Following the collapse of communism and the decline of Marxism, some commentators have claimed that we have reached the 'end of history' and that the distinction between Left and Right can be forgotten. In this book - which was a tremendous success in Italy - Norberto Bobbio challenges these views, arguing that the fundamental political distinction between Left and Right, which has shaped the two centuries since the French Revolution, has continuing relevance today. Bobbio explores the (...) grounds of this elusive distinction and argues that Left and Right are ultimately divided by different attitudes to equality. He carefully defines the nature of equality and inequality in relative rather than absolute terms. Left and Right is a timely and persuasively argued account of the basic parameters of political action and debate in the modern world - parameters which have remained constant despite the pace of social change. The book will be widely read and, as in Italy, it will have an impact far beyond the academic domain. (shrink)

The only contemporary moral problems text to focus directly on the ethics of current, divisive political issues, Ethics, Left and Right features newly commissioned essays on twenty contentious debates, written expressly with undergraduate students in mind. It offers two position pieces on each issue--one left-leaning, one right--followed by a reply from each author, giving you and your students the opportunity to engage in in-depth discussions of serious issues. The essays cover compelling topics including whether we should (...) have an "America First" approach to policy, whether it's okay to have religious tests for immigration, the merits of political correctness, the ethics of voting, whether progressive taxation is legitimate, and what to make of accusations of privilege. Case studies at the end of every main contribution encourage students to examine related problems and/or delve deeper into the current issue. (shrink)

Milton Friedman and Amartya Sen have a lot in common. Both are Nobel Prize-winning economists who venture beyond the more technical questions of positive economics to demonstrate the relevance of their expertise to philosophy and public policy. Their social and political philosophy, including normative theorizing from their work and the work of other economists, comprises arguably the most influential part of their corpus. Like most Americans, both Friedman and Sen are liberals, in the sense that they argue that social arrangements (...) should be assessed according to their tendency to further the liberty of individuals. In addition, both demonstrate the deep link between political and economic institutions, and articulate the ways in which an individual’s freedom (or lack thereof) in one sphere impacts her freedom in other spheres. -/- Despite these and other similarities, there is an immense partisan divide between the followers of their work in American politics (in particular). Friedman’s work is championed by so-called neo-liberals – a group that has come to dominate the political and economic right in the United States - providing the philosophical foundation for demands for limited government and free markets. Both critics and plaudits regard Friedman as the “intellectual architect” of the free-market policies of the Republican Party, from Ronald Reagan forward. Sen’s work, on the other hand, is frequently utilized to defend so-called progressive policies in the U.S. and abroad. Such policies, many argue, further the effective or substantive freedom of individuals (an idea associated with early socialist thought). This essay begins an overdue systematic analysis of their social and political philosophy, focusing on the central driving concept for both theorists: the idea of freedom. With this study in hand, I recommend a pragmatic, pluralist understanding of freedom in the United States and elsewhere. (shrink)

The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ cannot describe two extremes of a single ideological dimension. Instead, a bi-dimensional model including socio-cultural and socio-economic facets of leftism/rightism is postulated. Several studies conducted in the USA and Western Europe show a relative coherence of left-wing and right-wing orientation regarding both dimensions, whereas very diverse patterns can be found in the countries of Eastern Europe. In Poland cultural and economic leftism-rightism seem to be clearly negatively related. The general hypothesis in (...) this paper claims that such ideological inconsistency is a product of coherence at the level of preferences for values, i.e. covariance within individualistic as well as within collectivist values. Based on a survey study conducted on a representative sample of Poles, it was shown that preferences for values made up two distinct dimensions: Openness to change vs Conservation, and Self-enhancement vs Self-transcendence. They are positively related but have fundamentally different relationships with political self-identification and ideology. (shrink)

Both general publics and elites have long used labels of left and right as cues for political communication and vote choice in Western democracies. This study examines the utility of these spatial semantics as means of encapsulating major political cleavages in East Asian democracies. Through analysis of public opinion surveys, we investigate the influence of organizational affiliation; views on socio-economic, religious, and issues, as well as attitudes toward the political system, as anchors of public understanding of the leftWestern (...) leftright scale in South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan, left level of ideological conceptualization are likely related to party system development and democratic experience. (shrink)

Avoiding partisan diatribe, Left Wing, Right Wing, People, and Power traces the historical development of the left wing and the right wing to reveal that the core of politics is the conflict over power. Despite specific differences of time and place, political actions are consistently efforts to preserve or change the structure and dynamics of power. With this insight, we can better understand political positions and actions. -/- Written in an accessible style, this book will (...) inform readers regardless of where they see themselves on the political spectrum. With clear but nuanced definitions of political ideologies and movements, the author shows how politics is people seeking to express and expand their power in the social space around them. Thus, the clash of the left and right wings is not about grand ideologies but instead is about power relations and the flow of power among people. (shrink)

The Portuguese elections occurred this March, and the left’s decline has accompanied the far-right’s growth, as in previous elections. Explanations for such phenomena are often carried out using quantitative and qualitative methods. Philosophical conceptual analysis, in contrast, is frequently dismissed as a method for analysing political change. In this paper, I will show how, by using conceptual analysis, it is possible to assist in explaining voting behaviour from the left on the far-right party Chega in Portugal. (...) This methodology resembles philosophers and political theorists using concepts like ‘class’ and ‘authoritarianism’ to assist in explaining socio-political changes. I will use concepts, such as ‘complex ideology’ and ‘anti-power/anti-system politics’, which have helpful explanatory power to the phenomenon I address. Particularly, I argue that the right-wing party Chega can attract voters from the left because of its anti-system ideology, an ideological characteristic of left voters in Portugal. Thus, I argue that the rise of the far-right partly relates to the changing politics of some smaller left parties with parliamentary representation. These political changes within these parties create a space for specific anti-system ideologies that the far-right, in the case of Portugal, can fill. (shrink)

This article aims to outline a perspective on democratic ideology centred on orientation and justification, which is discussed in relation to the right?left dyad and public reason. Ideology is approached in terms of the orientational structuring of identification processes, which is discussed in relation to the articulation between four pairs of orientational metaphors (up?down, in?out, front?back and right?left), which shape the political terrain and the terms of political justification. The latter is expressed in public reason based (...) on political equality, pluralism and contingency as opposed to hierarchy, monism and objectivism. A modern democratic ideology is based on right/left orientation to underpin the autonomy of the political symbolic order vis?à?vis cultural and religious orders, and on public reason as freestanding in relation to comprehensive reasons, which is a political justification of the priority of right/left in matters of common concerns. (shrink)

The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of populist politics across the globe. The early 21st century saw the pink tide of left wing populism in Latin America, the Southern European populisms that rejected the politics of austerity after 2013, and the right wing populisms that now dominate not only European but global polities. Although each instance of populist politics is distinct, all share an appeal to the people, to the true people, who both (...) oppose and are dominated by the political elite. The nature of this elite also varies – in some cases it is predatory capital; in other cases it is the multicultural left; in yet others the anonymous bureaucrats in Brussels undermining national sovereignty. This special issue of RECERCA poses one question: how does populism relate to democracy? Is it democracy’s other face? (shrink)

1. IntroductionIn February 2019, the film Black Panther was awarded three Oscars in Los Angeles. Some reviewers embraced it for its anti-racist message against the resurgence of racism under U.S. president Donald Trump.1 It tells the story of a black hero who tries to steer the development of an ethnically pure, isolationist hereditary monarchy in Africa. The imaginary state of Wakanda, which presents itself to the rest of the world as a third-world country, has highly developed technologies at its disposal–at (...) the same time, one recalls archaic African myths there.2. (shrink)

This article examines the formation of consciousness among women at the beginning stages of the women's movement. The author analyzes the complexity of pathways to feminism across the political spectrum, comparing women who were active on the Left in Students for a Democratic Society with women active in the leading conservative organization of the 1960s, Young Americans for Freedom. She finds an unexpected division among women in both groups between those who identify discrimination by their male peers and those (...) who do not. The author argues there are three stages in the formation of feminist consciousness: identification of inequality or mistreatment, discovering a language or framing by which to interpret these experiences, and the social construction of a collective identity. Factors for each of these three stages that help or hinder the formation of feminist consciousness are discussed. (shrink)

Imagine that the person you see through the looking glass is a real person, with her own experiences, living in an environment that is the mirror-reverse of yours. You look at your right-hand glove as you put it on your right hand; she looks at her left-hand glove as she puts it on her left hand. You feel your heart beating on your left side; she feels her heart beating on her right side. You (...) hear a bird chirping out the window to your left; she hears a bird chirping out the window to her right. Is there any difference between your experience—your what-it-is-like phenomenal character—and hers? She is looking at her left-hand glove, the mirror-reverse of you as you look at your right-hand glove. Does she see what you see, a right-hand glove, or the reverse of what you see, a left-hand glove? Since her environment is the mirror-reverse of yours, and she seems to get by in it just fine, you'd probably assume, if you had to guess, that she sees it correctly. She is looking at her left-hand glove, after all. So it stands to reason that she is having an experience as of a left-hand glove, not a right-hand glove. And it stands to reason—it seems obvious—that an experience as of a left-hand glove differs in what it is like from an experience as of a right-hand glove. In this paper, I will argue that this last presupposition, obvious though it may seem, is false. I'll argue that (unless dualism is true) there is no intrinsic difference between what it is like to experience a left-hand glove and what it is like to experience a right-hand glove: if there are any relevant experiential differences, these are either merely comparative (differences in what it is like to compare gloves) or cognitive (differences in what it is like to bring an experience of a glove under a concept like LEFT or RIGHT). So your mirror-reverse twin, who won't differ from you in what she is comparing or thinking, will have the same (type of) experience as you. I'll call the position I am arguing against orientation–experience categoricalism, and the position I am arguing for orientation–experience relationism. Orientation–experience relationism is a surprising thesis, one whose falsity you might take for granted. I will argue for it by cases. Things go wrong for the orientation–experience categoricalist in one sort of way if we imagine that you and your mirror-twin's experiences differ: basically, this leads to absurdity if we imagine that you and she both live at a world with a non-orientable spatial topology (in the sense in which a Möbius strip or Klein bottle are non-orientable). Things go wrong for the orientation–experience categoricalist in a different sort of way if we assume that you and your twin would experience the same, but that someone else might have the experience that we were just imagining that your twin might have. Under these assumptions, we have to accept the existence of partial zombies, who lack the relevant phenomenology but behave as if they have it, at very close, empirically possible worlds. In an appendix, I argue that property dualism is the best alternative for those who cannot bring themselves to accept orientation-experience relationism. (shrink)

Hillel Steiner’s left-libertarian theory of justice is the most serious recent attempt to reconcile the ideals of (luck-egalitarian) equality and freedom. This attempt consists in an argument that a universal right to equal freedom, which in Steiner’s view means also a universal right to maximal freedom, implies a universal right to self-ownership and to an egalitarian share of the world’s natural resources. In this article, I argue that this argument fails on Steiner’s own terms. I argue (...) that, on Steiner’s conceptions of freedom, self-ownership, and an egalitarian share of the world’s natural resources, insofar as the right to equal freedom implies the right to self-ownership and to an egalitarian share of the world’s natural resources, it is incompatible with (luck-egalitarian) equality. (shrink)

The last decade has seen a dramatic increase in studies on the development, function and evolution of asymmetries in vertebrates, including amphibians. Here we discuss current knowledge of behavioral and anatomical asymmetries in amphibians. Behavioral laterality in the response of both adult and larval anurans to presumed predators and competitors is strong and may be related, respectively, to laterality in the telencephalon of adults and the Mauthner neurons of tadpoles. These behavior lateralities, however, do not seem to correlate with visceral (...) asymmetries in the same animals. We briefly compare what is known about the evolution and development of asymmetry in the structure and function of amphibians with what is known about asymmetries in other chordate and non‐chordate groups. Available data suggest that the majority of asymmetries in amphibians fall into two independent groups: (1) related to situs viscerum and (2) of a neurobehavioral nature. We find little evidence linking these two groups, which implies different developmental regulatory pathways and independent evolutionary histories for visceral and telencephalic lateralizations. Studies of animals other than standard model species are essential to test hypotheses about the evolution of laterality in amphibians and other chordates. BioEssays 26:512–522, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This book has appeared in the Italian Literature and Thought Series of Yale University Press, and not by chance the cover bears the green, white, and red of the Italian flag. The book is on political philosophy, although its subject matter is restricted to the role of culture. Finocchiaro investigates two Italian thinkers: the conservative Gaetano Mosca, author of The Ruling Class, and the communist Antonio Gramsci, founding father of the Italian Communist Party and author of the Prison Notebooks. While (...) Mosca is a classic source for the elitist school in political sociology, Gramsci is the originator of a cultural version of Marxism that proved to be immune to the intellectual criticism and economic failures that have rendered other versions obsolete. The point Finocchiaro makes is that Mosca and Gramsci belong to the same tradition of political theory, namely “democratic elitism” and that their differences are eventually far smaller than assumed. According to Finocchiaro, Gramsci is much less of a political revolutionary, and Mosca much closer to the political center and Gramsci and Mosca are closer to each other than commonly supposed. Besides, Finocchiaro’s interpretation also implies that “theoretically, intellectually, and conceptually they are much more radical than is ordinarily believed because democratic elitism represents an extremely distinctive orientation in political theory”. Hence Finocchiaro’s interpretation “also undermines the viability of the dichotomy between the Left and the Right,” which also explains the reference to what is “beyond right and left” in the title. (shrink)

Can aversion from a political ideology lead to rapid, automatic rejection of said ideology? We tested this question in the Israeli political context using a spatial Stroop task to examine whether politically charged left-wing terms would elicit slower verbal latencies. In Study 1 (n = 85), participants were presented with left- and right-wing political terms presented either in a congruent or incongruent spatial location and were asked to verbally indicate only the location of the word. Study 2 (...) (n = 128), replicated this procedure with the Hebrew words for “left” and “right” and examined whether political awareness primes would amplify the effect. Results indicated a slowdown for left-wing related terms above and beyond a congruency effect that was exacerbated under political priming. The slowdown was particularly pronounced among centre-right-wing participants in Study 1, but significant across political orientations in Study 2. Two auxiliary studies rule out the possibility that phonemic features of the words, or spatial preferences could explain these effects. Overall, results support a taboo effect (i.e., implicit aversion) for left-wing political terms. (shrink)

Although they hold different political positions, Oakeshott and Dunn actually share in common a sceptical reading of the human condition and the nature of politics. There are, however, two sceptical traditions within the British context that they seem, respectively, to have followed: the Humean autonomy of practice and the Lockean quest for guidance. It is hoped that by tracing their sources back to Hume and Locke, Oakeshott's and Dunn's conflicting views on the theory of practical reason, namely the detachment (...) view versus the engagement view, can be well explicated, and that the differentia between the `right' and the `left' can be philosophically reconsidered. (shrink)

Recent thinking on human rights, at least among the left, has divided along lines that have become familiar from other contemporary political debates. There are those who ground the discourse of rights in an ethical responsibility to fellow human beings in situations of suffering and oppression; for others, suspicion with respect to just such an ethical stance is their point of departure. They see in the ethical perspective at best a radical depoliticization of the struggle for human rights—its biopolitical (...) reduction to humanitarian aid to suffering others who are thereby accorded the status of ‘bare life’—and at worst a cover for a quasi-imperialist imposition of neo-liberal values according to which what ultimately deserves political protection and preservation is the right to entrepreneurial initiative and aspiration. Yet another form of leftist critique of the ostensibly post-political, ethical inflection of rights discourse takes aim at a line of thought most often linked to a series of mostly French philosophers—above all Emmanuel Levinas, but also Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and more recently Judith Butler—who in various ways have sought to ground philosophy in an ‘ethics of the Other’. The essay explores these positions and proposes a new thinking about human rights oriented by what Hannah Arendt referred to as the ‘dark background’ of human life. (shrink)

This book examines key twentieth-century philosophers, theologians, and social scientists who began their careers with commitments to the political left only later to reappraise or reject those commitments due to changes in the culture, economics, and politics.

Many economists have argued convincingly that automated systems employing present-day artificial intelligence have already caused massive technological displacement, which has led to stagnant real wages, fewer middle- income jobs, and increased economic inequality in developed countries like Canada and the United States. To address this problem various individuals have proposed measures to increase workers’ living standards, including the adoption of a universal basic income, increased public investment in education, increased minimum wages, increased worker control of firms, and investment in a (...) Green New Deal that will provide substantial employment in transitioning to green energy, buildings, and agriculture. In this paper I argue that both left-wing and right-wing positions in political philosophy, such as John Rawls’s Justice as Fairness and Robert Nozick’s Entitlement Theory, are committed to the conclusion that we should take political action to counteract the effects of technological displacement by undertaking such measures to increase workers’ living standards. (shrink)

This article, which inaugurated SCSS president Stephen M. Krason’s monthly online column, “Neither Left Nor Right but Catholic”, takes note of an important address given by Archbishop Charles Chaput in Europe in which he foresees increasing repression by an arch-secularist political and cultural elite against Catholics and the Church when they try to bring the Church’s message to society. This represents a deeply disturbing narrowing of the meaning of religious liberty to mere freedom of worship.

The imagery of Left and Right has been a common way to conceive democratic politics in modern Europe, and commentators have suggested it be extended to the European Union. This article examines the normative implications and plausibility of European politics being cast in these terms. It focuses on the challenges of rendering political division recognizable and acceptable at a transnational level, of evoking its continuities of structure, and of symbolizing the ties of political community. The article (...) probes the Left–Right dichotomy’s potential in these regards, together with the conjunctural factors likely to raise or diminish its appeal. (shrink)

In the 21st century, amid converging global political, social, and economic forces we are questioning the fundamental values we hold true, driven by an antagonism between different schools of philosophy--between left- and right-wing politics. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of western political philosophy and underlines the core principles of each argument. It then argues that neither have we solved nor do we have any pathway to eventually solve, the question of right and wrong--we are essentially (...) moral relativists in disguise. In order to break out of this cycle of uncertainty, the book proposes a solution of knowledge-based cognition: policy based on a concrete and proven understanding of an absolute and certain body of truths. This requires an analysis and blending of non-western political philosophical traditions, such as those espoused by Islam and Confucianism. This book gives an original critique of western political philosophy and is the first book to engage in a reconstruction of Islamic political philosophy." -- Back cover. (shrink)

I shall formulate and motivate a left-libertarian theory of justice. Like the more familiar rightlibertarianism, it holds that agents initially fully own themselves. Unlike right-libertarianism, it holds that natural resources belong to everyone in some egalitarian manner. Left-libertarianism is, I claim, a plausible version of liberal egalitarianism because it is suitably sensitive to considerations of liberty, security, and equality.

This article finds firmer evidence than has previously been presented that men are more left-wing than women in older birth cohorts, while women are more left-wing than men in younger cohorts. Analysis of the European Values Study/world Values Survey provides the first systematic test of how processes of modernization and social change have led to this phenomenon. In older cohorts, women are more right-wing primarily because of their greater religiosity and the high salience of religiosity for (...) class='Hi'>left-right self-placement and vote choice in older cohorts. In younger, more secular, cohorts, women’s greater support for economic equality and state intervention and, to a lesser extent, for liberal values makes them more left-wing than men. Because the gender gap varies in this way between cohorts, research focusing on the aggregate-level gap between all men and all women underestimates gender differences in left-right self-placement and vote choice. (shrink)

In June 2021, new waves of the current COVID-19 pandemic are still messing up our lives and magnetizing the compass of our life. No other epidemics or pandemics have been politicized at such a level since ancient times. The full political spectrum from right to left has tried to ride this pandemic and upset the public health response efforts. Statistics and politics have changed our daily approach to this brutal infection, but even crueler has been the palpable (...) miscommunication. Massive and uncontrolled lockdowns and not climate change are destroying the economy of our planet. Intolerance against vaccine opponents and hesitant families has been vocalized with martial tones in both social media and news channels. In this book, the author analyzes the pandemic in a historical context, emphasizes the importance of facemasks, but also highlights our human approach to anti-mask psychology. It would be appalling to call mistakes in public health decisions "learned lessons" because it reduces the gravity of the consequences of inadequate communication. Our youth is our future. The mental issues arising from a lack of social interaction and in-person education are dreadful. Vaccines are powerful and represent the most outstanding progress in medicine. There is light at the end of the tunnel, but vaccine acceptance or herd immunity is not the answer, or probably, not the only one. There is true hope that we are going back to our world, but the COVID-19 pandemic may be an occasion to reconsider the traditional family in the center of our lives and daily politics. A tolerance towards any race needs to be contagious, militant, and blazing to vehemently rebuild and revitalize the American Dream. (shrink)

This introduction summarizes the main contributions of this special issue titled “Quiet Politics and the Power of Business: New Perspectives in an Era of Noisy Politics.” The four articles in the issue use and extend Culpepper’s influential concept of “quiet politics” according to which business is able to shape policies and regulations when issues are of low salience to the public and politicians. The issue takes Culpepper’s analysis further in ways that respond to the rise of noisy (...) politics over the last few years, often associated with new strident forms of left- and right-wing populism. Three contributions are made. First, the articles show that salience is not an inherent property of a policy area but is socially constructed. Second, a variety of strategies are described that business uses when trying to keep politics quiet. Third, strategies are affected by the structure of business, which varies across types of capitalism. Future research can use these insights to extend our understanding of the limits, strategies, and dynamics of quiet politics across political economies. (shrink)

The extent of confusion between symbols and that which is symbolised is examined across five institutional spheres. Religion is the institution most marked by confusion of this type; indeed in some respects the symbolic mes- sage of religion may be the extent of the substantive reality. On the other hand, the very existence of the nation state may be judged to depend upon the exercise of the human imagination; hence providing a source of instability which may lead to the excesses (...) of nationalism. In regard to social status, the main problematical element is a certain circularity: it is necessary to get peo- ple to exhibit differences in behaviour which are then used to justify or con- stitute the status differences themselves. In politics, the symbolism of left and right threatens to strangle creative thinking, while in education the tendency on all sides to orient towards public systems of measurement and grading undermines the claim that what is really important is pupil and student learn- ing. A social cost is being paid for the failure to recognise and, where possible, address the issues identified. (shrink)

A striking paradox underlies corporate governance reform during the past fifteen years: center-left political parties have pushed for pro-shareholder corporate governance reforms, while the historically pro-business right has generally resisted them to protect established forms of organized capitalism, concentrated corporate stock ownership, and managerialism. Case studies of Germany, France, Italy, and the United States reveal that center-left parties used corporate governance reform to attack the legitimacy of existing political economic elites, present themselves as pro-growth and pro-modernization, strike (...) political alliances with segments of the financial sector, and appeal to middle-class voters. Conservative parties’ established alliances with managers constrained them from endorsing corporate governance reform. (shrink)

Commentators who find in Confucianism the resources for cross-cultural dialogues about human rights frequently tend to be divided in their emphases on liberal or conservative aspects of this tradition. Those who pursue individuality, even autonomy, in Confucianism, I call liberals. Those who stress collectivity or harmony in Confucianism I call conservatives. Despite these rival paths in appropriating Confucianism for human rights, I show that both liberal and conservative characterizations, properly understood, are present in this tradition. Corresponding to each group’s stress (...) on particular dimensions in Confucianism are the respective negative and positive human rights that each position defends. If my thesis that both the liberal and conservative accounts of human rights holds, then a Confucian account of human rights would entail that both the negative and positive rights will bear practical and political implications for it. (shrink)

This essay argues that Kant’s conception of regulative ideas of practical reason introduced in the Critique of Pure Reason serves an important twofold function in his political philosophy. First, Kant’s version of the ideal, Platonic republic acts as the a priori paradigm of a rightful state to which existing regimes can and should conform. Second, Kant frames the regulative status of such practical ideas as a resolution of the conflict between the extremes of dogmatism and skepticism. In his principal political (...) writings from the 1790s—i. e., “Theory and Practice,” “Perpetual Peace,” and the Doctrine of Right—Kant draws on his account of practical ideas in the Critique to articulate a counterfactual norm of popular sovereignty that distinguishes his political standpoint from opponents on the left and the right. Radicals repeat the error of the dogmatists by affirming that the norm of collective self-legislation is completely attainable in experience. By contrast, conservatives make the mistake of the skeptics by denying that rational political standards can be applied to reality at all. I show that Kant reconciles these extremes through his model of gradual, non-violent political reform guided by the regulative ideal of a perfectly self-legislating state. (shrink)

In this contribution, Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen’s Populism and Civil Society is confronted with current gender studies research on populism. This research mainly focuses on right-wing populism and highlights strong links between right-wing populists and the religious right, which are to a large degree organized by “anti-gender,” a stance both against social constructivist notions of gender and against basic gender rights, especially in the fields of reproduction and of LGBTIQ concerns. Against the backdrop of this literature, (...) I argue that in Populism and Civil Society, right-wing populist anti-gender politics are not addressed in a way that takes account of their full complexity; and that these politics furthermore suggest to treat right-wing populism and left-wing populism as phenomena that do not only differ in content, but also in form. (shrink)

In this paper I examine criticism of Hauerwas's critique of American democracy and liberalism, and of American violence and war, as sectarian and politically irrelevant. This twin account has the merit of engaging his critics from left and right. I show that his critique of American Christians, and their support of America's ways of promoting justice and freedom at home and in the world, has analogies with Foucault's genealogical project in France, and represents a more powerful critique of (...) American imperialism and militarism, and of a compliant church, than efforts to sustain the purchase of rights talk or liberal justice in contemporary theological ethics. (shrink)

In June 2021, new waves of the current COVID-19 pandemic are still messing up our lives and magnetizing the compass of our life. No other epidemics or pandemics have been politicized at such a level since ancient times. The full political spectrum from right to left has tried to ride this pandemic and upset the public health response efforts. Statistics and politics have changed our daily approach to this brutal infection, but even crueler has been the palpable (...) miscommunication. Massive and uncontrolled lockdowns and not climate change are destroying the economy of our planet. Intolerance against vaccine opponents and hesitant families has been vocalized with martial tones in both social media and news channels. In this book, the author analyzes the pandemic in a historical context, emphasizes the importance of facemasks, but also highlights our human approach to anti-mask psychology. It would be appalling to call mistakes in public health decisions "learned lessons" because it reduces the gravity of the consequences of inadequate communication. Our youth is our future. The mental issues arising from a lack of social interaction and in-person education are dreadful. Vaccines are powerful and represent the most outstanding progress in medicine. There is light at the end of the tunnel, but vaccine acceptance or herd immunity is not the answer, or probably, not the only one. There is true hope that we are going back to our world, but the COVID-19 pandemic may be an occasion to reconsider the traditional family in the center of our lives and daily politics. A tolerance towards any race needs to be contagious, militant, and blazing to vehemently rebuild and revitalize the American Dream. (shrink)

John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel can be given a reading that links events and the mentality of characters to mainstream schools of liberal and neo-liberal political theory: libertarianism, egalitarianism, and utilitarianism. Each of these schools is sketched in outline and applied to topics in rural political culture. While it is likely that Steinbeck himself would have identified with an egalitarian or utilitarian view, he resists the temptation to deny his Okie characters an authentic voice that matches none of these schools so (...) well as it articulates an agrarian mentality once associated with Thomas Jefferson and today articulated by Wendell Berry. This reading of The Grapes of Wrath, in turn, can be interpreted as both a rebuke to contemporary social theorists who continue to impose an ill-fitting left-right dichotomy on working class political culture in rural America and as a roadmap suggesting ways that philosophy and rural sociology might engage one another more directly and productively with respect to contemporary rural development and environmental quality issues. (shrink)

Scholarship in rhetorical political analysis and parliamentary studies devoted little attention to study how politicians employ intellectuals’ authority and theories in their discourses. We offer methodological directions to navigate this territory, combining quantitative and qualitative analyses to investigate the employment of Machiavelli’s figure in the Italian Parliament. We show that Machiavelli is regarded as a contested authority and that appeals to his arguments can perform different rhetorical functions, which are countered with different rhetorical tactics. In particular, we show that the (...) right appropriates the realist Machiavelli, especially in foreign policy, both as a national symbol and as a legitimate source of insights on political affairs, while the left and the centre resist these claims with alternative rhetorical tactics. Finally, we provide an original dataset and a new theoretical framework for future explorations of intellectuals and other authoritative figures’ rhetorical influence on politics. (shrink)

The Left is scientific, rational, paradigmatic; its concern is with the networks of relationships within which all things are located and through which all things have their significance. The Right is aesthetic, emotional. It attempts to understand in terms of some concrete specific, an archetype. Hybrids of these two, such as Christianity, Communism, and Fascism, mix paradigm and archetype and are dangerous. With the reification of form and idolatry of image, inhuman criteria of reality are automatically set up (...) and give license to idealists and fanatics to ignore the integrity of individual persons in the name of those theories and images. Countervailing factors can be swept away. Human events stand to one another both as parts and wholes; historians need to recognize events as simultaneously episodes and narratives. Paradigms and archetypes are half-truths only and deny the experiential openness that is history. A mysticism of persons would defuse and absorb the Left and Right while transcending them, putting to the fore instead the diversity and novelty of history. (shrink)

Members of the field of philosophy have, just as other people, political convictions or, as psychologists call them, ideologies. How are different ideologies distributed and perceived in the field? Using the familiar distinction between the political left and right, we surveyed an international sample of 794 subjects in philosophy. We found that survey participants clearly leaned left (75%), while right-leaning individuals (14%) and moderates (11%) were underrepresented. Moreover, and strikingly, across the political spectrum, from very (...) class='Hi'>left-leaning individuals and moderates to very right-leaning individuals, participants reported experiencing ideological hostility in the field, occasionally even from those from their own side of the political spectrum. Finally, while about half of the subjects believed that discrimination against left- or right-leaning individuals in the field is not justified, a significant minority displayed an explicit willingness to discriminate against colleagues with the opposite ideology. Our findings are both surprising and important, because a commitment to tolerance and equality is widespread in philosophy, and there is reason to think that ideological similarity, hostility, and discrimination undermine reliable belief formation in many areas of the discipline. (shrink)

Recent political developments leave liberal elites heartbroken. Why is it that the masses keep making poor, morally unacceptable, irrational choices? Among the many voices heard in this context, there are also those criticising those elites from the left. The elites, these voices imply, are guilty not just of past wrongs that have gotten us here, but also of patronising the masses right now, arrogantly failing to take seriously the masses and their concerns. I argue that such complaints – (...) perhaps appearances to the contrary notwithstanding – are every bit as patronising in their attitudes towards the masses they claim to respect, and proceed to discuss the question whether the elites should reason with the masses, or manage them. This practical discussion leads to more theoretical ones about justification and excuse in the public sphere, practical and epistemic reasons for belief, and ideal and non-ideal theory in political philosophy. (shrink)

McManus presents an intellectual history of the conservative and reactionary tradition, stretching from Aristotle and Confucius to Ayn Rand and Patrick Deneen. Providing a comprehensive critical genealogy of the intellectual political right, McManus traces its core to a nostalgia for the hierarchical cosmos of antiquarian and scholastic thinking. The yearning for a shared vision of the universe where each part of reality has its place maps onto the conservative admiration for orderly political and social stratification. It stamps even the (...) more moderate forms of liberal conservatism which emerged in the aftermath of the revolutionary 18th century, as the political right struggled to accept and later master first the politics of liberal capitalism and later universal suffrage. In its most radical forms this nostalgia for an orderly and hierarchical existence can harden into a resentment at the perceived shallowness of liberal modernity. McManus argues for those who support the project of modernity to commit themselves to better understanding the depth of the political right's critiques, many of which expose uncomfortable but solvable problems with the quest for equality and freedom. A critical guide to the history of conservative and reactionary thought for students and scholars of political science and political history. (shrink)

To ask about the nature of a concept of the Left is to recognize the radical crisis that the Left has been in for more than a century. During this time the labor movement has gone through crises and defeats, but only now we are beginning to realize that it is not so much a crisis or a defeat but a general process of dissolution of fundamental notions which constituted the Left's identity. It is no longer clear (...) what it means to be on the Left, or what consequences it has for political economy, social policy and civil rights. The question is whether this crisis is a weakening of the ability to comprehend the present…. (shrink)

In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates offers two speeches, the first portraying madness as mere disease, the second celebrating madness as divine inspiration. Each speech is correct, says Socrates, though neither is complete. The two kinds of madness are like the left and right sides of a living body: no account that focuses on just one half can be adequate. In a recent paper, Hugh Benson gives a left-handed speech about a psychic condition endemic among mathematicians: dianoia. Benson acknowledges (...) that his account is one-sided, but only hints at the virtues of right-handed dianoia. This note sketches a somewhat fuller picture. (shrink)