Liberalism at Large

by Alexander Zevin

  Rejecting in principle (if not always in practice) arbitrary bri-colages of this kind, the so-called Cambridge School of historians has sought to re-contextualize political thinkers in their national, linguistic and temporal space, so that who counts as a liberal at any given moment will depend on the available concepts, arguments and terms.24 This approach has produced remarkable histories of early modern republicanism, extending across epochs and frontiers, but has never been successfully applied to liberalism, of which its leading practitioners have markedly different, not to say incompatible, views. No comparative tracing of the transnational development of liberal ideas across borders has been offered by this tradition. Attempts to bridge this gap have come from other kinds of scholarship, but have been few and far between.25 For our purposes, a brief retrospect of early uses of the word liberalism in nineteenth-century Europe can suffice to set the historical stage for the birth of the Economist.

  Liberalism’s Origin Story: A Historical and Comparative View

  The morphology of liberalism developed in three stages. ‘Liberal’, as adjective, has been current in English since the fourteenth century, though for most of that time it had little to do with politics. In common with liber, its Latin root, ‘liberal’ distinguished free men and their cultivated pursuits – ‘liberal arts and sciences’ – from the rough manual labour of the lower classes. A compliment, it was always positive in connotation: to be liberal was to be generous, munificent, tolerant, broad-minded, or free-spirited. Politicization came much later, applied first to persons and ideas, only then to parties.26 Finally, the adjective became a noun: liberal-ism as a doctrine or system. How and when did this last jump take place? The answer lies in the Napoleonic era and its aftershocks, rippling across Spain, France and England.

  As Napoleon’s armies overran the old regime in Spain, reforming and absolutist deputies clashed in the Cortes of Cádiz (1810–1812) over what kind of political order was required to expel them. The first faction, describing themselves as liberals and their opponents as serviles, called for a constitutional monarchy, press freedom, universal male suffrage, indirect elections, and the breakup of church lands. Spanish ‘liberals’ drew on the French constitutions of 1791 and 1795 for this programme, which survived the restoration of Absolutism in 1814 as an inspiration to critical spirits in Spain and elsewhere in Southern Europe.27

  In France, Napoleon had seized power on the 18th Brumaire (9 November 1799) in the name of ‘idées conservatrices, tutélaires, libérales’. But of this trio only the last term resonated: the Parisian press was writing of ‘liberal ideas’ as ‘fashionable’ within a month, and outside the capital such ideas, associated with his Consulate, took some root in French-ruled Germany and Italy. Under the Empire they migrated towards critics of the regime like Benjamin Constant and Madame De Staël. But it was not until the Bourbon Restoration that ‘liberal’ as a collective political term acquired more general currency – at first to pillory those deemed insufficiently ultra in their royalism and clericalism (when liberal was virtually equated with Jacobin), then adopted by more moderate conservatives as a positive mark of opposition to the reign of Charles X. In the 1820s ‘liberalism’ came to describe the outlook of such figures, doctrinaires (as they were called) like François Guizot and Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, later pillars of the July Monarchy, from whom Tocqueville inherited central ideas.28

  French liberalism was thus different from the Spanish in two respects. Firstly, it positioned itself self-consciously as a centrist political viewpoint, the enemy of two extremes: both ultra-royalism and Jacobinism, both the ancien régime up to 1789, and the calamitous popular radicalization of the revolution against it. Spain did not experience an upheaval on this scale, so liberals there were somewhat less fearful of the masses, allowing for a wider suffrage than the doctrinaires ever envisaged. Secondly, the French version was much more sophisticated intellectually, producing major bodies of political theory.29

  This French political thought had little or no connection with the economic theory of the free market that generated doctrines of laissez-faire. That slogan-concept was formulated under the ancien régime by the Physiocrats, whose legacy passed to Jean-Baptiste Say during the Napoleonic period, and then to Frédéric Bastiat (one of Marx’s bêtes noires) under the July monarchy, who produced major bodies of work attacking state interference in the economy and trumpeting the virtues of self-regulating market exchange. But without a strong class of manufacturers in support of it, French political economy remained a marginal force, its free trade doctrines handicapped by the threat of industrial competition from a more advanced Britain, prior traditions of French mercantilism personified by Louis XIV’s minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and a generally more positive view of the State on both right and left.30 Its one significant achievement, the Anglo-French Treaty of 1860 lowering tariffs between France and Britain – negotiated by Richard Cobden and Michel Chevalier, once a disciple of Saint-Simon – would boomerang politically, as it came to be identified as the inaugural act of the final phase of Napoleon III’s rule, self-proclaimed as the ‘Liberal Empire’, whose collapse in the disgrace of the Franco-Prussian War ten years later covered the term with discredit. So no Liberal Party ever emerged in the Third Republic, unlike in Germany or Italy in the same period. ‘Liberalism’ acquired a toxic odour that, despite strenuous efforts by the deeply unpopular current ruler of the country, it has yet to overcome in France today.

  In Britain, Adam Smith and David Hume were using ‘liberal’ in its pre-political sense in the late eighteenth century to describe their favoured free market system.31 Politically, however, the word arrived late – carried back from the Peninsular Wars in Spain, and as a result viewed with suspicion in Tory Britain. Lord Castlereagh detested the Cádiz liberales, nominally English allies, considering them little better than Jacobins. This impression was only confirmed when Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron, notorious subversives, founded The Liberal, and championed Greek independence. For Robert Peel in 1820, ‘liberal’ was still ‘an odious phrase’, albeit an intelligible one. Three years later, the first English essay on ‘liberalism’ was a virulent attack on it as a destructive, alien doctrine wreaking havoc on the continent. Gradually, though, the Whig writers of the Edinburgh Review domesticated the term to describe their standpoints.32 But naturalization moved slowly for two reasons: first, the Whig-Tory dichotomy was deeply entrenched as the national political polarity; second, outside it, the term ‘Radicals’, referring loosely to the Benthamites, already occupied the space of innovation. It was not until the 1830s that John Stuart Mill wrote, privately, of the contrast between liberalism and conservatism, and not until the 1850s that ‘Liberal’ superseded ‘Radical’ as a political calling card in Britain.33

  And yet when ‘liberalism’ as such finally arrived in Britain, it was far stronger than anywhere else in Europe. For here alone there was a totalizing fusion of the political ideas of rule of law and civil liberties with the economic maxims of free trade and free markets, in theories of ‘limited government’. The synthesis that was missed in France is captured in Mill, who authored the Principles of Political Economy (1848) as well as On Liberty (1859) and On Representative Government (1861). The leap from ideology to organization then took place with the demise of Whiggery, and the birth in 1859 of the Liberal Party, to be led by the charismatic Gladstone.

  What produced this exceptional ideological-organisational double development? On the one hand, the dynamism of British industry, generating a feistier manufacturing class than on the continent, well capable of pursuing its own economic agenda, as in the Anti-Corn Law League.34 On the other, the absence of revolutionary plebeian traditions, with Chartist mobilizations quickly divided and deflated. British Liberalism remained poised between landowners and workers, as elsewhere, but with much less to fear from the latter. It could thus move more boldly to ‘disembed the market’ from society, in Karl Polanyi’s sense, than its European opposites, and to supplant earlier strains
of Ricardian socialism with a fully capitalist free trade fetishism in popular consciousness itself. Political economy became, as Economist editor Walter Bagehot enthusiastically put it, the ‘common sense of the nation’.35

  The singular consummation of liberalism in Britain is underscored by the fact that in Germany, Italy and France, the term remained so predominantly political that a separate coinage was typically used to indicate the economic creed central to British liberalism. In Germany, where the bourgeoisie of the Vormärz and 1848 were primarily bureaucratic and professional, not industrial, Manchestertum stood in for the cult of the free market. In Italy, Benedetto Croce coined liberismo, to distinguish it from liberalismo. In France, the conventional term was always laissez-faire – notably absent from Tocqueville, the country’s best-known defender of political liberalism.

  Liberalism in America: A Detour

  In America, on the other hand, no crystallization of liberalism as an explicit doctrine occurred, because many of its basic tenets were taken for granted from the start. As Louis Hartz and Eric Voegelin famously argued, the absence of either feudal and aristocratic barriers to capitalism above, or working class and socialist threats from below, obviated the need for systematic liberal theories or organizations in nineteenth-century America.36 Liberalism was not entirely unknown – a group of Liberal Republicans split from the Republicans, albeit for just two years, in 1870 – but it was not until almost half a century later that it began to acquire political salience. The New Republic, looking for alternatives to the word ‘progressive’ after the defeat of its candidate, Theodore Roosevelt, in 1912, chose the term. Eager to court its influential editors, and to justify his entry into the First World War, Woodrow Wilson began to describe his foreign policy as ‘liberal’ in 1917.

  This fairly light symbolic baggage made ‘liberal’ attractive in the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt hit on it as a tag for his New Deal policies, in part to distinguish them from the efforts of his Progressive predecessors to end the Great Depression. The alternatives were less appealing: social democratic, let alone socialist, was far too extreme, and anyway sounded foreign, while progressive was too redolent of Republicans and smacked of laissez-faire for most Democrats. Liberal, in contrast, had positive if vague associations with British ‘New Liberals’ such as Lloyd George, whom members of Roosevelt’s Brain Trust saw as paving an economic middle way between unbridled capitalism and oppressive statism. This appropriation of the term provoked an immediate reaction from right-wing critics, however, who claimed – as purer adherents of free markets – to be the ‘true’ liberals.37 Upset by collectivist departures from laissez-faire, but losing this battle to define liberalism in the 1930s, American conservatives eventually managed to invert the term, such that today ‘liberal’ often implies a leftist departure from American liberty, rather than its fulfilment.

  Classical Liberalism: Three Unanswered Questions

  The core ideological complex of classical liberalism that emerged in Britain combined economic freedoms – the right to unconditional private property; low taxes; no internal tariffs; external free trade – with political freedoms: the rule of law; civil equality; freedom of the press and assembly; careers ‘open to talent’; responsible government. While this was a coherent, integrated agenda, it left unresolved three large questions.

  First, to whom was government to be responsible? Who should parliaments, essential to the new constitutional system, actually represent? The classical liberal response was a censitary suffrage: votes only for those with sufficient means and education to form an independent judgment of public affairs. But how should liberals react when those without them pressed for inclusion in the political process? Second, how far should the liberal order extend, not just to the lower classes within the constitutional state, but to territories beyond it? By the mid-nineteenth century, the modal type of liberal state was national. Could it also be imperial, with overseas possessions? If so, did liberal principles apply to them? Finally, what was the role to be accorded by liberal political economy to activities not regarded as productive of value – neither agriculture, nor industry, nor trade, but lending and borrowing, and speculation? Was money a commodity like any other, with banks no different from farms or factories? If business cycles were normal in a market economy, what of longer-lasting crises and depressions?

  How, in other words, would liberals respond to the rise of democracy, the expansion of empire, and the ascendancy of finance, none of which figured in the core doctrine?

  The Economist as Touchstone

  Other studies have examined a single point in this triad. Scholars have shown how methodically liberals opposed democracy, defending a limited suffrage on the basis of education, and turning to an emphasis on economic over political liberties as socialist ideas spread after 1848.38 The concept of ‘empire’ has recently garnered more attention than in the past. Liberals are now acknowledged to have been deeply interested in the imperial project, even as debate rages over the nature of that interest, and whether it constituted a fundamental ‘urge’ or was liable to constant shifts and shadings.39 Recent histories of finance capitalism have added to our knowledge of the City of London, though they remain rather hesitant to credit an ideological perspective to the varied actors operating within it.40

  The Economist, however, unlike particular thinkers or themes, offers a continuous record of the confrontation between classical liberalism and the challenges of democracy, empire, and finance across the better part of two centuries – and can claim far greater intellectual success than any other expression of liberalism, with a world-wide reach today. Reading it is an antidote to the standard eclecticism of most accounts of liberal ideas, whose effect has been to noyer le poisson, as the French say, adducing everything and its opposite in a grab-bag going back at least to Smith, if not to Locke or earlier. From the time when the term first truly became part of political discourse, the paper has pressed imperturbably forward under the banner of liberalism – sometimes a little ahead of ideological shifts, at others a little behind them. What the history of the Economist reveals is the dominant stream of liberalism, which has had other tributaries, but none so central or so strong.

  On Method

  Writing the intellectual history of a newspaper that covers the entire world and has come out on a weekly basis for the last 176 years has not been simple. Nor has it been a straightforward matter to choose how to organize and narrate that history, so that both general and specialist readers can hope to move through it with relative ease. What began as an article, turned into a dissertation and became a book has threatened at each stage to exceed the frame to which it was fitted – as in the famous Borges story, in which an obsessive group of cartographers draws a map of the world that expands until it is the same size as what it seeks to represent. Contrary to appearances, given the length of the present volume, principles of selection were applied to avoid that outcome.

  Alternative paths could have been taken: that of a more or less traditional publishing history; or one that set the paper in a media studies frame, among the literary quarterlies, business journals and mass circulation dailies that have appeared and disappeared in London since the Victorian age. While I do discuss the location, production and distribution of the Economist – and the way other periodicals have competed with it for writers, readers and renown – my focus has been on ideas, and on connecting these to the broader material and ideological forces that have shaped ‘actually existing liberalism’ since 1843: radical demands for democracy, the ascent of finance in the global capitalist order, and imperial expansion, conflict, cooperation and continuing dominion. Three official books, and a few academic articles, have been written on other aspects of the Economist, or its attitude to one theme or another: railways, statistics, drugs, laissez-faire, America.41 Now that every issue has been digitized and made available online, future works can explore other subjects, sketched too lightly – or left out – of the portrait I have drawn here. To name just
two cases, much more could be said on the way its views have evolved on climate change, or on the project of European integration.

  In writing the history of the Economist as a history of liberalism, I confronted challenges particular to my source material: not just continuously and collectively published, but almost all of it anonymously. I have worked to attribute some of its most significant articles, and to explain the editorial environment in which they were composed, through extensive research. That has meant sifting the letters, memoirs and other papers which editors left behind, at archives in London, Cambridge, Oxford, Stanford and elsewhere. Since most were prolific authors outside of the Economist, I have also made use of their books, articles and speeches, which range from treatises on the stock market and unemployment to politics, religion and even spy fiction, in my assessments of them and the paper. (Often these titles have helped to determine the authorship of articles – or to discern a disagreement – within the Economist itself.) From around the middle of the twentieth century, these sorts of sources could be supplemented with another: interviews. Between 2011 and 2018, I conducted over two dozen interviews with current and former Economist staffers. Robustly confident in their convictions, they were always generous and open, never troubling to inquire too deeply into the nature of my research, nor worry whether my findings might cast their work in a critical light. How could it? This book is richer for their insights: not just because of the colourful stories and character sketches they shared, but for their inside perspectives on the debates and turning points in the recent history of the Economist, from the Vietnam War to the drive for circulation in America, the decisions to endorse Thatcher and Reagan to the invasion of Iraq. The one cache of material I have been unable to access is the Economist’s own, which – largely destroyed in the Blitz, haphazardly stored since – is still being catalogued. As it is, a largish body of notes can be found at the back of this volume. This is where publishers insist on putting them, even if they contain – as they do here – not just sources, but vivid quotations, biographical asides, and historiographic discussions. My apologies for the inconvenience of their location to readers who take an interest in such things: commerce oblige, as today’s wisdom has it.