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The Economist and the Making of Modern Liberalism

The Economist is not like other magazines; it does not even call itself one. No ‘newspaper’ – as it styles itself – has been anywhere near as successful in the internet age, nor able to defy digital gravity for so long. As print media shed audiences and advertisers, foreign bureaus and paid journalists, the Economist added them. How had ‘a magazine with a sleep-inducing title’ and ‘sometimes esoteric content’, asked National Public Radio in 2006, posted readership gains of 13 per cent the year before, comparable only to celebrity tabloids?¹ Four years on, circulation in North America topped 820,000, a tenfold increase since it began an additional printing there in 1981. The global total surged, nearing 1.5 million, or fifteen times the figure in 1970.² Editors and publishers at Time, Atlantic, Newsweek, Businessweek and US News all agreed on the need to emulate the Economist, while in Europe similar refrains echoed at Der Spiegel, L’Express and Panorama.³ But what was the secret, and why try to steal it from a paper a century older than any of them, edited from London continuously since 1843?

For some, it was the clever covers, wry humour, strong editorial line. For the New York Times, the answer was simpler: slick marketing. Red-on-white banners tugged at the insecurities of striving readers, making the Economist a status symbol for the would-be well-heeled. Its ads said everything. ‘“I never read The Economist.” Management Trainee. Aged 42,’ ran one ad from 1988. Another quipped, ‘It’s lonely at the top; but at least there’s something to read.’⁴ This view owed much to James Fallows, whose 1991 broadside in the Washington Post argued that the Economist peddled conventional wisdom to US professionals too besotted by its snooty British accent and ‘Oxbridge-style swagger’ to be able to tell. A few other journalists sounded sceptical notes over the next two decades, when the Economist seemed unstoppable. For Jon Meacham, ex-Newsweek editor, it failed ‘even to attempt to do original reporting’. At the New York Observer, one reporter struggled just to open his copy, then quickly shut it – finding leaden editorials, airy adjectives in place of evidence, layouts so dense they recalled the telephone book – and wondered if others who swore to read it might be pretending.⁵

The Economist does not walk on water, and in 2014 paid sales dipped for the first time in at least fifteen years. But in response, the Economist did what few other magazines could: it raised subscription prices 20 per cent to $180 for the electronic edition alone, making it the most expensive weekly in the US, with operating profits to match. At £54 million in 2017, these were still 60 per cent higher than they had been a decade before, despite the general collapse of ad revenues in the intervening years.⁶ But even if Economist readers are richer and more status-driven than most, the draw of the paper is about more than symbolic prestige, as a glance at its Letters to the Editor section might suggest. Here articles are nitpicked by whatever corporate, academic or government authority they incensed the week before: a lesson in the law from Philip Morris; a territorial protest from the Azerbaijani Ambassador; a budget clarification from South Korea’s Ministry of Finance; the case for a US weapons system from the ex-general in charge; a professor’s pained explanation that Chinese is logo-graphic, not ideographic. Too busy to write, Angela Merkel speaks to the editor when she is ‘cross’.⁷ Before her, George H. W. Bush could be seen with a copy pressed to his chest, striding up the White House lawn.

Not all readers are this powerful, but many have plans to be. In Anthony Powell’s novel A Dance to the Music of Time, Sunny Farebrother – stockbroker, entrepreneur, amateur geo-statesmen – serves to satirize the type, retiring from dinner at the manor house he is visiting to scan the Economist. He has so annoyed the other guests, expatiating on everything from how ‘to handle the difficulties of French reoccupation of the Ruhr, especially in relation to the general question of the shortage of pig-iron on the world market’ to ‘professional boxing’, his host tells him to shut up: ‘Farebrother, you are talking through your hat.’⁸ Buyers usually do more than walk around with their copies, in other words: whether he or she is the leader of the free world, a business magnate, college freshman or, apparently, Sarah Palin and Steve Bannon – they also read it.

Investigative journalism is not a strength of the paper. What readers expect from the Economist are sharp didactic summaries and surprising numbers, which it provides on a grand scale. In a single issue, one may flit past e-commerce in China, mortgage fallout in Las Vegas, peace negotiations in the Middle East, the search for life on Mars, a new art museum in Qatar, and an obituary for an obscure South African explorer eaten by a crocodile. The first paper ever to compile and publish wholesale prices, it still devotes its back pages to data sets that change like shifting prisms onto the world economy: greenhouse gas emissions, growth forecasts, global remittances, the cost of a Big Mac. Treatment of any single issue is limited, outside of special reports, and articles can descend into parody – ‘as if the writer started out knowing that three steps must be taken immediately – then tried to think what those steps should be’.⁹ Range is accompanied by relentlessness: sucked under the foaming waves, the unfortunate explorer was served up as a fine specimen of the entrepreneurial spirit.¹⁰

Yet this strong institutional character, which sees an act of creative destruction in death, is also what makes it unique, preserved as it is by an equally unusual ownership structure designed to ‘let the editor run the paper as though it belonged to him’. In place since 1928, this structure gives the editor power over policy, salaries and employment; and puts between him or her and the board of directors four trustees, who sign off on share transfers and the appointment of chairmen and editors. In 2016, when Pearson sold its half of the Economist Group for £469 million to existing shareholders, this charter came into play, with voting rights capped at 20 per cent for the largest of them. Insulated from business pressure, editors have swelled the business. In 176 years, just seventeen have filled the position: all but one a man, and for the last hundred years almost exclusively graduates of Oxford and Cambridge. At least one staffer has called the striking lack of diversity in this ‘common room’ an asset, making it easier to maintain a stable, collective voice. The need for that will be obvious to any reader, as the most distinctive feature of the Economist by far is that articles in it are unsigned. With few exceptions, the hundred or so staff in London and abroad toil anonymously – common enough at nineteenth-century newspapers, but almost unheard of today. Individualism may be the editorial line, but as a result of this Victorian holdover, the editorial leaders are written in an unusually cooperative and collegial manner, as if guided by invisible hands.¹¹

Anonymity was always designed to amplify the voice of the Economist. Today, so do the covers, with Photoshop acting as a slingshot for pop-cultural lèse-majesté: Kim Jong Il blasts into space as ‘Rocket Man’; Angela Merkel appears as Kurtz, groaning in horror at Greeks in ‘Acropolis Now’; Hu Jintao and Barack Obama are the cowboy lovers from Brokeback Mountain. The more hated the figure, the more lurid the caricature: Vladimir Putin has been a prohibition-era mobster with a gas pump for a gun, a chess piece, a spider, an ice cube, a shirtless tank driver. Faced with this sort of barrage, Silvio Berlusconi sued. Hero worship is less common, if not unknown. ‘Freedom Fighter’, above a halo of hair, was its memorial to a monochrome Margaret Thatcher.

Both covers and articles are belligerent but conversant with politicians and governments; whole countries are blamed or praised with breezy self-assurance. But this is not mere posturing. When a new leader appears on the global stage, especially one unknown to capital markets, or from a developing country that needs to tap them, he or she will make a pilgrimage to the offices of the Economist. Even Hugo Chávez paid homage in 2001, trying to ‘chat up the receptionists, two young black women, as if they were Venezuelan voters’. Luiz Inácio da Silva got a warmer welcome in 2006 for his plans to promote market reforms in Brazil, as well as asides about his diet. Michelle Bachelet had her tête-à-tête in 2014 ‘over herb tea in the Moneda palace’ in Santiago, assuring the Economist she would never put equality before growth.¹² Latin American leftists are one thing. The paper is naturally still more solicited at home, where each year Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer briefs it on the budget over lunch at Downing Street.¹³ In the US, Barack Obama was the first president to write a signed editorial for it in 2016, before departing the White House.

‘How do you write like the Economist?’, a nervous new recruit, trying to compose his first leader for it, once asked. Simple, a senior editor replied. ‘Pretend you are God.’¹⁴

A Power unto the Powerful

This quality of omniscient narration was not dreamt up by sales managers, and even if they could account for the success of the paper in circulation terms, this would be a misleading measure of its importance. What truly sets the Economist apart is the way it has shaped the very world its readers inhabit, by virtue of three close relationships: to liberalism, to finance, and to state power. Launched at a watershed in the historical development of each, the Economist opened a new front in the mid-nineteenth century battle against the Corn Laws in Britain, aimed less at partisans of the free trade in grain than at those wariest of it, above them: ‘the higher circles of the landed and monied interests’, in particular the commercial and financial hub of the City of London.¹⁵

That perspective paid. The Economist not only made money – turning a regular profit after just two years – it also made a name for its founder, James Wilson, a Scottish hat manufacturer who used the paper to catapult himself into politics. Elected to parliament in 1847, Wilson became a powerful financial secretary to the Treasury, and the first ‘Chancellor of the Indian Exchequer’, tasked with putting the British Raj on a sound fiscal footing in 1859. As Wilson stepped onto the steamer that would take him to India, the Chartered Bank he had co-founded – in part from Economist profits – was opening branches in Calcutta, Bombay, Shanghai and Hong Kong, with an eye to the opium traffic into China; this would become today’s Standard Chartered Bank, with over $660 billion of assets.¹⁶ By that time his paper had become indispensable as a conduit between a nascent Liberal Party in Whitehall and Westminster and the parts of the City of London most concerned with imperial and foreign affairs. This caught the attention of Karl Marx, who read the Economist not just for its indexes on global trade, but for its political worldview – the most striking depiction in Europe of the concerns of the ‘aristocracy of finance’, whose stake in ‘public credit’ required it to keep close track of ‘state power’.¹⁷

Over time, the Economist became even more deeply embedded in these circuits of money, power and ideas: editors advised chancellors on the currency, devised ground rules for running central banks and responding to financial panics, scanned the horizon for threats to British rule and British capital everywhere from Ireland to Egypt and Argentina – offering up the sort of political advice that markets themselves might, if only they could speak. Up to 1943, the paper had 10,000 subscribers, no more. But, as one editor pointed out at the time, in the past decade these had included Franklin D. Roosevelt, Benito Mussolini, Manuel Azaña, Heinrich Brüning and Adolf Hitler’s finance minister. Its centenary celebration in wartime London was stuffed to bursting with bankers, politicians, economists, diplomats and foreign dignitaries, eating smoked salmon, puffing cigars. ‘Never has so much been read for so long by so few,’ quipped another editor, riffing on Winston Churchill.¹⁸

In the second half of the twentieth century, the Economist reached across the Atlantic: the role it once played in the British Empire, it now undertook in the American. A literal bridge between them, star reporters now passed apprenticeships on Wall Street and in Washington, where they enjoyed special access from the start – collared by John F. Kennedy or Lyndon B. Johnson in the marble corridors of Congress, enjoying personal lines to Ronald Reagan’s White House via George Shultz, Henry Kissinger and other pillars of the foreign-policy establishment. The intimacy of its advocacy of US hegemony, all the more powerful for coming from a global rather than merely national point of view within the US, is one reason why a new history of the Economist is needed, and American readers have cause to be interested in it. If much of what follows is a history of liberalism in a British sense and a British setting, this matters in the US too – as parallel and preamble to a doctrine that came to explicitly dominate the political landscape there after 1945. Many now lament that this post-war liberal order is under threat; but very rarely do they define liberalism, still less disambiguate it for Americans, who may take it to mean several different and contradictory things at once.

What Is Liberalism? Barriers to a Better Definition

The Economist has long defined itself as a lodestar of liberalism. In the aftermath of Trump and Brexit in 2016, it took great pains to renew and recast that commitment in a series of online debates, podcasts, films and profiles of liberal philosophers, culminating in a bold manifesto for its 175th anniversary in September 2018. Made complacent by their very success in spreading ‘freedom and prosperity’, the paper declared, liberals had to rediscover their best traditions to ‘rekindle the spirit of radicalism’ these contained.¹⁹ But what is liberalism? Who are liberals? If American readers are confused, they are not alone; so are scholars, who are partly responsible for the muddle.²⁰ Before proceeding, it makes sense to consider some of the shortcomings in studies of this difficult-to-define ‘ism’, not only to explain how a work on the Economist may help to avoid them, but also to set us on the path to a more accurate conception. The barriers are roughly three: anachronism, decontextualization, and lack of comparison.

Political theorists usually treat liberalism as a boundless body of thought, loosely and adaptively adhering around a few abstract principles of freedom, to be found in this or that canonical text or great thinker. In one recent indicative survey, liberalism is said to begin with John Locke, who supplied its first capacious axiom: men are ‘born in a state of perfect freedom, to order their actions and dispose of their possessions, and persons, as they see fit’. The writings of this seventeenth-century English philosopher, for whom liberalism as a developed doctrine was totally unknown, are then stretched into political formulae fit for today: ‘committed to democracy tempered by the rule of law, a private-enterprise economy supervised and controlled by government, and equal opportunity so far as it can be maintained without too much interference with the liberty of employers, schools, and families.’²¹ The dangers of this approach are clear, and do not arise through want of erudition.

Perhaps the best-known account of liberalism in this key, and for many an inspiration, is Isaiah Berlin’s 1958 Oxford lecture, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’. There were two diverging branches of the political philosophy, argued Berlin: one based on negative and another on positive freedom. The first, greatly to be preferred, meant ‘non-interference’ – by individuals, a ruler, the state, a ‘minimum area of personal freedom which must on no account be violated’. John Locke and John Stuart Mill, Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville lit up this path. The second was darker, and held that men could be made free, in conformity with their ‘true’ or ‘rational’ selves, even if they do not desire it. This was the legacy of Plato, Auguste Comte, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and in certain moods even Immanuel Kant and Mill. Here, the issue of decontextualization – thinkers plucked from across time and space, to be arranged like flowers in a vase – met anachronism, as Berlin applied ‘profoundly divergent and irreconcilable attitudes to the ends of life’ to the two camps in the Cold War.²² The procedure may have been useful for normative purposes, but as one of Berlin’s students later acknowledged, it could not be justified on the basis of what liberals had actually thought.²³

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.

This study follows the Economist through the sequence of its editors, whose tenures organize the narrative, tracing the tone and direction that each has given to the paper. Variation in the texture of the story is one consequence, reflecting contrasts between different incumbents and their eras – yielding, for example, here a finer-grained sense of British politics or newsroom disputes, there a broader brush on wars or economic conjunctures. I start with a detailed contextual account of the political origins of the Economist and its links to the organized campaign for free trade in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, and a consideration of the extraordinary figure of its founder, James Wilson – whose life and writings have been edulcorated in the few latter-day accounts we have of him. Then I pass to the paper’s famous second editor, Walter Bagehot, whose output and reputation are in a class by themselves in the history of the Economist, overtopping it, so that here uniquely it becomes the story of effectively one person. This sets the stage for the paper’s emergence as the voice of British finance capital at its global peak, punctuated by the exceptional tenure of Francis Hirst, who opposed Britain’s entry into the First World War and was fired in 1916. Disputes between interwar editor Walter Layton and John Maynard Keynes over the gold standard and how to respond to the Depression presage Britain’s global decline and the passing of the imperial sceptre to the United States. After the paper’s turn to America during the Second World War came an all-out commitment to Washington as the Cold War escalated, a fealty consummated in the eras of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Moving into the present, the story ends with what is now – rightly or wrongly – widely perceived as the contemporary crisis of liberalism, and looks at the ways the Economist has contributed to and tried to surmount it. In doing so, it pulls back to survey the long history of liberalism according to the Economist, and lays out a counter-narrative to which its actual record points. No one book can have the last word on the Economist. But I hope enough is said in these pages to alter whatever may come after them.