LEFT AND RIGHT

LEFT AND RIGHT

The Significance of a Political Distinction

(Intervention)

I think it is convenient to describe the historical context of this great work and its author Norberto Bobbio an Italian who was born before the First World War and turned eighty years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The formative years of Bobbio coincide with Mussolini's fascism, sufficient reasons to seriously consider his political ideas.

Bobbio presents us from the social and political ethics, his admiration for the fundamental values such as Tolerance, freedom, pluralism, nonviolence, peace, fraternity and especially equality.

Its left text recognizes the failure of historical communism, although the challenge remains, it presents itself to a dyad, which has lasted for at least two centuries and which designates the contrast of ideologies, of two movements in which the universe.

A Challenge to the Distinction

In this chapter, Bobbio enters to make a description of what is understood by the right and left, something that has prevailed since a long time ago, and which possibly constitutes a metaphor, that is why it enters to give a possible definition. Here we can read one of your relevant quotes:

“There are distinctions in which the two constituent terms are antithetical, and others in which they are complementary. The former interpret a universe as a composition of divergent entities which oppose each other, whereas the latter interpret a harmonious universe composed of convergent entities which tend to'fuse into a superior whole . The left/right pair belongs to the first type. Given that triadic thought is often generated from dyadi!i thought or represents, as it were, a development from it, the transition from one to the other will differ according to whether the dyad one starts from consists of antithetical or complementary terms. In the first case the transition occurs through a dialectical synthesis or negation of the negation, in the second case through composition.”

The right-left dyad, which has prevailed for at least two centuries and which designates the contrast of ideologies and movements in which the political universe is divided, Bobbio acts as devil's advocate and establishes some situations that generate doubts about the validity of the dyad in question. First, the crisis of ideologies. If the ideologies touched their end, as some scholars have expressed, the dyad would have no meaning; but on the contrary, the tree of ideologies is always greening. In addition, right and left do not mean only ideologies; reducing them to the pure expression of an ideological thought would be an unjust simplification, since they also indicate conflicting programs with regard to many problems whose solution usually belongs to political action. It is not only about ideas, but also about interests or valuations.

Second, the synthesis of right and left towards a convergence or third way. Liberal-socialism or liberal-socialism and conservative revolution are examples of an attempt to reconcile opposing ideas, and therefore alternatives, that history had pointed out as incompatible. But still there has not been among the third routes one that brings, in political practice, communism and fascism, despite having a common enemy to democracy.

Extremists and Moderates

Norberto Bobbio always considered himself as a man of the Moderate Left. In the book Right and Left, he contemplates another alternative dyad, that of extremism versus moderation, which belongs to a different political universe than that of right-left. The extremism-moderation dyad is referred not to the concept of equality, but to the concept of freedom. The ideal of freedom, another great reference of humanity, does not serve to distinguish between right and left because there are doctrines and libertarian and authoritarian movements on both the right and the left. "And there are both left and right libertarian and authoritarian movements and doctrines because the criterion of freedom serves to distinguish the political universe not so much with respect to ends as with regard to means; or the method used to achieve the ends », writes the Italian author.

This explains why right-wing revolutionaries and right-wing counterrevolutionaries can share certain authors (George Sorel, Carl Schmitt, even Antonio Gramsci), not insofar as they are of the right or of the left, but as extremists of the right and of the left respectively. , precisely because they are so, they are distinguished from the moderates of the right and the left. Only the moderate wings of the two affiliations are compatible with democracy. «I consider myself a moderate [...] The moderate is, by nature, democratic; an extremist of the left and one of the right have antidemocratism in common [...] It is not by chance that both left-wing extremists and right-wing extremists despise democracy, even from the point of virtues that she feeds and that are essential for your survival In the language of One and other democracy is synonymous with mediocracy, understood as the domain not only of the middle class, but the mediocre. The issue of democratic mediocrity is typically fascist. But it is a theme that finds its environment in the revolutionary radicalism of each color ».

From the conjunction of freedom and equality, the Italian philosopher extracts a political spectrum with four categories:

-The extreme left: Jacobinism. Movements and doctrines that are both egalitarian and authoritarian.

-The center left: liberal socialism And social democracy. 

Movements and doctrines liberal and at the same time equal.

-The right center: conservative parties that are faithful to the democratic method, but that stop at equality before the law, which only implies the duty of the judge to apply the laws in an impartial manner. Movements and doctrines liberal and at the same time unequal.

-The extreme right: fascism, Nazism. Movements and doctrines antiliberal and simultaneously antiigualitarios.

The other distinction

Bobbio divides the political universe along two fundamental axes: the previously discussed distinction between equality and inequality, as expressed by the terms 'left' and 'right' , and the distinction between liberty and authoritarianism.

The ideal of liberty is the other great ideal which has guided Europe since the Enlightenment. 9 Liberty, in the modern sense , represents a complete break with the p ast and with the organic concept of the state , the Aristotelian model whereby the whole is more important than the p arts. Bobbio is unusual on the left in perceiving individualism not as a negative value, but as a product of the modern state , the rej ection of the organic concept of the state and the development, however imperfect, of human rights . Without going into all the categories of human rights which Bobbio has defined elsewhere, to it will be sufficient for this argument to state that the two principal c ategories are libertarian rights and social rights, which to some extent are in conflict with each other. The left, which is generally associated with social rights, has long accused the right ofbreaking up the community through its over-emphasis on

the individual's libertarian rights at the expen se of the community's wider interests; while the right has accused the left of the s ame thing, on the grounds that it is supposed to have undermined religion and traditional values, which bind society together. This latter argument is rather weak because, as Bobbio points out, there are plenty of right-wing atheists and left-wing believers; the association of the right with traditionalism is understandable, but often misleading.

More recently, the right has come up with the more coherent argument that the implementation of social rights in the modern welfare state has undermined the sense of community by removing an individual's personal responsibility for his family and community . Leaving aside the questionable concept of a previous golden age in which the community cared for all its weaker members, it is certainly true that the welfare state tends to treat each citizen as an individual. It raises taxes from the individual at national level, and distributes benefits to the individual, usually in accordance with clearly defined national criteria.

According to Bobbio, increasing individualism relates to the abandonment of the organic concept of the state and the rise of human rights and democracy, wherein the individual citizen exercises his political power in the total isolation and privacy of the polling booth. The rise of individualism therefore relates not to the left/right distinction, but to the -distinction between liberty and authoritarianism. 

Once religious freedom had been accepted in the wake of the religious wars following the Reformation, the wholly organic state and the homogeneous community it governed ceased to exist in their purest forms. The process has continued since then, and both the left and the right feel an undoubted sense of loss, the former because of a weakening in social cohesion, the latter because of a weakening in social hierarchy. In spite of that shared sense of loss, neither the moderate left nor the moderate right would wish to. return to a truly organic concept of the state. In any case, community in its, more positive sense is a purely cultural phenomenon, and it is difficult to see how it could ever be imposed (at best it can be encouraged).

To finish I think it is important to highlight Bobbio as the “Philosopher of Democracy”, perhaps because in political matters Bobbio always tended to defend three self-implicit ideals and that he himself expressly recognized: democracy, human rights and peace.

In the next opportunity, I will present to you another of his great works “the future of democracy”. Bye

Written:

Omar Colmenares Trujillo

Political analyst