THE NEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 11, 2019 77
the raw materials of the globe.” The
Great Depression forced John Dewey
to conclude that “the socialized econ-
omy is the means of free individual
development.” Isaiah Berlin champi-
oned the noninterference of the state
in 1958, in his celebrated lecture “Two
Concepts of Liberty”; but eleven years
later he had come to believe that such
“negative liberty” armed “the able and
ruthless against the less gifted and less
fortunate.”
Because of this conceptual morass,
liberalism has, to an unusual degree,
been defined by what it wasn’t. For
French liberals in the early nineteenth
century, it was a defense against the
excesses of Jacobins and ultra-monar-
chists. For the free-trading Manches-
ter Liberals of the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury, it was anticolonial. Liberals in
Germany, on the other hand, were al-
lied with both nationalists and impe-
rialists. In the twentieth century, lib-
eralism became a banner under which
to march against Communism and
Fascism. Recent scholars have argued
that it wasn’t until liberalism became
the default “other” of totalitarian ide-
ologies that inner coherence and in-
tellectual lineage were retrospectively
found for it. Locke, a devout Chris-
tian, was not regarded as a philosopher
of liberalism until the early twentieth
century. Nor was the word “liberal”
part of U.S. political discourse before
that time. When Lionel Trilling
claimed, in 1950, that liberalism in
America was “not only the dominant
but even the sole intellectual tradition,”
the term was becoming a catchall
signifier of moral prestige, variously
synonymous with “democracy,” “capi-
talism,” and even simply “the West.”
Since 9/11, it has seemed more than
ever to define the West against such
illiberal enemies as Islamofascism and
Chinese authoritarianism.
The Economist proudly enlists itself
in this combative Anglo-American tra-
dition, having vigorously claimed to
be advancing the liberal cause since
its founding. In “Liberalism at Large”
(Verso), Alexander Zevin, a historian
at the City University of New York,
takes it at its word, telling the story
not only of the magazine itself but also
of its impact on world affairs. Using
The Economist as a proxy for liberal-
ism enables Zevin to sidestep much
conceptual muddle about the doc-
trine. His examination of The Econo-
mist’s pronouncements and of the pol-
icies of those who heeded them yields,
in effect, a study of several liberalisms
as they have been widely practiced in
the course of a hundred and seventy-
five years. The magazine emerges as
a force that—thanks to the military,
cultural, and economic power of Brit-
ain and, later, America—can truly be
said to have made the modern world,
if not in the way that many liberals
would suppose.I
n terms of its influence, The Econo-
mist has long been a publication like
no other. Within a decade of its found-
ing, Marx was describing it as the organ
of “the aristocracy of finance.” In 1895,
Woodrow Wilson called it “a sort of
financial providence for businessmen
on both sides of the Atlantic.” (Wil-
son, an Anglophile, wooed his evidently
forbearing wife with quotations from
Walter Bagehot, the most famous of
The Economist’s editors.) For years, the
magazine was proud of the exclusivity
of its readership. Now it has nearly a
million subscribers in North America
(more than in Britain), and seven hun-
dred thousand in the rest of the world.
Since the early nineties, it has served,
alongside the Financial Times, as the
suavely British-accented voice of glo-
balization (scoring over the too stri-
dently partisan and American Wall
Street Journal).
According to its own statistics, its
readers are the richest and the most
prodigal consumers of all periodical
readers; more than twenty per cent
once claimed ownership of “a cellar
of vintage wines.” Like Aston Mar-
tin, Burberry, and other global Brit-
ish brands, The Economist invokes the
glamour of élitism. “It’s lonely at the
top,” one of its ads says, “but at least
there’s something to read.” Its articles,
almost all of which are unsigned, were
until recently edited from an office in
St. James’s, London, a redoubt of posh
Englishness, with private clubs, cigar
merchants, hatters, and tailors. The
present editor, Zanny Minton Beddoes,
is the first woman ever to hold the po-
sition. The staff, predominantly white,
is recruited overwhelmingly from theP.O. Box 2195, Duxbury, MA 02331
800 -222 -1236 781-934 -2454
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