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
