Animal Balm – The Noble Art of Getting Orwell Wrong

 

 

The trailer for the new Andy Serkis (Lord of the Rings) directed reimagining of Animal Farm has caused apoplexy among the right-wing guardians of George Orwell’s true message. With which there can be absolutely no messing. By order of God himself.

As is well known, Orwell’s novella is a thinly-veiled allegory of the descent of the Russian Revolution into Stalinist totalitarianism and repression. The dream of freedom and equality and liberation from human slavery is gradually turned into a nightmare of repression by the domination of the pigs, led by Napoleon (Stalin). In the end, the animals of Animal Farm are worse off and work harder than animals on neighbouring human-run farms. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

This is where communism leads so don’t go getting any ideas is what they want you to think Animal Farm is saying.

Serkis’s unpardonable sin is to have ‘updated’ the plot of Animal Farm to make it about capitalism. The film, 15 years in the making apparently but only a trailer has been made public so far, has a tech billionaire plotting to take over Animal Farm and allying with pig dictator Napoleon to do so. Rather than leading a communist enclave, Napoleon now craves to “belong among the ruthless human billionaires”. And there are fart jokes, which last I checked weren’t in the original book.

Cue a predictable torrent of outrage from the sentinels guarding Saint George’s official message. The new Animal Farm is a “complete perversion of the book”, “they literally INVERTED Orwell’s message”, “It guts the entirety of the book’s message,” “Orwell must be spinning in his grave”, etc, etc.

Central Unintelligence Agency

It might be possible to take this avalanche of offence more seriously if the film adaptations of Animal Farm that have already been made, such as the iconic CIA-financed 1954 animation, weren’t also – while, unlike Serkis, outwardly sticking to the original plot – “complete perversions of the book”.

The problem for it seems almost everyone who wants to adapt Animal Farm is the way Orwell ends it *. In the final chapter, neighbouring farmers, including the old established farmer Mr Pilkington, come to visit the now unassailable pigs on Animal Farm. In the analogies of the book, Pilkington represents the West (Britain and France basically) while another farmer, Mr Frederick, who brutally mistreats his animals and leads a failed attempt to destroy Animal Farm (‘The Battle of the Windmill’, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union) is a stand-in for Hitler.

“Years later” it is Pilkington who comes to Animal Farm clutching an olive branch, lauding the fact that “a long period of mistrust and misunderstanding” was now over. “Between pigs and humans,” he declares, “there was not, and there need not be, any clash of interest whatever …. If you have your lower animals to contend with … we have our lower classes.”

A gratified Napoleon clinks beer mugs with Pilkington, regretting the unfortunate misconception that Animal Farm had been trying to stir up rebellions by other animals on neighbouring farms. He then announces that, henceforth, Animal Farm will revert to its old pre-rebellion name under Mr Jones, the Manor Farm.

There then comes Orwell’s kicker of a last line:

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and looked from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Seriously, could this be any more obvious? Orwell is saying that the communists, Stalinists whatever you want to call them, were becoming indistinguishable from the exploitative capitalist countries that surrounded them, a fact celebrated by the latter.

But such an ending was unacceptable to the CIA in 1954. In that adaptation of Animal Farm, “pig delegates come from far and wide” ** to celebrate their supremacy with Napoleon. No human is in sight. This scene so incenses the watching animals that they rise up in revolt, overthrowing their porcine overlords. This was described by one critic as “a wholesale inversion of Orwell’s ending”.

Ironically, in portraying the pig dictator Napoleon’s “desperation to belong among ruthless human billionaires”, the new version of Animal Farm may be truer to Orwell’s actual message than its supposedly more faithful predecessors.

The History Nobody Knows

Because the events and history that Orwell was drawing on in the conclusion of Animal Farm have been deliberately forgotten, and in the current era of compulsory Russophobia are unlikely to be remembered. The uncomfortable kernel of that history is that Stalinism, while internally incredibly repressive (in that sense the story of Animal Farm hit the nail on the head) was externally totally hostile to revolution, desiring nothing more than, in Orwell’s words in Animal Farm, “normal business relations” with its capitalist neighbours.

Orwell was inspired to write Animal Farm (and its equally famous successor Nineteen Eighty-Four) by his experience in fighting on the Republican side against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War in 1937. There he saw first-hand the role of the Soviet Union (then run by one man, Joseph Stalin) in destroying the anarchist and syndicalist revolution that had gripped Catalonia and other Northern provinces and that Orwell enthusiastically supported.

In the only instance of Stalin’s feared secret police (Napoleon’s dogs) operating in a Western European country, left-wing opponents of the Communist party were hunted down, tortured and disappeared. You can see something of this atmosphere in the Ken Loach film Land and Freedom. Orwell himself feared for his life and had to secretly slip across the border to France.

Contrary to the presumption of Western historians that in the 70 years of its existence the Soviet Union had an unvarying policy of fomenting world socialist revolution, the actions of Stalin and his henchmen in Spain were aimed at reversing a revolution. “The Russians,” as Orwell was later to write, did “all in their power to crush the Spanish revolutionary movements, defend private property and hand power to the middle class as against the working class”.

Why on earth would devout ‘communists’ do that? The answer lies in Stalin’s (prolonged) desire to do nothing to offend the Western capitalist countries in the hope that they would agree to ally with the Soviet Union against the threat of Nazi Germany. This alliance – the so-called ‘Grand Alliance – did eventually come about after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 but it was a definite last resort for Britain and France who would have much preferred that Hitler leave the West alone and concentrate on the barbarians to the East.

Stalin pursued the same policy in the Grand Alliance – that of appeasing the Right and supporting non-Fascist conservatives in the West – as he did in the Spanish Civil War. For example, in the so-called ‘Salerno Turn’ of March 1944, Italian Communist party leader Palmira Togliatti – under instructions from Moscow – joined with ex-Fascists and monarchists in a unity government and disbanded the Communist resistance. In war-time Britain, the Communist party, in decidedly non-revolutionary fashion, threw its weight behind Conservative party candidates in by-elections.

Animal Farm was written between November 1943 and February 1944, i.e. when this war-time alliance between official Communism and actually existing capitalism was in full bloom. And many people overlook the fact that the book was not merely a barely disguised history of the Russian Revolution and the depredations on Stalinism in the 1930s, it was also a prediction. The last historical event ‘covered’ by Animal Farm was probably the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union – in the book ‘The Battle of the Windmill’. The animals, at immense cost, beat back Mr Frederick’s (Hitler’s) men. Although, at the time Orwell was writing Germany hadn’t yet been expelled from the Soviet Union, it was clearly going to happen.

Thereafter, and especially in the last chapter (‘Years passed…’), the book becomes Orwell’s prediction of what would happen, based on what was already happening in the ‘Grand Alliance’ between Stalin and the West. That capitalism and communism would merge, or to be more specific communism would become indistinguishable from capitalism, losing all traces of its revolutionary origins. Symbolically, in the penultimate page of the book, Napoleon/Stalin announces that Animal Farm will no longer be called Animal Farm – it will revert to the name it had under the ‘old regime’ of Mr Jones.

Of course, as it turned out, none of this actually occurred. Rather than converging, Stalinist communism and Western capitalism faced each other down for decades in the Cold War – ironically a term coined by Orwell himself in 1945. Stalin instituted socialist revolutions from above in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states and the West seriously considered invading the Soviet Union after Nazi Germany was no more.

But two things should be borne in mind. Outside of the confines of its buffer, Soviet communism remained non-revolutionary even, in Orwell description, “counter revolutionary”. Stalin and his successors never reneged on the “percentages agreement” hammered out with Churchill in October 1944, whereby each side was given control over its zone. This is why Italian and French Communists tamely left post-WW2 governing coalitions in their respective countries despite the huge well of support they enjoyed after leading the war-time resistance, and why Britain and America were given carte blanche to fight the Left in Greece (in fact also while the Second World War was still raging). This was their zone and they could do what they wanted in it.

Secondly, Stalin did avidly court the West (notwithstanding the interlude of the Nazi-Soviet pact) for about a decade (1934 to 1944). And this was the context in which George Orwell wrote Animal Farm.

After the Thaw

However, the passing of the Cold War and of the state that Stalin led for 29 years did not lead to more honest adaptations of Animal Farm. The ending of the 1999 Babe-style version (with talking animals) is, if anything, even more ridiculous than the 1954 CIA-financed animation.

In this version, the animals leave Napoleon’s dystopia which eventually collapses of its own accord (get the symbolism?). In time, a new human family comes to take over, promising that the mistakes of the past won’t be repeated. In a final voice-over narration, Jessie the sheepdog gasps “And now at last, we shall be free!”

How wonderful. Given that, in the real-world, the restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet Union after 1991 had led to the biggest decline in life expectancy, outside of war or famine, in human history, that final line should be seen, in retrospect, as somewhat ironic.

In truth, Animal Farm was a subversive book that satisfied virtually no-one. It was, predictably, banned in the Soviet Union. But ostensibly supportive Ukrainian and Russian translations in the late 1940s also saw fit to delete certain offending passages. There then came the travesty of the CIA-approved version of 1954, to be followed 45 years later by an even more inept interpretation.

And despite the weary, fatalistic assertion that Animal Farm is a parable of the inevitable fate of all revolutions – “humans are not equal and you can’t force them to be” – the book retains its pep 80 years after its publication precisely because it is not inherently pessimistic – the novella ends with the animals finally realising what is going on.

Orwell was a democratic socialist (and a real one, he thought Attlee and co. were sell outs) lambasting communist totalitarianism for becoming no better, probably even worse, than capitalism. HG Wells called him a “Trotskyist with big feet”. If Animal Farm was really a conservative critique of revolution as such, its author would hardly have bothered to fight for a real revolution in Spain, nearly being killed in the process. Why fight for something that would inevitably be perverted anyway?

In point of fact, Orwell did criticise precisely the fatalistic, conservative attitude that Animal Farm supposedly embodies. In 1946 (a year after the publication of Animal Farm), he wrote an essay admonishing the shallowness of ex-Communist Arthur Koestler, a man who had precisely concluded that because the Russian Revolution had ended in oppression and murder, “This is what revolutions lead to”. Orwell’s response was:

Perhaps some degree of suffering is ineradicable from human life, perhaps the choice before man is always a choice of evils, perhaps even the aim of Socialism not to make the world perfect but to make it better. All revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure.

The “unwillingness to admit this”, in Orwell’s words, had led all adaptations of Animal Farm to be travesties of the original book. Perhaps because Serkis’s version gets Orwell so wrong, it can turn out to be more right than any of its inglorious predecessors.

 

*Orwell’s endings, even of his ostensibly non-political novels, always seem to confound the adapters of his works. The end of the 1997 film version of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, for instance, is a joyous celebration of the belated maturity achieved by its ‘hero’, Gordon Comstock. But in the 1936 novel, the final act – putting an aspidistra in the window – is portrayed as a resigned succumbing to middle class respectability, after years of impotent defiance. Again a “wholesale inversion” of Orwell’s meaning.

** This makes no sense from the point of view of the book – or indeed the film. Both show Napoleon’s Animal Farm dedicated to trading with the surrounding human-run farms, so where exactly do these “pig delegates” come from? Their presence might ring more true if Snowball (Trotsky) had won the battle for control with Napoleon (Stalin) because he was dedicated, unlike Napoleon, to “stirring up rebellion” on neighbouring farms. But early on in the book, Snowball is chased out of Animal Farm by Napoleon’s dogs, never to return.

Expert Fascists: The Untold Story of the Spirit of Our Age

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to escape,” someone said once. In the case of austerity, the nightmare has lasted for more than a century and the alarm isn’t about to jolt us into reality. “Outside, perhaps, of the less than three booming decades that followed World War II," Clara E Mattei notes soberingly in the introduction of her fine book The Capital Order, “austerity has been a mainstay of modern capitalism”.

Even the words are the same. In 1920, upholding the urgent need for countries to “pay their way” through spending cuts and individual abstinence, Lord Robert Chalmers, former permanent secretary at the Treasury, warned of the necessity of “painful” choices. In 2024, as an autumn budget featuring spending cuts of £1bn per department and tax rises looms, Sir Kier Starmer, PM of something called the ‘Labour’ party, has told us to steel ourselves for the “painful” decisions that must be made.

And just as in the 1920s, the promised sunlit uplands – the better times which this perpetual medicine is supposed to give way to – never appear. We must, says Starmer, “accept short-term pain for long-term good”. But we have been hearing that message for 14 years. Britain has been subject to austerity – of the fiscal kind – since 2010. And we (or the governing classes) are still making the same mistake. Maybe, as Mattei suggests, it’s not a mistake.

The Capital Order is about the origins of the creed of austerity. In the aftermath of the First World War, when the public wanted a “land fit for heroes” and the workers’ movement was on the march after decades of subservience, the wise, grey men in the shadows of power realised that something had to be done. The pressure of “excessive” demands on government had to be eased and workers, who were not only pressing for wage rises but questioning the immutability of the rule of capitalists over industry (‘the capital order’ of the book’s title), needed to know their place again.

Without drastic change and a remoulding of public opinion, the result would be ‘socialism’ or, in the worst nightmare of all, workers’ control and Bolshevism.

In Britain, the spirit of the age was trending in this catastrophic direction. Strikes were rampant and ‘reconstructionists’ from the elite, inspired by what had been possible during the war after laissez-faire had been discarded, were hatching plans for a free national health service and huge house-building programme (financed in part by local councils through non-profit making building guilds). It is fascinating to discover that the bulk of the reforming programme of the Attlee government after the Second World War was actually drafted in 1918-20 before being brutally scotched.

In Italy, as Mattei elucidates, things were even more serious. The workers’ movement was reaching the peak of its power – factories were seized and occupied during the long hot summer of 1920. The government stood by, helpless, and revolution seemed just a matter of time.

But at this point in both countries economists and bankers decisively entered the stage of history. On their advice, politicians implemented ruthless austerity. In Britain, savage spending cuts (the ‘Geddes Axe’) were forced through, and a policy of high interest rates, which caused a recession and mass unemployment, imposed in the face of protests. By 1922, wage levels were a third of what they had been in 1920, and 20% cuts in government spending were forced through. Confronted with the situation, workers went into survival mode and the strike wave evaporated.

The Italian ‘solution’ was even more extreme – Fascism. Mussolini marched on Rome and the supine Parliament granted full powers to his minister of finance, the liberal economist Alberto de Stefani, and his team of mainly non-Fascist advisors.  Free to follow their hearts’ desires, they implemented drastic reductions in welfare spending, abolished short-lived experiments in progressive taxation on the rich and corporations, and privatised state-run enterprises such as telecommunications. Coupled with Mussolini’s brutal physical destruction of the Left and workers’ organizations, the economy was pacified and profit-making made a safe endeavour again – though at the cost of wage levels, which sank like a stone, and political and economic freedom.

I must quibble here with the subtitle of the book – How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism. In Italy, they didn’t pave the way to Fascism; they were Fascism.

But regardless, what Mattei has done here is a wonderful example of historical revisionism (which is usually tainted by being associated with holocaust denial). It tells you things you very likely did not know and corrects the oversights of the historical ‘canon’ – a narrative which views the 1920s as a well-meaning period blind to the pain to come as a result of the Great Depression and the “low, dishonest decade” to follow. This book changes the way you view the past and thus the present.

Based on the experience of the last decade or so in Britain and Europe, most people tend to view austerity in terms of budget cuts and (regressive) tax rises. But, as Mattei points out, this is just one prong of the “austerity trinity”.

Fiscal austerity (1) is often accompanied by (2) monetary austerity which entails large rises in interest rates – the cost of holding debt – ostensibly to combat inflation but at the cost of driving the economy into recession. In the 1920s, this was known as the “dear money” policy – “the queen of all austerity policies in Britain” according to Mattei.  Dear Money was inaugurated in 1921 (when interest rates were raised to 7%) and lasted for more than a decade. It was still the official response to the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and predictably only made things worse. But the most brutal example of monetary austerity in the West took place at the beginning of the 1980s on both sides of the Atlantic, when interest rates were hiked to above 17%. The result was recession, mass unemployment (reaching 4 million for a decade in Britain), and the taming of organized labour. Again these results were not an unfortunate mistake. And the lady wasn’t for turning.

The last leg of austerity is (3) industrial austerity, which involves privatisation and crushing organized labour and the right to strike. Both, as Mattei details, were an integral part of Fascist austerity in 1920s’ Italy which literally destroyed (physically) the workers’ movement, enshrining a period of ‘industrial peace’. Industrial austerity was zealously resuscitated by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s leading to a world-wide revolution in economic ‘common sense’, shaping the economic landscape we now take for granted. Nowadays in Europe, if you displease the economic overlords of the European Central Bank, you will be compelled to swallow the medicine of both fiscal and industrial austerity – budget cuts, privatisation, and laws against striking.

But if the economic history of the 20^th and 21^st century has, in the main, been one of austerity, the three horsemen of the austerity trinity have not always been paraded at the same time. Depending on the circumstances, different aspects have been stressed while others have been ignored – or in fact seriously transgressed.  This discordant record, dependent on the needs of the time as defined by technocrats shielded from democratic accountability, reveals – as we will see in part two – a lot about our current economic predicament.

A moral (and strategic) collapse

 

The collective West’s inability to respond to the deepening genocide in Gaza, now replete with mass executions and the deliberate killing of aid workers, is deeply troubling. It betrays a stunning moral degeneration that the British government, supported by His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, cannot even propose stopping arms sales to the Israeli regime.

But this is not just a moral collapse, it is also a political and strategic one. This will not end well. Part of the West’s legitimacy, however much honoured in the breach, relied on projecting ‘soft power’ based on human rights and ‘a rules-based international order’. This is being shredded in real time. It is an insult to our intelligence to insist that Israel is merely trying to release the hostages as it blows up hospitals, universities, and apartment buildings and kills thousands of children.

It is frequently pointed out, with validity, that the US and Britain don’t support Israel because of the malign influence of the Israeli lobby, but because Israel is a strategic ally. It is the ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’, in the description of ’80s secretary of state Alexander Haig, and a nuclear armed US surrogate in a vital region of the world. According to current president Joe Biden, if Israel didn’t exist, it would have to be invented by the US. Hence the mind boggling weapons sales (from mainly the US but also Britain and Germany).

But I can’t be the first to notice that unconditional support for Israel as it commits genocide in full view of the world is not a very clever strategy. Long-term, or even short-term, the result will not be a ‘Greater Israel’ but a moral, and subsequently physical, collapse of the Zionist project. Already, the normalisation agreement with Saudi Arabia – the Islamist but pro-Western power in the region – based on erasing Palestine from the map (as Netanyahu showed the UN), has been scuppered because of Gaza.

If Israel is left unhindered, more unbelievable Palestinian suffering will happen. But after that, all bets are off. According to the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, “the more oppressive the eliminatory policies are (and it’s terrible to say but it’s true) the less they are able to be covered up as a ‘response’ or ‘retaliation’ and the more they are seen as a brutal genocide policy. Thus, it is less likely that the immunity that Israel enjoys today would continue in the future.”

“On the basis of sober professional examination,” he says. “I am stating that we are witnessing the end of the Zionist project, there’s no doubt about it.

In the past, the US was able to see Israel as a strategic ally but one that occasionally needed to be restrained. In 1957, threatening behind the scenes the withdrawal of aid and the imposition of sanctions, the US (in the person of Dwight Eisenhower) persuaded Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula it had occupied during the invasion of Egypt. In 1982, Reagan demanded, and got, a ceasefire after Israel had invaded Lebanon. Both these inhibiting actions were carried out by Republican presidents by the way.

But now, beyond bleating and transparent PR exercises, the US government appears powerless to do anything. Despite the presence of legions of strategists, it seems totally beholden to a regime that traces its ideological lineage back to Benito Mussolini, shoots 5 year old children with sniper bullets, and is unable to see the fatal long-term consequences of its actions.

Even if I was a thoroughly amoral Kissingerian national security strategist, I’d see the looming disaster ahead and rationally take steps to avert it.

But maybe the world isn’t rational anymore.

The Liberalism Nobody Knows

Liberal democracy (or liberal-democracy) appears as one of those natural pairings of the English language – a linguistic partnership that enhances, rather than does violence to, its constituents. It has become a modern truism that liberalism and democracy are inseparable bedfellows, soul mates even. Where liberalism is vanquished, democracy, at best, becomes a plebiscitary tool to vindicate the wishes of absolute rulers. Conversely, where liberalism is allowed to flourish, democracy – defined as free elections, an independent media and free speech – inevitably follows.

But this comfortable view, which permits its proponents to always feel they are siding with the angels, is a delusion. As Domenico Losurdo shows in Liberalism: A Counter-History, liberalism had quite separate roots from democracy and was fully prepared to countenance the seemingly illiberal tools of coups and dictatorship if it felt threatened from below. The much vaunted, and supposedly natural, coupling of liberalism and democracy was a slow, painful and fitful process, invariably achieved against the will of liberals and to which they have never been reconciled.

The rarely told history of liberalism

Losurdo traces the history of liberalism back to the Glorious Revolution in Britain in 1688. The subsequent Bill of Rights limited the power of the monarch and allowed a Parliamentary (though emphatically not democratic) system to emerge. From that point, liberalism was defined as opposition to concentration of power, in the form of the monarch and sometimes the Catholic Church. The other side of the coin was the liberty of people to be unrestrained by state power. But this liberty was never meant to be the birthright of everyone. Far from it, only “the community of the free”, in Lusurdo’s phrase, a small minority of male property-owners, were so blessed. The role of everyone else – the vast majority of people – was merely to be their servants.

Thus it was no accident that the liberal era was coeval with the slave trade, “the largest involuntary movement of human in all history”, and the establishment of a brutal system of racial chattel slavery in the United States – a British settler colony that achieved independence. In the metropolitan countries, the vast majority of non-property owners were not slaves but they were enchained as serfs or wage labourers. Freedom, to early liberalism, was the freedom of property owners to enjoy their property as they wished. In England, from 1688 (the Glorious Revolution) to 1820, the number of crimes carrying the death penalty increased from 50 to between 200 and 250 and these were almost always for crimes against property. In England at the start of 19^th century you could be hung for taking an unauthorized clipping from an ornamental bush.

The newly independent United States of America was a bastion of liberalism. But as British loyalists pointed out, this love of liberty went hand in hand with the consecration of the ‘worst species of slavery’. The Britain derived from the Glorious Revolution, the rebel colonists shot back, presided over the horror of the slave trade and treated its white servants little better than slaves.

Both accusations were true and both exposed the underbelly of liberalism. The veneration of freedom for some people was dependent on the complete opposite – total subjection and domination – for many others. To work this required an intricate ideology of dehumanisation. The French liberal Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès regarded wage labourers as “bipedal machines”, while the British liberal-conservative Edmund Burke (a man considered to be the father of modern conservatism who incidentally subscribed to the most elaborate Jewish conspiracy theories) looked upon workers as mere instrumentum vocale.

And when these machines began to make demands, the sheen of opposition to ‘despotism’ miraculously fell away. John Locke, the most influential of the early liberals, regarded physical force as entirely justified in the event of a tax not authorised by those affected by it. Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America, was intransigently opposed to attempts to legally reduce the 12 hour day, introduce progressive taxation or instigate rent controls and believed “nothing authorizes the state to interfere in industry”. He supported the idea of a temporary dictatorship to modernize France. In Britain, between 1790 and 1820, more than 60 Acts of Parliament were passed aimed at repressing working class activity. Liberals enthusiastically endorsed the discipline of the workhouse.

The story of the vote

This is not to deny the umbilical connection of liberalism to self-government and representative, elected institutions – ‘no taxation without representation’ as the American rebels famously proclaimed – but the section of the population to be represented was necessarily and intentionally tiny. Britain had Parliamentary institutions – powerful bodies that had succeeded in executing a King and, since the Glorious Revolution, formed part of a constitutional monarchy – but prior to the Great Reform Act only 3 per cent of the public were entitled to determine who their members were – about 200,000 out of a population of eight million.

In 1832, the franchise was extended to 13 per cent of adult males, but Chartism, a mass movement calling for universal manhood suffrage and annual elections, was bitterly resisted and above all by avowed liberals. “In England” Karl Polanyi reminds us, “it became the unwritten law of the Constitution that the working class must be denied the vote. The Chartist leaders were jailed; their adherents, numbered in millions, were derided by a legislature representing a bare fraction of the population, and the mere demand for the ballot was often treated as a criminal act by the authorities …. Inside and outside England, from Macaulay to Mises, from Spencer to Sumner, there was not a militant liberal who did not express his conviction that popular democracy was a danger to capitalism.”

Britain did not approach becoming such a democracy until after the First World War. On the eve of that conflagration, only 30 per cent of the adult population (no women and 60 per cent of men) could vote. Britain was thus less democratic than its illiberal adversary, Germany, which had manhood suffrage.

The community of the free in the US was more expansive – voting for all white men was in place by 1856 – but that was because of the existence of millions of black slaves and endless expanses of supposedly “unpossessed” land. Even so, the idea that wage labourers were, in reality, wage slaves – because of their material dependence on employers, their state was comparable to that of chattel slaves – was enormously strong in the 19^th century.

And one of the strongest of the liberal “exclusion clauses” related to women. The vote wasn’t granted to women in the US until 1920. In Britain female votes were only achieved following a campaign of militant civil disobedience and hungry strikes and the massive turmoil of World War One. Women gained the vote partially in 1918 and, unconditionally, in 1928.

Far from being synonymous with democracy, liberalism, as Losurdo points out, regarded it with “coldness, hostility and sometimes frank contempt” – an attitude maintained for more than two centuries. Democracy and equal rights didn’t flow naturally from liberalism; they had to be prised from it:

… it must be borne in mind that the exclusion clauses were not overcome painlessly, but through violent upheavals of sometimes quite unprecedented violence. The abolition of slavery in the wake of the Civil War cost the United States more victims than both world wars combined. As for censitary discrimination [restrictions on the electoral franchise], a decisive contribution was made to its abolition by the French revolutionary cycle. Finally, in major countries like Russia, Germany and the United States the accession of women to political rights had behind it the war and revolutionary upheavals of the early twentieth century (Liberalism: A Counter-History, p 341).

The new liberalism

But, it will be objected, all this refers not so much to the history of liberalism, as its pre-history. With the emergence of the ‘new liberalism’ in the late 19^th century, the creed of liberalism changed beyond recognition. It became reconciled to – even championed – democracy, economic regulation and racial and gender equality. John Maynard Keynes, for example, an economist synonymous with scepticism towards laissez-faire capitalism, was a lifelong member of the British Liberal party. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, probably the most famous of 20^th century American liberals (he never called himself a socialist), placed freedom of speech and freedom of worship on a par with freedom from want for “everyone in the world”.

The face of modern liberalism can be seen in the public letter of 30 writers, historians and Nobel laureates published in January who warn that European “liberal democracy” is confronted with “a threat not seen since the 1930s”. The liberal values espoused here are those of internationalism, anti-populism and toleration. Democracy is ostensibly defended, not derided.

But the older liberalism has not died. It is, in fact, arguably more influential than its modernised twin. Neoliberalism (‘new liberalism’) has been guiding force of the economy since the 1980s. Neoliberalism holds that market forces should determine economic decisions, taxes on wealth and corporations should be as low as possible and government budgets should be balanced (a feat always to be achieved by cutting public spending rather than raising taxes on the wealthy). Neoliberalism harks back very directly to economic liberalism, the doctrine of laissez-faire that asserted that contracts negotiated between ‘free’ individuals should not be interfered with by the state.

Except that economic liberalism is a misnomer. The original 20^th century economic liberals, such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises, did not regard themselves as economic liberals but consistent liberals. To them, the other liberals had abandoned the tenets of liberalism and embraced ‘socialism’. It was always a cause of some regret to Hayek that his ideas were taken up by the British Conservative party – he was a major influence on Margaret Thatcher – rather than the Liberals.

Taking the risk out of democracy

And Hayek and Von Mises retained the older liberalism’s coldness towards democracy. Hayek, for example, was full of praise for Chilean dictator Augustus Pinochet and believed that “liberal dictatorship” was infinitely preferable to “democratic government devoid of liberalism”. Von Mises, a generation older, regarded trade unionism as a form of terrorism and thought the merit of Italian Fascism – won through saving European civilisation from the workers’ movement – would “live on eternally in history” (and this in a book entitled Liberalism).

The temptation is to say that we are dealing with two distinct political currents that, by dint of historical coincidence, go by the same name. But that would be too hasty a judgement. Hayek, for instance, was very sympathetic to the idea of European federalism. To him it offered protection against the virus of democracy. “The absence of tariff walls and the free movements of men and capital between the states of the federation has certain important consequences which are frequently overlooked,” he wrote in a 1939 essay. “They limit to a great extent the scope of the economic policy of the individual states.”

Hayek’s praise for the virtues of “one single market” thus prefigures the creation of the EU’s single market which does indeed limit the economic policy of individual European states and enshrines the free movement of capital and people. And the single market – resolutely supported by Margaret Thatcher it should be recalled – is the core institution of a European Union whose “liberal values”, intellectuals warn, are under attack from nativists and xenophobes.  

But the clearest bridge between the two liberalisms can be seen in the outlook of the corporate elite at the Davos World Economic Forum. Their concern about the threats to what they term the “liberal order” has now risen to a crescendo. This order comprises the free movement of capital and commodities (globalisation) coupled with a cosmopolitan attitude and support for gender and racial diversity.

However their stance towards the arch destroyer of that liberal order – Donald Trump – is revealing. They are repelled by his protectionism, hostility to immigrants, sexism and xenophobia but irresistibly attracted to his indulgence of the immensely wealthy. When, in 2017, Trump massively cut taxes for the rich (reducing the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 per cent and instituting tax breaks for millionaires), Davos went weak at the knees at this long overdue “tax reform”.

Contrast this with the unrelenting hostility directed towards left-wingers such as Jeremy Corbyn, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders who are in fact resiliently liberal in their opposition to attacks on immigrants, refugees or LGBT people but also in favour raising taxes, moderately, on the wealthy (and, in Corbyn’s case, renationalising public services). Should Corbyn become UK Prime Minister – which now seems likely – expect that hostility to ramp up into brazen attempts to bring down his government, by any means possible. And liberals will be at the forefront of that effort. The tragedy is, they will always return to their roots.