Alexander Zevin

Alexander Zevin’s book Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist will be published in November.

Letter

What Matters

27 January 2020

Stefan Collini is troubled by ‘two problematic features’ in my history of the Economist (LRB, 6 February). First, claiming that I ‘arraign figures in the past for failing to live up to the most progressive standards of the present’, he cites my treatment of the banker-editor Walter Bagehot. In leaping to defend this ‘teasing, playful writer’ who was ‘no zealot for any cause’, Collini...

Every Penny a Vote: Neoliberalism

Alexander Zevin, 15 August 2019

Neoliberalism​ is often conceived as a system of self-regulating markets, shrunken states and crudely rational individuals. Early neoliberals, however, didn’t believe in markets’ self-correcting properties. Instead, as Quinn Slobodian argues in Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, they were concerned above all with establishing governments, laws and...

Letter
Patrick Cockburn mentions Bakunin’s dictum to ‘beware of small states’ to help explain why Israel and the US, and before them Britain and France, ought to have been wary about meddling in the affairs of their more diminutive victims – in this case, Lebanon (LRB, 5 August). The clearest example of the risks involved is not, however, to be found in a precipitate act of aggression, but rather...

Paris, 18 October: The New ’68ers

Alexander Zevin, 29 November 2007

During the strike in Paris on 18 October people holding papers hand papers to other people holding papers. An inflationary papering. The striking workers – mostly rail workers, but also miners, state utility workers, opera singers, librarians and actors from the Comédie Française – have pensions that allow them to retire earlier than other public sector workers...

It may be satisfying, though it isn’t terribly surprising, to find that the Economist has mostly come down on the side of capital in the major political conflicts of the past. More interesting would...

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