The division of political parties and ideological programs into Left and Right is so ingrained in our perception of political reality that it is difficult to find an alternative. The reasons for this persistence have long been a mystery to political theorists and scientists. Why does this particular spatial metaphor occupy a central place in our understanding and configuration of the political landscape? What is so essential in these terms that it has given them so much mobilizing and affective power for centuries? From the French Revolution, when the notions of left and right entered the political jargon, to the present day, when this fundamental division is often declared inadequate and outdated, they have been closely linked to the institution of parliament and the dynamics of democratic electoral processes. However, as the historian Marcel Gauchet once pointed out, their meaning was not stable and precise. Their meanings changed so much that the distinction between the original Left and Right during the French Revolution and today’s Left-Right parties in Europe was almost completely reversed.
It began with one practical decision in the National Assembly during the French Revolution, to make it easier to count the votes in a packed hall. The initial left-right seating arrangement in the then National Assembly reflected divisions between opponents and supporters of the monarchical regime of the absolutist state. On the left was the former Third Estate with the demand to abolish the privileges of the aristocracy and the Church, to establish the republic on constitutional principles and national unity, enabling freedom of expression and protecting private property. On the right side were those who sought the preservation of the monarchy or various concessions such as the institution of the king’s legislative veto, the property census on the right to vote, etc. This nominal division, however, was short-lived.
With the emergence of socialist parties in the 19th century and the spread of labor movements, the left spectrum began to be associated with a completely different set of political ideas: class conflict, redistributive justice, materialist understanding of history, contradictions of the modes of production, economic inequalities, collectivist economy, welfare state, internationalism. More or less associated with the revolutionary wing of Marxism and the problems of the workers’ movement in the context of industrialization, these conceptions fundamentally changed the semantic basis of the Left-Right dichotomy. The result was that the former left side of parliament (liberals, democratic republicans, radical egalitarians) moved to the center and the right, mixing with the former right, which accepted former “leftists” into its camp. The hybrid identity of the Right then began to maneuver between libertarianism and conservatism, on the one hand linking itself with the industrial capital and the need to preserve market mechanisms responsible for the rise of new social elites, opposing state intervention and wanting to radically limit the power of the state bureaucracy, and, on the other hand, further preserving the place for the authoritative and traditional approach to rule.
As the 19th century progressed, the “original” meaning of the Left and Right – as a conflict between the market-liberal and royalist parliamentary currents – increasingly lost its meaning. The discourse of socialism (Marxism, class struggle, and the labor movement) was the first major discontinuity in the history of the left-right opposition, not its essential moment. At the same time, this discontinuity was a confirmation of the flexibility and perseverance of the Left-Right opposition, its ability to persist at the level of formal semantic features even when its semantic content changes significantly.
Even those who today claim that the Left-Right division has been overcome and undesirable, and that consequently there is no longer a “true” Left or Right, should know that attacks on the Left-Right division have been present from the very beginning. For example, some authors such as Marcel Gauchet and Jean Laponce point out that after the fall of Robespierre and the end of Jacobin terror, there was an attempt to dismantle the spatial disposition in the National Assembly – the seating became random and changed every now and then to prevent the creation of radical factions among extremists on both sides. The Left-Right division was considered conducive to the emergence of political radicalism and an obstacle to the consolidation of the “general will” and the “indivisibility of the political body”. “General will”, as one of the key terms of the French Revolution, was at odds with the sectoral mentality of the Left-Right parliamentary dichotomy that sought to intensify social conflicts: the attempt to abolish left-right political topography was therefore an attempt to consolidate political unity and equality, ideologically aspired by the revolution.
In any case, the history of the Left and Right allows us to see how the symbolic effectiveness of these terms was less determined by the semantic content itself, and more by their ability to adapt to different political circumstances and take on the weight of social turmoil. Although for those (modern and classical) political theorists who believe that political concepts must be precisely and rationally defined in order to understand and use them correctly, transformations of the meaning of Left and Right point us to another aspect of political language. As postmodern theorists such as Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have argued, fundamental political notions are determined more by their semantic emptiness and flexibility than by the richness and stability of their content. Indeed, these authors believe that it is precisely the ambivalence of pivotal political notions that enables them to be symbolically effective even when their content is radically altered. Because the notions of Left and Right were at first abstract and practical spatial metaphors, used to facilitate the counting of votes in modern democratic parliaments, they were able to represent very divergent social relations. They translated collective conflicts into easily accessible and recognizable categories, providing an “amorphous” language that could be used effectively on different sides of the political spectrum. To that extent, the Left-Right division could take on the contradictions of political life without losing its power and appeal. It could support hybrid conservative ideas mixed with market fundamentalisms or socialist utopias about a classless society in a pact with the inertia of a bureaucratic state. It could justify liberal-rational theologies, radicalisms of all kinds that sought refuge within the legitimate framework of parliamentary language, marginalized and rejected groups in search of some kind of political status, and so on.
And if the notions of Left and Right have solidified their political connotations through the specialized vocabulary of parliamentarism and party competition, the crisis of parliamentarism and legitimacy of democratic institutions unfolding before our eyes will affect their effectiveness and mobilizing power. Of course, it is possible that things will go in a completely different direction: that we are not witnessing the dissolution of the meaning of Left-Right positions, but that another profound transformation of this opposition is at work, as it was in the 19th century with the emergence of socialist parties or the 1980s, at the end of the Cold War, and that new positions were being regrouped that will form the basis of some new Left and Right in the coming decades.
For example, today’s green activist left, which in the last decade has overshadowed the traditional workers’ and trade union Left in Europe and Croatia, is for some a sign of this new identity. The same could be said for some right-wing positions that have, since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, been moving further and further away from certain neoliberal ideas that have guided them since the late 1980s. In any case, the question of the obsolescence of the Left-Right distinction is not so much a question of its empirical or descriptive validity as of its symbolic effectiveness and ability to generalize and simplify social conflicts. The notions of Left and Right can be rejected only in a moment when their “useful” value no longer exists in the language games of contemporary politics; and conversely, as long as they circulate and elicit concrete effects at the level of social relations, we would be wrong to claim that their time has passed.
