THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 11, 2019 79
India, for Cobden, was a “country we
do not know how to govern,” and In-
dians were justified in rebelling against
an inept despotism. For Wilson’s Econ-
omist, however, Indians, like the Irish,
exemplified the “native character ...
half child, half savage, actuated by sud-
den and unreasoning impulses.” Be-
sides, “commerce with India would be
at an end were English power with-
drawn.” The next editor, Wilson’s son-
in-law Walter Bagehot, broadened the
magazine’s appeal and gave its opin-
ions a more seductive intellectual sheen.
But the editorial line remained much
the same. During the American Civil
War, Bagehot convinced himself that
the Confederacy, with which he was
personally sympathetic, could not be
defeated by the Northern states, whose
“other contests have been against naked
Indians and degenerate and undisci-
plined Mexicans.” He also believed
that abolition would best be achieved
by a Southern victory. More impor-
tant, trade with the Southern states
would be freer.
D
iscussing these and other edito-
rial misjudgments, Zevin refrains
from virtue signalling and applying
anachronistic standards. He seems gen-
uinely fascinated by how the liberal vi-
sion of individual freedom and inter-
national harmony was, as Niebuhr once
put it, “transmuted into the sorry re-
alities of an international capitalism
which recognized neither moral scru-
ples nor political restraints in expand-
ing its power over the world.” Part
of the explanation lies in Zevin’s so-
ciology of élites, in which liberalism
emerges as a self-legitimating ideol-
ogy of a rich, powerful, and networked
ruling class. Private ambition played a
significant role. Bagehot stood for Par-
liament four times as a member of Brit-
ain’s Liberal Party. Born into a family
of bankers, he saw himself and his mag-
azine as offering counsel to a new gen-
eration of buccaneering British finan-
ciers. His tenure coincided with the
age of capital, when British finance
transformed the world economy, ex-
panding food cultivation in North
America and Eastern Europe, cotton
manufacturing in India, mineral ex-
traction in Australia, and rail networks
everywhere. According to Zevin, “it
fell to Bagehot’s Economist to map this
new world, tracing the theoretical in-
sights of political economy to the peo-
ple and places men of business were
sending their money.”
The pressures of capitalist expan-
sion abroad and rising disaffection at
home further transformed liberal doc-
trine. Zevin fruitfully describes how
liberals coped with the growing de-
mand for democracy. Bagehot had read
and admired John Stuart Mill as a
young man, but, as an editor, he agreed
with him on little more than the need
to civilize the natives of Ireland and
India. To Bagehot, Mill’s idea of broadly
extending suffrage to women seemed
absurd. Nor could he support Mill’s
proposal to enfranchise the laboring
classes in Britain, reminding his read-
ers that “a political combination of the
lower classes, as such and for their own
objects, is an evil of the first magni-
tude.” Not surprisingly, The Economist
commended Mussolini (a devoted
reader) for sorting out an Italian econ-
omy destabilized by labor unrest.
Nonetheless, by the early twenti-
eth century, the magazine was grop-
ing toward an awareness that, in an
advanced industrial society, classical
liberalism had to be moderated, and
that progressive taxation and basic so-
cial-welfare systems were the price of
defusing rising discontent. The mag-
azine has since presented this volte-
face as evidence of its pragmatic lib-
eralism. Zevin reveals it as a grudging
response to democratic pressures from
below. Moreover, there were clear lim-
its to The Economist’s newfound com-
passionate liberalism. As late as 1914,
one editor, Francis Hirst, was still de-
nouncing “the shrieking, struggling,
fighting viragoes” who had demanded
the right to vote despite having no ca-
pacity for reason. His comparison of
suffragettes to Russian and Turkish
marauders—pillaging “solemn vows,
ties of love and affection, honor, ro-
mance”—helped drive his own wife
to suffragism.
As more people acquired the right
to vote, and as market mechanisms
failed, empowering autocrats and ac-
celerating international conflicts, The
Economist was finally forced to com-
promise the purity of its principles. In
1943, in a book celebrating the cente-
nary of the magazine, its editor at the
“And, for being careless with the environment, put tiny,
hard-to-remove stickers on all their fruit.”
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