Liberalism at Large
Page 47
The difference in the second half of the twentieth century has been the focus on the US version of liberal imperialism – with a wink and a nod from its leading practitioners and theorists. Under the banner of anti-communism, the paper provided a running rationalization for interventions as far afield as Greece and Korea, Guatemala and Iran, Vietnam and Laos, Chile and Indonesia, Angola and Ethiopia, Nicaragua and Grenada. It greeted the end of the Cold War with huzzahs to the new world order, and calls for bombers for the Balkans, invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and for NATO to expand to the borders of Russia – all on a fresh gust of democratic optimism. Internationalism of the sort espoused by Hirst or Layton went silent, with a few editors left to make that case as best they could. In a rollicking account of life at the Economist since 1956, Barbara Smith admitted that she had often disagreed with its policies – ‘when we supported third-world anti-communist monsters’, during Vietnam, or ‘when, as at present, we seem too closely identified with official America’. Did she or the other dissenters resign over these disagreements? ‘We did not. Shameful that, I agree.’49 In 2012, Johnny Grimond gave a speech at his retirement party announcing that in all his time there, the Economist ‘never saw a war it didn’t like’ – a memorable barb, eliciting nervous laughter from his colleagues and a riposte from Bill Emmott.50
So, finally, to finance. A ‘friend to the investor’ since the railway mania of the 1840s, the paper has made some of its most storied contributions of all to this field. Wilson championed unlimited and unregulated competition in banking, including when it came to the printing of notes. Bagehot, a banker before he was a journalist, tamped down this celebration of unbridled competition – pointing out that what was wanted in the currency was fixity of value, not competition, especially in the event of commercial crises, when many of these rival notes would turn out to be worthless. Under him, the Economist came around to central banking, as crucial to a complex financial sector, laying down practical rules for its conduct, and shifting the focus to foreign flotations and loans. In subsequent years, it never lost sight of these flows of investment, becoming at times itself indispensable in resolving crises occasioned by the City’s global role: as editor at the fin-de-siècle, Johnstone was the bondholders’ advocate in Egypt, whose ‘assistance was secured in straightening out affairs after the Argentine crisis’ when Baring Brothers went bust in 1890.51
In the twentieth century, even when bankers came in for criticism under Hirst, ‘free trade finance’ continued to be the motor of peace, prosperity and reform, with the hegemony of the City as ‘the banking and financial center of the world’ jealously defended. And once Hirst was out of the way in 1916, this self-identification took a more straightforward turn: Withers’s emphasis on the heroic sacrifices of the City during the First World War, and the rejection of any capital levy on profits from it; or Layton’s efforts to restore confidence in the pound with a return to gold in the interwar years. After 1945, the standing of sterling as international and imperial currency and British power were even more closely linked – with Labour, according to the paper under Crowther, culpable for the fragility of both, ‘its guns unmasked against the City and all its works’. The loosening of what restrictions there were on finance capital came gradually in the post-war years, through the pooling of offshore Eurodollars in London from the late 1950s, then in a rush with the collapse of Bretton Woods in the early 1970s and finally with a Big Bang in 1986 – hailed by Pennant-Rea as a shot in the arm for financial services, before he left for the Bank of England in 1993. Under Emmott and Micklethwait, the neoliberal drive for the insulation, light regulation, privatization and globalization of markets, reached its apogee – culminating in the crash of 2008, and the editors’ breathtakingly unrepentant response to it.
A long way from the wishful images of popular parlance in Europe or philosophical discourse in America, this is the record of actually existing liberalism, at its most powerful. Averting their gaze, liberals have scratched their heads at the political volatility of the present, unable to recognize their handiwork. The tripartite structure is intact – with democratic dissatisfactions, imperial conflicts and debt-fuelled financialized capitalism as far as the eye can see. It is rare for a ‘newspaper’ that describes the world to shape its possibilities, but for over 175 years such has been the case of the Economist.
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Acknowledgments
Without help I could not have written this book, and I wish to express my gratitude to just a few of the many people who have had a hand in it. I would like to thank my teachers at UCLA, Lynn Hunt and Perry Anderson, along with my classmates Jacob Collins and Naomi Taback, for intellectual inspiration and comradeship. For their friendship in Los Angeles and beyond, my thanks to Rachel Kushner, Laura Owens, Asha Schechter, Patricia Lennox-Boyd and Jamie Stevens, and the other artists who welcomed me; and to my cousins, Lois Brodax and the Kremens. My colleagues at the City University of New York have supported my research, as have grants from the Professional Staff Congress and Amiel and Melburn Trust. For suggesting I explore this topic in the first place, credit is due to Serge Halimi and the editors at Le Monde Diplomatique, and for help during the research, Patrick Weil.
I am grateful to the outside readers of the manuscript, whose criticisms, queries and suggestions vastly improved it – in particular Thomas Meaney and Kelly Burdick; as well as to my colleagues at the New Left Review, especially Susan Watkins and Tony Wood. At Verso, Tom Hazeldine has graciously and intelligently worked to refine the text, while Jake Stevens and Mark Martin have done an excellent job of producing it. I also wish to thank Amana Fontanella-Khan, for her sage advice on the finished work.
Last but not least, I owe much to the unfailing courtesy and candour of the Economist editors who shared their stories and their views – often at variance to mine – with me. My special thanks go to Bill Emmott, Andrew Knight, John Micklethwait, Zanny Minton Beddoes and Rupert Pennant-Rae, but many others who have worked for the paper were equally helpful.
On a more personal note, my gratitude goes to my family, whose love and support have over many years made this possible – especially my parents Jack and Iris, to whom I dedicate this book.
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Notes
Abbreviations
BL: British Library
BLOU: Bodleian Library, Oxford University
CAIB: Covert Action Information Bulletin
CHAR: Churchill Archive
CUL: Cambridge University Library
CW: Collected Works
HC Deb: House of Commons debate
HIA: Hoover Institution Archives
LMA: London Metropolitan Archive
LSE: London School of Economics
MCL: Manchester Central Library
ODNB: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
SN: Standard Note
TCC: Trinity College, Cambridge
Introduction
1.Frank Langfitt, ‘“Economist” Magazine Wins American Readers’, National Public Radio, 8 March 2006.
2.‘The Economist Group Media Information’, 21 October 2013.
3.Christine Haughney, ‘Magazine Newsstand Sales Plummet, but Digital Editions Thrive’, New York Times, 6 August 2013. For recent chronicles of its rise, amidst the generalized fall of the printed press, see David Shaw, ‘The Economist Takes the High Road to Global Success’, Los Angeles Times, 20 July 2003; Stephen Hugh-Jones, ‘So What’s the Secret of “The Economist”?’, The Independent, 26 February 2006; Stephen Brook, ‘Let the Bad Times Roll’, The Guardian, 25 February 2008; Matt Pressman, ‘Why Time and Newsweek Will Never Be The Economist’, Vanity Fair, 20 April 2009; Noah Davis, ‘Why The Economist Is Winning’, Business Insider, 21 July 2011.
4.Jeremy W. Peters, ‘The Economist Tends Its Sophisticate Garden’, New York Times, 8 August 2010. For a defence of the E
conomist against its jealous detractors, see Ryan Chittum, ‘The Economist’s Success Is Not a Marketing Story’, Columbia Journalism Review, 9 August 2010.
5.James Fallows, ‘The Economics of the Colonial Cringe’, 6 October 1991. ‘The audience for this is not people who care about the world, but people who believe it is important to care about the world’: Tom Scocca, ‘Everyone Copies It, but Does Anyone Translate It?’, New York Observer, 19 March 2007.
6.Economist annual reports 2007 and 2017. According to its research, Economist readers were among the richest in the US in 2009 – with a median household income of $166,626 compared to $156,162 for the Wall Street Journal – and around the world, ‘where every third reader is a millionaire’. Twenty per cent confessed to owning ‘a cellar of vintage wines’. ‘Audience Advertising Categories’, 2 April 2009.
7.Examples, in order: 25 October 2014; 20 September 2014; 11 October 2014; 4 October 2014; 13 September 2014; Mark Sweney, ‘Merkel Listens to the Economist’s Audio App’, 16 November 2014.
8.Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement, Chicago 1995, Vol I, pp. 76–77, 83, 86–87, 104.
9.Michael Kinsley, quoted in Fallows, ‘The Economics of the Colonial Cringe’, Washington Post, 6 October 1991.
10.‘Hendrik Coetzee’, 29 December 2010.
11.‘Because every story is attributable only to the paper, every story is also the responsibility of the paper … co-operation replaces competition and – rather contrary to Economist editorial philosophy – it turns out that co-operation can produce a better product than competition’, argued former political editor David Lipsey, In the Corridors of Power: An Autobiography, London 2012, p. 171. Blogs have modified, without undoing, the editorial cloak of invisibility. Self-promotion on social media and TV are greater threats.
12.Michael Reid, Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America’s Soul, New Haven 2007, p. 159; ‘Brazil: Lula’s Leap’, The Economist, 2 March 2006; ‘Brazil’s Foreign Policy: Lula’s World’, 2 March 2006; ‘The Moderates Fight Back’, 19 July 2014.
13.The Economist described internal cabinet battles over spending cuts in 1984 as spilling ‘old blood on the carpet’, after being personally briefed about them by the deputy prime minister, Willie Whitelaw. ‘Old blood on the carpet, old blood in the cabinet’, 7 September 1985; Kiran Stacey and Emily Cadman, ‘Archives 1984: Thatcher’s Struggles Provide Lesson for Cameron’, Financial Times, 2 January 2014. Lunch takes place on Wednesday, the day after the budget is presented in the Commons, allowing, as one former editor put it, for a ‘deeper conversation’.
14.Barbara Smith, ‘Not So Hard Labour’, Economist, 20 December 2003.
15.Richard Cobden writing to James Wilson, 22 June 1843, Wilson Papers, MCL; Norman McCord, The Anti-Corn Law League: 1838–1846, London 1958, pp. 182–84.
16.The Times, 5 August 1859. Emilie Barrington, Life of Walter Bagehot, London 1914, p. 286; ‘The Bankers’ Gazette’, The Economist, 9 October 1852; Zhaojin Ji, A History of Modern Shanghai Banking: The Rise and Decline of China’s Finance Capitalism, Armonk 2003, p. 43.
17.Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, New York 1963, p. 103.
18.Raymond Streat, Lancashire and Whitehall: The Diary of Sir Raymond Streat, ed. Marguerite Dupree, Manchester 1987, Vol II, pp. 143–45. Streat left a snapshot of the 1943 celebration at the Connaught Rooms. The Bank of England governor Montagu Norman gave a toast. ‘He traced the community of interest over 100 years between the Economist and the Bank of England, both privately owned but both, he thought, rather the better able on that account to serve the public interest.’ Feasting on ‘rare bounties in war time’ and ‘excellent claret and a real Havana cigar’, at a top table sat Chancellor Kingsley Wood; Labour’s Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison; John Maynard Keynes; ‘Lord Portal, Stanley Bruce and sundry ambassadors and foreign ministers.’ ‘The company below the salt was very distinguished. On one side was Lord Wardington, Chairman of Lloyds Bank; on the other Sir William Moore, E. H. Lever, Robert Barlow, Ashley Cooper of Hudson’s Bay Company, Sir Robert Sinclair, Head of Ministry of Production. Elsewhere I saw Barrington-Ward, Editor of The Times, Professor Robbins, Sir Armond Overton, Holland-Martin, old Sir George Paish, Paul Cadbury, Sir Alan Anderson … only other Manchester face was Sir Noton Barclay, Chairman of the District Bank.’
19.‘A Manifesto’, 15 September 2018.
20.‘I often feel very annoyed and frustrated by the use of the word liberal. It’s gotten completely, hopelessly messed up in America’, then editor John Micklethwait told Harry Kreisler in ‘Globalization and the Conservative Movement in the US’, University of California Television, 6 February 2007.
21.Alan Ryan, The Making of Modern Liberalism, Princeton 2012, pp. 22, 41. Ryan acknowledges flaws in modern liberal democracies, but is clear they are superior to anything that came before and any present alternative, and would be seen as a ‘triumph’ by ‘most political thinkers in the past two and half millennia’: Alan Ryan, On Politics: A History of Political Thought from Herodotus to the Present, London 2012, Vol II, pp. 905, 941–45, 948, 972–73, 976–77.
22.Berlin was upfront about which side he took. Pluralism, ‘a recognition that human goals are many … and the negative liberty it entails, seems to me a truer and more humane ideal than the goals of those who seek in the great disciplined, authoritarian structures the ‘ideal’ of positive self-mastery by classes, or peoples, or the whole of mankind.’ This was an error, a ‘metaphysical chimaera’, inspiring ‘the nationalist, communist, authoritarian and totalitarian creeds of our day’: Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford 1982, pp. 124, 131, 141, 144, 171.
23.There ‘is certainly no necessary connection between the negative view of liberty and liberalism’. In fact, the two ‘most uncompromising exponents’ of negative liberty – Hobbes and Bentham – were not liberals at all, according to John Gray, Isaiah Berlin, London 1995, p. 21. Gray’s own work has become sufficiently unmoored from historical context to posit a chain of equivalence linking Saddam Hussein, Joseph Stalin, Baader-Meinhof, al-Qaeda, French Jacobins and American neocons on the basis that each was inspired by ‘secular faiths of the Enlightenment’. Gray, Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions, London 2004.
24.In the most sophisticated recent attempt at a comprehensive, contextual definition of liberalism, Duncan Bell argues that the conflation of liberalism and the Western tradition, and the elevation of Locke as its central thinker, dates to the third decade of the twentieth century: part of an ideological contest with ‘totalitarianism’ that began to gain traction in the US and Britain between the 1930s and 1950s. The implication that liberalism might be disentangled from such Cold War imbrications, however, begs the question about Bell’s own ‘summative conception’: why could liberalism, and not another ‘ism’, be sent to do battle with communism? Duncan Bell, ‘What Is Liberalism?’, Political Theory, June 2014, pp. 682–715.
25.The best wide-angle account – juxtaposing English, French, German and Italian variants of liberalism in nineteenth-century Europe – remains Guido de Ruggiero’s work, written nearly a century ago. Writing under the influence of Giovanni Gentile and Benedetto Croce, and in response to the rise of Italian Fascism, Ruggiero’s history was Hegelian, having as its goal a higher unity – the Liberal State – which would soon subsume the illiberal threats of Fascism on the right and socialism on the left. This outcome required revitalized Liberal parties, however, and an effort to recall ‘the middle classes to a sense of the reflective and critical value of their own activity and a recognition of the universal character of their historical mission’: The History of European Liberalism, London 1927 (Italian original 1925), pp. 343, 440–43. For an impressive recent study ranging over some of this terrain, see Jörn Leonhard, Liberalismus: Zur historischen Semantik eines europäischen Deutungsmusters, München 2012. Recent work on the outward dimensions of liberal thought do not transcend national boundaries: Victorian Visions of Global
Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth Century Political Thought, ed. Duncan Bell, Cambridge 2007; Gregory Claeys, Imperial Skeptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850–1920, Cambridge 2010; Georgios Varouxakis, Liberty Abroad: J. S. Mill on International Relations, Cambridge 2013.
26.If, by the fifteenth century, the word ‘liberty’ was associated with freedom, it was not until the late eighteenth that ‘liberal’ was used to affirm individual freedoms. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, New York 1985, pp. 179–81.
27.Charles J. Esdaile, Spain in the Liberal Age: From Constitution to Civil War, 1808–1939, Oxford 2000, pp. 31–34; Richard Herr, ‘The Constitution of 1812 and the Spanish Road to Parliamentary Monarchy’, in Revolution and the Meanings of Freedom in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Isser Woloch, Stanford 1996, pp. 85–88; Richard Herr, An Historical Essay on Modern Spain, Berkeley 1971, pp. 73–74; Stanley G. Payne, Spain: A Unique History, Madison 2011, pp. 141–45.
28.G. de Bertier de Sauvigny, ‘Liberalism, Nationalism and Socialism: The Birth of Three Words’, The Review of Politics, April 1970, pp. 147–166; Pamela Pilbeam, ‘The Growth of Liberalism and the Crisis of the Bourbon Restoration, 1827–1830’, The Historical Journal, June 1982, pp. 351–66; Aurelian Craiutu, Liberalism under Siege: The Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires, Lanham 2003, pp. 112, 290, 287–88; French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day, eds. Raf Geenens and Helena Rosenblatt, Cambridge 2012.