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 sup
eriority’. 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 aga
inst 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.
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