Variations on Liberalism in The Economist Newspaper

Liberalism

1: Chapters 1-3

Introduction

The Industrial Revolution changed the rules of the game in England in the 19th century. Zevin shows that the aristocracy had ruled in the past; but by the 1840s, a new order had emerged—one in which a rising middle class now had a common voice and an interest in controlling or at least shaping markets. This paper highlights how those who started and edited The Economist were in league in terms of wanting a liberal market—a free market—one that was not pre-determined and subjected to the whims and will of the aristocracy.

Synthesis

The Economist was born out of the Anti-Corn Law League that rose up to challenge the aristocratic tariff that kept “foreign competition in wheat out of the country, and domestic prices high” (Zevin, 2019, p. 22). Its founder was James Wilson, “a Scottish hat manufacturer and author, whose powerful vision of a free trade world, first set out in 1839, gave [the League’s] campaign its winning argument” (Zevin, 2019, p. 23). Wilson founded it and argued against the Corn Law with it. He became the voice not only of the League but also of the common man in England: “In Wilson the League discovered that in pursuing its own class interests it was pursuing those of all classes” (Zevin, 2019, p. 26).

When Wilson’s son-in-law Walter Bagehot took over upon the former’s death, as editor of The Economist, it marked a shift in weekly newspaper’s scope: “In addition to money market summaries, Bagehot wrote two and often three or four leading articles a week on current events for sixteen years; in 1861 he wrote at least thirty-one just on the American Civil War” (Zevin, 2019, p. 64). Bagehot broadened The Economist to take in more of what was going on in the world. Bagehot was described by contemporaries as “the most acute observer of the political and economic society in which he lived” (Zevin, 2019, p. 65). Bagehot reflected the popular sentiment of the time—so much so that Karl Marx turned to it after the seeds of his Communist Manifesto failed to sprout fruit: for Marx, The Economist was a window on “a sector of liberal opinion with a distinct worldview and cosmopolitan wealth, so fearful of further popular upheaval that by 1851 it was ready to welcome an illiberal but orderly dictatorship in the revolutionary capital of the nineteenth century, France” (Zevin, 2019, p. 101). The Economist was a populist newspaper for those interested in capital in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.

Assessment