Alexander Zevin on the Economist

Starting with London’s free-trade debates of the 1840s and continuing since, the Economist has been a guiding hand in debates over imperialism, decolonization, and globalization, and its long history can provide a view of how the term “liberalism” has evolved and how it should be understood today. Alexander Zevin, an assistant professor of history at City University of New York and an editor at The New Left Review who stated he had been influenced by Benjamin's Arcade Project and the Situations (among others), who recently reviewed Slobodian's "Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism", in his new new book 'Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist', by looking through and into the perspective of the Economist, and by examining the origins of liberalism in the thought of figures such as John Locke and Adam Smith, and in the struggles in France in the 18th century, helps us see what he calls “really existing liberalism”––that is, a liberalism that rooted for empire, embraced wars at times, embraced finance, and has always wielded an ambivalence towards democracy.