Liberalism Is as Bad as the Economist Makes It Sound
Liberalism is often presented as a loose set of principles like reason, freedom, and the rule of law. But over almost two centuries, the Economist has provided a window into the dominant strand of liberalism in action — with imperial conquest and undemocratic regimes defended in the name of upholding “free trade.”
By the late 1980s, the Economist was the champion of — indeed, it would define itself as the “rough guide” to — neoliberal globalization.
Meticulously read by Karl Marx, Franklin Roosevelt, and Bill Gates, the Economist is today one of the liberal world order’s most powerful magazines. Created in the midst of nineteenth-century laissez-faire in Britain, what Vladimir Lenin called the journal that “speaks for British millionaires” in many ways embodies the dominant strand of liberalism.
That’s not the liberalism you read about in university textbooks, but the one championing ruthless free trade around the globe — through the barrel of the gun if necessary. In his recent book Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist, Alexander Zevin uses the iconic newspaper as a prism to understand the material and ideological forces that have shaped modern liberalism’s worldview.
Jacobin’s Daniel Zamora and Anton Jäger spoke to Zevin about the historical roots of the Economist’s ideas, the newspaper’s peculiar links to British finance, and the concrete political actions that make up “real-existing liberalism,” beyond its supposed ideals.
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