Warnings of a crisis of liberalism have become commonplace, as it is assailed by an illiberal right on the one side and a socialist left on the other. The situation is plain, and it is at least partially self-inflicted. Liberalism has missed opportunity after opportunity. It is not merely the tepid response to the financial crisis. One critic warns that already in the ’80s there were “fresh and full disclosures of poverty” and “the decay of rural industry and population,” yet liberals made no serious proposals for reform. “The old laissez faire individualism,” he reasons, “was still too dominant.” Nevertheless, he holds, there is the possibility of renewal. The cause of liberty can be advanced through social reform, through a more robust welfare state, through attacks on monopolies and unearned property. The writer is the social scientist J.A. Hobson. The year is 1909.

LIBERALISM AT LARGE: THE WORLD ACCORDING TO THE ECONOMIST by Alexander Zevin Verso, 544 pp., 34.95

Today, Hobson is best remembered for his 1902 work Imperialism, the major thesis of which was cribbed by Lenin. (They agreed that the drive for empire was caused by the search for profits under capitalism.) Yet the parallels between Hobson’s analysis and the widespread “crisis of liberalism” literature of our own times are striking. Hobson’s ’80s were not the Reagan years but the 1880s, of course, but his complaints about laissez-faire individualism find their echoes in today’s critiques of neoliberalism. Even his eventual refuge feels contemporary: After trying to convince liberals to include more socially protective programs, Hobson eventually gave up and became a socialist.

That this 110-year-old complaint seems to speak to our own times is a testament both to the longevity of liberalism and to the difficulty—perhaps impossibility—of resolving its tensions. In his book Liberalism at Large, Alexander Zevin seeks to trace this history through a study of a single publication: The Economist, which still describes itself as a newspaper rather than a magazine. Published continuously since 1843, The Economist is deeply identified with the liberal project, and has long proved influential throughout the world. Its readers have ranged from Karl Marx to Benito Mussolini, from Franklin Roosevelt to Angela Merkel. Even today, when it is harder and harder to make journalism pay, it remains profitable and widely circulated, whistling past the graveyard of many a mangled media property. It has more than a million subscribers, despite being the most expensive weekly in the United States. Unlike most magazines, it de-emphasizes individual authors, only occasionally posting bylines and relying instead on a strong institutional voice and a dry wit.

Zevin, who is an editor at the New Left Review, regards The Economist as one imagines an antelope might regard a crocodile—impressed by its longevity and power, suspicious of its habitat, and wary of its bite. Parts of the liberal program have been incorporated across the political spectrum: As Zevin describes it, liberalism “combined economic freedoms—the right to unconditional private property; low taxes; no internal tariffs; external free trade—with political freedoms: the rule of law; civil equality; freedom of the press and assembly; careers ‘open to talent’; responsible government.” But it has also been closely associated, at least in the dominant version represented by The Economist, with financial power. Zevin argues that The Economist’s unabashed pro-market position and its close relationship to the City of London (the United Kingdom’s equivalent of Wall Street) explain its influence, its importance, and its blind spots. For over 150 years, he writes, The Economist has been “offering up the sort of political advice that markets themselves might, if only they could speak.”

For Zevin, this is the core of the problem. The bankers and businesspeople who read it are treated to capsule summaries of world affairs and charts, presented with an air of knowing superiority. A senior editor once told a nervous new recruit that to write like The Economist, you just “pretend you are God.” But markets are human institutions, not divine ones. As one writer for the paper put it, The Economist was the place where you could “hear the bourgeoisie talking to itself, and it could talk quite frankly.” What Zevin finds is a frequently unreflective conversation. His Economist is an institution that has too often been unable to confront, or resolve, liberalism’s troubled relationships with democracy, empire, and the expanding power of finance itself.