Liberalism at Large

by Alexander Zevin

  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 fee
t’ 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