In search of right and left
Viable conceptual distinctions must be grounded on explicit criteria and must generate exclusive categories.[1] Various attempts to classify ideologies as Right and Left (and Center)[2] have seldom, if ever, met these criteria and the results have usually been hopeless aporias.[3] Attempts of this type are not new. Those familiar with Zeev Sternhell's work on the "third way" in France in the late 1890s and early 1900s[4] will recall how the rejection of these political and cultural categories constituted a precarious point of convergence for the "1930s non-conformists" and their forerunners: syndacalists, national-populists and aristocratic socialists.[5] This state of affairs already betrays the widespread perception of these concepts as inadequate and obsolete. Yet their durability and the political failures of those who thought they could dispense with them send a different signal -- one of vitality and endurance, which in turn is challenged by the continuous reemergence of polemics and doubts.
In discussing the relevance of these concepts, it is useful to recall the early 1960s' claims of the advocates of "the end of ideology." This thesis was accepted within a context which assumed that in the age of technology it was finally possible to delegate decisions to technocrats and to an updated "invisible hand" no longer identified with the market but with administrative bureaucracies. It was predicated on the decline of political functions and the assumption that, as a result, value conflicts would become superfluous. As Dino Cofrancesco has pointed out, the increasing homogenization of the new era seemed to turn the end of ideologies into a "final solution" because "the elimination of various attitudes about events would produce the sterile and nightmarish world so often envisioned by science fiction writers."[6]
Although usually assumed by intellectuals and the mass media, the thesis of a radical de-ideologization of public life[7] has turned out to be useless.[8] Those who still regard ideologies as viable, frequently use the categories of Right, Center and Left in three ways: a) as essences embodying fundamental political beliefs; b) as ideal types defining rigorous theoretical divisions but not directly applicable to concrete experience; c) as relative conventions applicable to particular situations but lacking sharp bounderies.
The effectiveness of each of these approaches is a function of the context within which they are deployed. Thus, it is not unusual for scholars to shift from one to the other. Indicative of the difficulty to pigeon-hole new political phenomena such as the so-called New Right is Anna Galeotti's attempt to reject "the pretense of the contemporary Right to locate itself beyond classical distinctions."[9] She identifies three fundamental questions: "1) Is there an adequate and univocal definition of Right and Left? 2) If not: does the distinction mean anything more than it does in everyday life? 3) If yes, is this division useful in interpreting contemporary political phenomena?"[10]
Two other questions ought to be asked: Does this distinction help explain political behavior? Does it exclude other distinctions? Essentialist perspectives according to which Right and Left are two metaphysically grounded and irreducible entities have often been abandoned, simply to re-emerge under new guises. Sartori has demolished the pretenses of identifying the two concepts in terms of property rights, social change or class,[11] and Bobbio has dismissed attempts to ground the distinction on the individualism-organicism dichotomy, since it "cannot withstand historical scrutiny -- not even a superficial one." According to him, "the reactionary Right and, in part, the conservative Right, has an organicist vision of society which, to cite recent examples, reveals itself by emphasizing the principle of solidarity contraposed to that of aggregation on the basis of common interests, the need to integrate single individuals into the group even at the cost of personal sacrifice and, finally, the concept that the whole comes before the parts and that the parts do not count outside the whole. Yet it cannot be denied that an organic concept of society has been accepted by part of the Left and the labor movement as a polemical answer to individualistic theories disdainfully labelled atomistic, 'bourgeois' and so on."[12]
While not universally shared, there is broad agreement among scholars concerning the impossibility of identifying the distinction between Right and Left with the one between conservatism and progressivism. Yet this thesis often reappears in different guises. Bobbio himself has proposed one of the most authoritative versions, based on different attitudes towards equality. In the context of relative beliefs (where the Right loses its pretense of metaphysical inequality, and the Left that of an equally undemonstrable natural equality) the ideal of equality translates into preferences, which can be expressed as follows: "In general the egalitarian thinks that most inequalities that bother him and that he wants to eliminate are social and therefore removable; the non-egalitarian, on the contrary, thinks they are natural and therefore irremovable."[13]
The exclusion of any third option prevents the application of this hypothesis. It cannot accomodate ideologies which, assuming natural inequalities as an anthropological given (subsequently developed into a theory of differences qua specificities) have sought to reduce social inequalities. In these cases, the shift of emphasis from the natural order to cultural development has generated much more substantial results than Bobbio's distinction. What this suggests is that there may be a much wider spectrum of transversal attitudes than can be captured by the Right-Left scheme.
If, following Bobbio, one identifies a "moral choice" in the preference for either equality or inequality, things become even more problematic. One can acknowledge what Pietro Barcellona has called a "tragedy of inequality" meant paradoxically to guarantee "the diversity, individuality and autonomy of the will," while at the same time rejecting all hierarchies. Different questions are raised by Cofrancesco's position. Interpreting tradition and emancipation as "two values deeply rooted in the human soul but often in conflict," he sees the Right as implying a "loyalty to tradition, however understood and realized," and "the Left as the obligation to demolish political and economic privileges."[14] Overlooking the questionable equation of tradition and privilege, this static analysis reduces the two concepts to stereotypes which miss their internal dynamic.
Cofrancesco anticipates some objections. Yet his reasoning remains circular. The argument based on the subjectivity of political actors is not convincing. The confusion between "ideal behavioral orientations and concrete political programs in which those orientations are translated," whereby "a political program can be objectively conservative in some respects, but subjectively leftist in others" confirms the relativity of political topographies based on simplistic positions rather than on coherent Weltanschauungen. Consider those originaly leftist movements in defense of the quality of life. They soon generated the suspicion of using regressive ideologies that turn out to be "invectives against modem civilization, seen as the mother of all catastrophics" within a perspective that Cofrancesco would not hesitate to define rightist. Thus they have been accused of advocating "a new kind of conservative ideology seeking to deny and annihilate the political dimension as inconsistent and superfluous" (Marramao) and therefore of appropriating the critique of "realism" historically deployed by the liberal-democratic Left.[15]
This contradiction reveals a further division within Cofrancesco's dichotomy of classic and romantic attitudes: "The classic attitude approaches political interactions as a critical spectator, paying attention to what is constant, interested primarily in analyzing, distinguishing and classifying. The second one, on the contrary, is immersed in politics and tends to elevate to an infallible criterion of truth the emotions and hopes it generates."[16] Even if such were the case, how can one tell which one of these two levels is dominant in each given situation? In other words, who knows whether a "Left romantic" is closer to a "Right romantic" or to a "Left classic" when it comes to crucial decisions, i.e., to translate a subjective state of mind into action?
Cofrancesco's definition overlooks the continuous interpenetration of positions the course of the events forces on both camps. It fits well two groups still troubled by the trauma of modernization (seen either as progress by the Left or decadence by the Right); but it does not take into account what has happened since. How can those "ethical ideals and models of coexistence be realized in the future" Cofrancesco vindicates as the patrimony of a rational Left against Alain de Benoist's accusations of"infantile idolization" be defended against pre-industrial and organicistic objections concerning the negative impact of progress? And to what extent can the Right be identified with "the idealization of a hierarchical and patriarchal community in which the division of roles and the attribution of prestige and authority followed criteria very different from modem societies"?17
If the essentialist reading of the opposition Right-Left betrays these obvious inadequacies, approaches seeking to redeploy these two concepts as ideal-types are not much more successful. Without claiming to be descriptive, these approaches justify themselves as conceptual tools useful to explain and simplify more complex realities. Galeotti finds them particularly useful in the analysis of ideologies and methodologies of the social sciences, where they become the "guiding ground for research." In this context, Right and Left help situate actors within a concrete political context. According to Galeotti, this line is as follows: "Left= socialism=lower classes= goverment intervention and, on the other side, Right= conservatism=higher classes=total privatization of the economy and the social sphere."[18] Concepts so precisely operationalized can be useful for surveys in countries with a superficial political culture such as the US, but they loose all heuristic potential in more complex environments. If the effectiveness of these modes of representation is determined by the context in which they are used, they will be relatively useless in Europe today. If the Right and the Left are like linguistic games in everyday life, they risk being manipulated by a mass media orchestrated by different competing groups.
This leads back to the question concerning the plausibility of the two categories as guiding models for political analysis. If Right and Left are theoretical constructs corresponding to no particular empirical reality, why evoke them when the split on which they are based does not help classify the subjects to whom they are to be applied? To avoid transforming them into Trojan horses for value judgments, these ideal-types should be assigned a merely prescriptive function in defining abstract normative frameworks, transgressions of which generate observable and ultimately measurable phenomena. In this sense, Right, Center and Left classify ideologies and not behaviors, measuring, at best, the distance of the former from the latter.
Galeotti's error lays in claiming it is possible "to propose a definition of these two terms that allows a meaningful binary classification of the entire post-French Revolution ideological production,"[19] even if it may not be the only possible one. According to her, "the French Revolution has led to a rotation of the axis of imaginary representation of the political dimension from a vertical to a horizontal position, where horizontality is associated with a precise ideological strategy against hierarchy and privilege." The fact that the Left has brought about this rotation and the Right has been its victim implies a retroactive use of these two categories -one presumably designating opposition to power, the other identifying with it. The Manichaeanism of this account intensifies when the outcome of the rotation is seen not as a new level of conflictuality and new behavioral norms to which Right and Left should conform, but the inauguration of a new stereotype of spatial representation identifying the Right with hierarchy and the Left with horizontality.
This ideal-typical scheme predicated, as in Bobbio, on a contraposition based on equality (but in a stronger sense, because here the focus is not so much on inequality as on hierarchy) pretends to "derive the entire ideological framework of the Right from a fundamental anthropology, communitarian concerns, or the rejection of an ethics and a politics based on individual interests and, therefore, from the rejection of the economic dimension, of a rational dimension of politics and of the democratic method ideally conceived both as popular sovereignty and as the procedure of collective decision-making."[20] Unfortunately, history does not follow the prescriptions advocated by the French Revolution and it has reconfigured the two camps in altogether different ways. The individualism of Enlightenment democracy has succumbed to the logic of organized groups, and "the concept of society as a whole as a super-subject and the consequent devaluation of individuals as only parts and functions of the whole" have triumphed in the regimes of "really-existing socialism" rather than in the authoritarian regimes established by the opposite side. Furthermore, what George Mosse described as a process of nationalization of the masses and its plebiscitarian implications has severely weakened the verticality of the Right's principles of political organization, confining it within the dictator's charismatic personality -- something similar in both Stalinism and National Socialism.
Precaution and realism suggest it may be better to avoid mechanically applying the Right-Left dichotomy to historical developments and relegating it to particular situations. There are many possible readings of this dichotomy.[21] In the early 1980s, Sartori refined the conventionalist approach as follows: "it is now clear that in European countries the Right-Left dimension is meaningful and important. An advantage of the variable Right-Left consists of its 'ability to travel' and therefore its comparability. Clearly, in each country the spatial locations of Right and Left are relative to their own space. This does not detract from the fact that the Right.-Left variable remains the most 'translatable' one and, in this sense, the most comparable among different countries." He goes on to claim that "if the Right-Left dimension is important and the electorate really finds it useful, what does it mean? Rigorously speaking, nothing. Right and Left are spatial images. What is interesting is that they lack any 'semantic anchorage' and are empty containers ready to be filled with different contents. This can happen atemporally or through time. In every single time, moment or historical period, our 'spatial images' are not empty but full, i.e., they are associated with a whole series of contents. In this sense then, Right and Left "mean" something. They consist of a set of issues, a series of positions concerning controversial questions. In a nutshell, Right and Left are, case by case, syntheses of attitudes."[22]
Sartori's analysis is linked to a theory of political behavior according to which fundamental personal attitudes translate into political choices. From this viewpoint, the elimination and amplification of the distance between Right and Left are not anomalies but regularities. Realistic and flexible, the conventionalist approach emerges as the most useful for a dynamic reinterpretation of shifting political allegiances, which is one of the main legacies of the process of modernization that has transformed the European continent in the 20th century. The crises connected with the unfolding of this process have modified both beliefs and behavioral models, resulting in a "politicization of identity, a legitimacy founded largely on efficacy, a growing ability to mobilize and redistribute national resources, a broadening of political participation and a growing integration of the various social sectors."[23] Among the consequences of this metamorphosis, there is a progressive normalization of the above mentioned rotation that has moved the axis of political legitimacy from the vertical level of the holy investiture of sovereigns to the horizontal dimension of the rulers' popular elections. The secularization of power has gradually flattened the conservatives-innovators split and the antithesis tradition-emancipation has turned into a simple choice between alternative ways to manage society.
It would be too difficult and time consuming to dwell on the complexities of the relations between Right and Left throughout the 19th century -- "the century of ideologies" par excellence.[24] Yet a tendency seems to emerge in those countries that have gone through the most traumatic experiences of socio-economic modernization. Far from settling in that social imaginary which is, for Galeotti, "the way in which a collective sees itself and expresses desires, fears and hopes, defining at the same time normative models of behavior and of social order," the Right-Left opposition tends to come back in mere pragmatic circumstances which blur its boundaries and modify its content. The time of polarized and irreducible types seems over. The optimism of "the noble savage" and the pessimism of "bellum omnium contra omnes" today rate no better than simple scholastic hypotheses. Phases of conflict and neutralization among the ideological camps designate aggregations without clear boundaries.
Those who try to analyze the process of social development of contemporary Europe with essences or ideal types connected to two inflexible categories of Right and Left risk becoming lost among a variety of Rights which can be modem and regressive, consensual and authoritarian, statist and communitarian, and Lefts caught between postmodernity and premodernity, the logic of mediation and decisionism, ethical fascinations and the autonomy of the political. Today it is not unusual to see the people's right of self-determination vindicated against the threat of planetary homogenization by a Western or American civilization by the historical heir of an originally colonialist nationalism, and the proposals of privatistic and neo-utilitarian projects by intellectuals and politicians with a Marxist or Leninist background.
An epoch of conventions and reversals, the present is characterized by the proliferation of the conviction that crucial future antagonisms will come about as a result of the confrontation and mixture of the patrimony of hopes and experiences of both the Right and the Left. From this perspective, "New Right" and "New Left" seem to differ from one another less than they do with respect to their own historical matrices. Today, the overcoming of rigid 19th century dichotomies is essential to interpret new metapolitical frameworks beginning to objectify themselves into empirical realities.
a Originally published in Democrazia e Diritto, Vol. XXXIV, No. 1 (January-March 1994), pp. 381-396. Translated by Franco Sacchi.
Notes:
[Telos; Spring95 Issue 103, p181, 8p]