76 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 11, 2019
The magazine was founded in 1843, to disseminate the doctrine of laissez-faire.
BOOKS
THE INFLUENCER
Liberalism according to The Economist.
BY PANKAJ MISHRA
ILLUSTRATION BY MARK LONG
“
L
iberalism made the modern
world, but the modern world is
turning against it,” an article in The
Economist lamented last year, on the
occasion of the magazine’s hundred-
and-seventy-fifth anniversary. “Eu-
rope and America are in the throes of
a popular rebellion against liberal élites,
who are seen as self-serving and un-
able, or unwilling, to solve the prob-
lems of ordinary people,” even as au-
thoritarian China is poised to become
the world’s largest economy. For a pub-
lication that was founded “to campaign
for liberalism,” all of this was “pro-
foundly worrying.”
The crisis in liberalism has become
received wisdom across the political
spectrum. Barack Obama included
Patrick Deneen’s “Why Liberalism
Failed” (2018) in his annual list of rec-
ommended books; meanwhile, Vladi-
mir Putin has gleefully pronounced
liberalism “obsolete.” The right accuses
liberals of promoting selfish individu-
alism and crass materialism at the ex-
pense of social cohesion and cultural
identity. Centrists claim that liberals’
obsession with political correctness and
minority rights drove white voters to
Donald Trump. For the newly resur-
gent left, the rise of demagoguery looks
like payback for the small-government
doctrines of technocratic neoliberal-
ism—tax cuts, privatization, financial
deregulation, antilabor legislation, cuts
in Social Security—which have shaped
policy in Europe and America since
the eighties.
Attacks on liberalism are nothing
new. In 1843, the year The Economist
was founded, Karl Marx wrote, “The
glorious robes of liberalism have fallen
away, and the most repulsive despo-
tism stands revealed for all the world
to see.” Nietzsche dismissed John Stu-
art Mill, the author of the canonical
liberal text “On Liberty” (1859), as a
“numbskull.” In colonized Asia and
Africa, critics—such as R. C. Dutt, in
India, and Sun Yat-sen, in China—
pointed out liberalism’s complicity in
Western imperialism. Muhammad
Abduh, the Grand Mufti of Egypt,
wrote, “Your liberalness, we see plainly,
is only for yourselves.” (Mill, indeed,
had justified colonialism on the ground
that it would lead to the improvement
of “barbarians.”) From a different van-
tage, critiques came from aspiring im-
perialist powers, such as Germany (Carl
Schmitt), Italy (Gaetano Salvemini),
and Japan (Tokutomi Sohō). Since
then, Anglo-American thinkers such
as Reinhold Niebuhr and John Gray
have pointed out liberalism’s troubled
relationship with democracy and
human rights, and its overly compla-
cent belief in reason and progress.
Yet the sheer variety of criticisms of
liberalism makes it hard to know right
away what precisely is being criticized.
Liberalism’s ancestry has been traced
back to John Locke’s writings on in-
dividual reason, Adam Smith’s eco-
nomic theory, and the empiricism of
David Hume, but today the doctrine
seems to contain potentially contra-
dictory elements. The philosophy of
individual liberty connotes both a de-
sire for freedom from state regulation
in economic matters (a stance close to
libertarianism) and a demand for the
state to insure a minimal degree of so-
cial and economic justice—the liber-
alism of the New Deal and of Euro-
pean welfare states. The iconic figures
of liberalism themselves moved be-
tween these commitments. Mill, even
while supporting British imperial-
ism in India and Ireland, called him-
self a socialist and outlined the aim
of achieving “common ownership in
