did not represent the only variety of Victorian liberalism,
but he does see it as the most dominant one. Yet, I was struck by how often,
and how starkly, the Economist seemed
out-of-step with the values espoused by other liberals in the nineteenth
century. From the beginning, it is clear that Wilson’s liberalism was very far removed
from any kind of Smithian notion of laissez
faire and its critique of colonies. But, empire was not the only issue on
which the Economist took a seemingly illiberal
line. On questions of social reform and political enfranchisement, too, the Economist was remarkably at odds with the
views of other liberals. At times, the editors of the Economist appeared almost to be reluctant liberals, only belatedly
coming around to positions that mainstream liberals had long held. And, neither
did they seem particularly loyal to liberal party politics. As Zevin memorably
points out, in the five general elections between 1886 and 1906, the Economist, a supposed beacon of liberalism, actually endorsed the
Conservative and Unionist Party, having fallen out with the Liberals over the
issue of Ireland and empire [132-133]. Given these frequent departures from liberalism,
both in principle and in politics, one wonders how much of an exemplar of
liberalism the Economist can really be. To be fair, part of the argument as I read
it is that, for this strand of nineteenth century liberalism, the stability of
the financial markets and the preservation of empire became such absolute
priorities that all other principles could be sacrificed in their service. And,
yet, as Zevin also amply details, there were other nineteenth-century liberals –
Richard Cobden and John Bright, for instance – who were not willing to sacrifice
Smithian laissez faire at the altar
of finance and empire. Cobden, Bright, and others not only remained deeply critical
of war and empire, but were also anxious about the influence of capital on
democracy. For Cobden, in particular, this was not simply a matter of
disagreement with other liberals, but rather a fundamental question of who
could or could not credibly claim the mantle of liberalism in the first place. _ (1) Uday Mehta, Liberalism
and Empire : A Study in nineteenth-century British Liberal Thought (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999); Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire : The
Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: University
Press, 2005; Duncan Bell, Reordering the World : Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton: University Press, 2019). (2) Andrew Sartori, Liberalism
in Empire : An Alternative History (Oakland, CA: University of California
Press, 2014). (3) Jonathan Parry, The
Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1993); Eugenio Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform :
Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860-1880 (Cambridge: University
Press, 1992). (4) Elaine Hadley, Living
Liberalism : Practical Citizenship in mid-Victorian Britain (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2010); Sarah Collins, ed., Music and Victorian
Liberalism : Composing the Liberal Subject (Cambridge: University
Press, 2019). (5) C.A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties :
Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge: University
Press, 2011). (6) Nils Jacobsen, “Liberalism
and the Indian Communities in Peri, 1821-1920,” in Robert Jackson, ed., Liberals, the Church, and Indian
Peasants : Corporate Lands and the Challenge of Reform in nineteenth-century
Spanish America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997).
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