Bruno Gianelli: Somebody came along and said, ‘“Liberal” means soft on crime, soft on drugs, soft on Communism, soft on defence, and we’re gonna tax you back to the Stone Age because people shouldn’t have to go to work if they don’t want to!’ And instead of saying, ‘Well, excuse me, you right-wing, reactionary, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-education, anti-choice, pro-gun, Leave It To Beaver trip back to the Fifties…!’, we cowered in the corner, and said, ‘Please. Don’t. Hurt. Me.’ No more. I really don’t care who’s right, who’s wrong. We’re both right. We’re both wrong. Let’s have two parties, huh? What do you say? — The West Wing, s. 3 ep. 6 ‘Gone Quiet’ (2001)
The characterisation of ideas, people, and institutions in terms of a spectrum stretching from ‘left’ to ‘right’ via a notional ‘centre’ is one of the most common ways that ideology – and ideological understanding – manifests in society today. As voters, workers, and taxpayers, as consumers of news and journalistic opinion, among friends and family, among neighbours and colleagues, we have an intuitive sense of whether we fall in the middle of the ‘mood in the room’, or whether we are more eclectic outliers. We grow used to seeing the social reality we all inhabit painted in very different shades depending on which ‘angle’ we describe it from: ‘woke’ or ‘intersectional’, ‘entrepreneur’ or ‘exploiter’, ‘tough decisions’ or ‘artificial scarcity’, ‘free speech’ or ‘hate speech’. Our everyday lives are populated by a host of prominent figures who end up eagerly or reluctantly ‘picking a side’ in ideological conflicts, from ministers to media barons, from professors to pop stars, from trade unionists to investment bankers, from NGO workers to charity volunteers. But as familiar as we may find this characterisation, however dextrously and confidently we may apply it in our everyday contexts and experiences, the concept of ‘left–centre–right’ can prove surprisingly elusive on closer inspection.
For a start, there is often raucous disagreement over who and what precisely fits each of these labels. In fact, policing the boundaries between them, expanding and contracting them inclusively or exclusively as the situation demands, is part of the bread-and-butter of ideological contestation, especially in its vernacular rhetorical forms. Moreover, when ‘left’, ‘centre’ and ‘right’ are used – above all when they are bandied about casually, and not deployed with forensic precision – they typically carry strong, and strongly divergent, connotations. They are designed to prompt clear positive or negative (and occasionally, but rarely, neutral) inferences about the ideas, people and so on, they are attached to. They are meant to provoke correlative reactions in us about them. They are, quite literally, loaded terms – perhaps even overloaded, piled high with additional understandings, saturated with implications, bristling with arrows pointing towards further ‘obvious’ conclusions. This becomes evident in how we deal with being plunged into ideological discourse when it is translated into the language of ‘left–centre–right’. About ourselves, we either claim these labels or abjure them. For others, we accuse or deny. Whenever we do so, our remonstrations often become folded into larger claims about whether we ourselves or others are being ideological at all. Us (proudly, flamboyantly) ‘leftist’, ‘centrist’, ‘rightist’, versus them (shamefacedly, blandly) ‘apolitical’, ‘unaligned’. Or us (sensibly, thoughtfully) ‘impartial’, ‘non-partisan’, versus them (crazily, blindly) ‘left-wing’, ‘right-wing’, and so on.
At the same time, beyond such everyday usage, the concept ‘left–centre–right’ has not generally been given the precise scholarly attention it deserves. Within political science, ‘left’, ‘centre’ and ‘right’ categorizations have been subtly reframed into the (far narrower) concept of a ‘party location scale’. Here, debate has focused on the question of how far crafting such scales should rely on (1) country-specific academic or journalistic commentary, (2) ad hoc decision criteria or (3) numerical categorizations based on mass survey data.Footnote1 Within social theory, the idea of ‘left–right’ has come under devastating assault and been given eulogistic defences, in both cases on the issue of whether it is an outdated way to conceptualize societal divisions or whether it still retains key relevance (even if it could do with a bit of a methodological upgrade).Footnote2 The upshot is that examples of social research broadly construed that use the labels of ‘left’, ‘centre’ and ‘right’ (and their derivations) are very sporadic and disjointed. In turn, how they use this terminology to ‘translate’ (e.g.) party identities or voting patterns is highly inconsistent and often unique to particular groups of researchers or ‘schools’ of analysis. It is hard not to read this as a direct effect of the ‘left–centre–right’ spectrum’s close association with vernacular language, and with connotatively loaded rhetoric, which social research tends to dismiss as ‘unhelpful’ from a ‘sober’ analytical perspective.
Scholarly approaches to the specific concept of an ‘ideological (or reductively political) spectrum’ typically fall into one of two kinds. Some unquestioningly take as read the idea of a single, one-dimensional spectrum on which ideological identity can be ‘placed’, but try to ‘elevate’ the rowdy, primary-colour directional terminology of ‘left’ and ‘right’ by crowbarring it into a more convenient, carefully denotated set of parameters. A classic case of this is the highly questionable – but still pervasive – use of a ‘liberal–conservative’ or more lately ‘progressive–conservative’ spectrum in US-centric political science, which has spilled over into other arenas of US-influenced political discourse. Another popular variant is the rebranding of ‘left–right’ as ‘economic left–right’, occasionally explicated as ‘economic interventionist–laissez-faire’.
Meanwhile, other approaches de-emphasize the ideological meaning of ‘left–centre–right’ by disaggregating the idea of ‘a’ single ideological spectrum entirely. Instead, they argue for a plethora of different dimensions of ideological comparison, normally presented as being of more-or-less equal significance for ideologically ‘placing’ any object of analysis. The ‘ideological compass’, one of the best-known examples of a two-dimensional model, pairs the ‘economic interventionist–laissez-faire’ spectrum with a sociocultural equivalent, often framed in terms of ‘authoritarian–libertarian’ or ‘collectivist–individualist’ dichotomies, but perhaps best encapsulated by a ‘monist–pluralist’ polarity. Others can be even more dramatically multi-dimensional, introducing new focuses on criteria such as religiosity and secularism, nation-statism and global-institutionalism, freedom and equality, tolerance, humanitarianism, traditionalism, survivalism and self-expression.Footnote3
Whatever their peculiarities and differences, these approaches have conspired to set a very specific, resolute tone within ideology research: ‘left’, ‘centre’ and ‘right’ are concepta non grata for ‘serious’ study. At best, they can act as colloquial placeholders, hermeneutic shortcuts that are useful to scholarship only insofar as they allow ideology researchers to translate their findings into a more vernacularly accessible idiom. But therein lies the rub. The idea of ‘left–centre–right’ has proved remarkably resilient in the face of this obstinate refusal to engage with it on its own terms. It has retained a particularly tenacious hold over our everyday ideological self-imagination, while only a handful of the more ‘ideologologically acceptable’ terms have achieved a remotely comparable level of cut-through. Tellingly, this is true of contexts well beyond the confines of electoral competition or even politics tout court, appearing in everything from census data collection and voter surveys to blogs, podcasts and dating apps.
As scalar categories or group labels for self- and other-placement, and self- and other-identification, terms such as ‘extreme left’, ‘far right’, ‘soft left’, ‘right-leaning’ or ‘centre-ground’ have intuitive appeal. They offer an immediate shorthand for how stridently, how firmly, how consistently, and so on, someone commits to social positions that put them in the majority or the minority within society as a whole, in lockstep with some people, at odds with others. Only the oldest and best-known of the classic ideological ‘isms’ lie remotely on a par with them: ‘liberalism’, ‘conservatism’ and ‘socialism’ in particular. The next most prevalent ideological signifiers are party- or faction-affiliated labels that have become broader signifiers of someone’s rhetoric and implied values: ‘Tory’ and ‘tankie’ (across the Anglosphere), ‘péquiste’ (Quebec), ‘Shinner’ (Ireland), ‘bhakt’ (India) or ‘Bolsominion’ (Brazil). Even other ‘ism’ labels (‘fascism’, ‘libertarianism’, ‘anarchism’ and so on) tend to be restricted to more rarefied discursive settings, generally among overtly and self-consciously ideological interlocutors. Meanwhile, any even more niche modifiers (e.g. ‘neoliberalism’, ‘paleoconservatism’, ‘ecosocialism’) are safely relegated to true ideologological nerdom.
In light of the ongoing dominance of the ‘left–centre–right’ heuristic, ideology studies is left with something of a lacuna in how it represents ideology’s social dynamics so long as it dodges the question of how to integrate this heuristic into its analysis. This lacuna is all the more paradoxical given that one of the hallmarks of ideology studies over recent decades has been an explicit commitment to take seriously ‘ordinary’ social thinking.Footnote4
Yet against this backdrop, there are emerging signs that a small but actively growing literature has set itself the task of resolving this analytical impasse – in large part by blasting through the barrier between vernacular and scholarly uses of ‘ideological spectrum’ terminology. Some approach this task obliquely, integrating their analysis of ‘leftness’, ‘rightness’ or ‘centreness’ (often implicitly) into projects that focus mainly on other ideological concerns. These include sweeping assessments of the evolving comparative fortunes of various national political parties, definitional debates over the most accurate way to label the recent populist wave, or psychoanalytic treatments of the unconscious content of ideological tendencies.Footnote5 Others tackle it head-on, thematizing ‘the left’, ‘the right’ or ‘the centre’ as primary objects of study in their own right – sometimes by themselves, but often in tandem with close cognates that are currently more familiar within ideological research. The most prominent examples have been intellectual-historical studies of ‘left’, ‘right’ and ‘centre’ longue-durée traditions or groups of key thinkers, conceptual analyses of ‘reactionarism’ and ‘progressivism’, along with a long legacy of more policy-oriented reports (often by ideologically affiliated thinktanks) on ‘their own’ and ‘the other’ side’s future prospects.Footnote6
Now that its gaze has turned to capture the conceptual edifice of ‘left–centre–right’ ideologization, one of the essential tasks facing ideology studies is to corral the many useful insights from these emergent contributions into less disparate and more explicit form. We have to confront the key question of what ‘left’, ‘centre’ and ‘right’ means, in order to answer a number of consequential follow-up questions, including: why these meanings are associated with ‘the left’, ‘the centre’ and ‘the right’; when and how these ‘left’, ‘centre’ and ‘right’ meanings arise; and who or what is (or is not) in, on or part of ‘the left’, ‘the centre’ and ‘the right’. Finding clear and precise answers to these questions is, of course, valuable in and of itself, in that it expands and thickens the ‘coverage’ that ideology studies can offer social research. But it is also vital for another reason – namely, that it helps establish what we might best call ‘spectrum analysis’ as a legitimate and profitable nascent direction in ideological research.
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Pinning down the definition of ‘left–centre–right’ takes us back to two fundamental questions, which both in some way dog any set of concepts that is presented as a potential spectrum. The first is whether ‘left’, ‘right’ and ‘centre’ are absolute or relative signifiers, i.e. whether they are each capable of being meaningfully defined by themselves, in an alone-standing way, or whether they depend on each other’s existence or proximity for their definition to make meaningful sense. The image offered by the former is of a ‘left’ sitting in an entirely separate ideological space to the ‘right’ and the ‘centre’, acting as three semantic ecosystems that exist in parallel. Their morphological content undoubtedly interacts, it may even touch or overlap at the margins, but as ecosystems all three ultimately maintain an inwardly complex and outwardly functionally autonomous existence. Each one brings together a set of ‘takes’ that portray the world in a certain way, and their main preoccupation is to refine these ‘takes’ to make them as accurate and all-encompassing as possible.
The idea of the latter, meanwhile, is that ‘right’ exists only by virtue of its contrasting placement or status versus – in opposition to, as a dialectical negation of – ‘left’ and ‘centre’. Each one’s content relies on its différance from that of the others to be recognizable as belonging to the one’s morphology; it derives its clarity not so much from asserting what it is as from inverting what it is not. Each one’s ‘takes’ are the way they are because they are trying to outdo the ones the others have to offer, not just to compare but to compete – to head them off, neutralize them, get them out of the picture.
The second question is whether, in their presentation as ‘left–centre–right’, these terms are intended to be discrete or continuous signifiers, i.e. whether the definitional boundaries between them are hard, fortified walls or blurry, permeable membranes. For the former, ‘centre’ is a specific categorical bloc that sits in its own allotted space, divided equidistantly from ‘left’ and ‘right’ blocs on either side by clear iridescent water. Between them, they hoover up all the available relevant morphological content, so that the distance between them is a kind of ideological no-man’s-land – a barren waste pockmarked at most by semantic detritus, connotative fragments that have found no home in any of the blocs and have thus been discarded. When we choose a ‘take’, we automatically pick a ‘side’, we are either ‘in’ or ‘out’ (or have some serious making up of our minds to do). In any event, we cannot stay aloof, floating serenely beyond ‘bloc’ space.
With the latter model, ‘left’ is more of a loose gestural area whose occupied territory bleeds gradually and imperceptibly through into that of the ‘centre’ and thence the ‘right’. Morphological content in all its forms is smeared generously along the whole length of this ideological stretch of land, undergoing many subtle, infinitesimal transformations all the way from ‘left-of-centre’ across to ‘right-of-centre’ (and back again). Here, when we choose a ‘take’, we are far more subtly and precisely slotting ourselves into a ‘patch’ of ideological turf somewhere on this longer stretch, which may be closer to some of its key ‘waystations’, further from others, but ultimately accessible to all of them.
The problem for ideology studies – and another key part of what makes ‘left–centre–right’ so elusive as a concept – is that the vernacular answer to both of these definitional questions is ‘well, a bit of everything really’. The way ordinary thinking uses these labels entertains both an absolute distinction and relative circularity between them, and happily sees their content as both discretely parcellized and continuously shared. If we take up position in the ‘centre’ of the ideological spectrum, we are certainly subscribing to a unique and specific way of looking at the world: one that deals in a generous bit of circumspect morphological borrowing, ad hoc deals and pragmatic constraints, a sedate social tempo and modest expectations. But part of what makes our position so distinct is that we are explicitly ruling out being like ‘left’ and ‘right’ in certain respects, which we are often happy to enumerate: they are ‘too much’ in some ways and ‘not enough’ in others, while we are ‘just right’. Similarly, if we declare ourselves ‘on the right’, we are saying quite clearly that there are specific ways in which we are not, and could never be, like ‘the centre’ and ‘the left’: they are not just ‘other’, they are partially or even fully ‘beyond the pale’. Nevertheless, we are hardly averse to a bit of morphological encroachment to pervade ‘their’ social thinking and shore up ‘ours’, not least to try and win over new converts to our cause.
How is this problem resolved? One approach, in traditional morphological style, is to cash out ‘left’, ‘right’ and ‘centre’ in terms of familiar core and peripheral ideological concepts. This is a more sophisticated process than simply reeling off a list of concepts that are said to define ‘the left’, finding all of their opposites and mirror-images and attributing them to ‘the right’ as its logical antithesis, and then finessing ‘the centre’ as a kind of compromise, middle or mixed/hybrid position between the other two. Rather, each one of the three has several concepts in its morphology that are entirely unique to it, with essentially no bearing on that of the other two. The ‘left’ is alone in centring (e.g.) anti-capitalism, class emancipation and productive labour; the ‘centre’ has the most to say about parliamentary democracy, the social market economy and cultural tolerance; and the ‘right’ is more or less the undisputed home for religious influence, civil security and tradition. Other concepts stand in deliberate tension, even logical opposition, between ‘left’, ‘right’ and ‘centre’ morphological clusters. ‘Left’ anti-statist revolution is explicitly targeted against the pro-police, pro-military tendencies of the ‘right’; the latter’s emphasis on natural growth and opposition to experimentalism directly contradicts the former’s insistence on critical spontaneity and the inevitability of social progress.
To complicate matters, some of their constitutive concepts are found in more than one of ‘left’, ‘right’ and ‘centre’ at the same time. All three have some conception of order and sociality, though they differ immensely in the relative place they give in each of these concepts to (e.g.) the market, the party, the trade union, nature, divinity, the nation or the organic community. Many of these ‘shared’ concepts also take on very different connotations depending on which of the three morphologies they belong to. Equality in the ‘centre’ is more about individual opportunity or resource allocations, while on the ‘left’ it connotes collective class struggles against hierarchical elitism. Rights, meanwhile, for the ‘right’ subsist above all in privacy, property and capital accumulation, while for the ‘centre’ they shift across to priorities of the electoral franchise, healthcare and social welfare provision.
Another morphological approach, operating at the next level up, is to insert members of the classic roster of ideological families as an intermediate layer between the ‘left–centre–right’ tier and this litany of ideological concepts. In essence, this approach treats the problem of defining ‘left’, ‘right’ and ‘centre’ as a matter of accurate grouping, with each of the three terms acting as a more-or-less loose or rigid combination or arrangement of several ‘isms’, each of which provides a combination or arrangement of ideological concepts in turn. The placings of some ideological families under this model are fairly uncontentious: communism, socialism and most forms of anarchism on the ‘left’; libertarianism, conservatism and fascism (despite its occasional claims to be ‘beyond’ easy spectrum placement) on the ‘right’. It is the ‘centre’ that is a little harder to populate. Some ideologies that enthusiastically claim a centrist position, such as liberalism, find themselves accused of actually being ‘on the right’ (generally by ‘left’ ideologies) or ‘on the left’ (by ‘right’ ideologies). Conversely, several ideologies which find themselves more gently drawn towards ‘left’ (social democracy, green ideology) or ‘right’ (Christian democracy) often find themselves ‘accused’ of actually belonging to ‘the centre’ by ideologies with stronger ‘left’ and ‘right’ commitments respectively. But despite such occasional definitional instabilities, the core principle that there are three overarching family clusters of broadly equal size remains fairly well-established.
This introduces a way to qualify the relative similarity or difference between individual ideological families, rather than treating them all as de facto morphologically equidistant from one another. Clustering certain ‘isms’ together as members of a particular ‘left’, ‘right’ or ‘centre’ grouping exaggerates the morphological elisions and overlaps, borrowings and exchanges between them. By the same token, it exaggerates the morphological distinctions between them all together and any other ideological families that lie outside their grouping, especially if they belong to a different grouping in their own right. Depending on how granular this approach is prepared to be, it may break up the bigger ‘left–centre–right’ clusters into a more subtly differentiated set of categories. Often, ideological families, their hybridizations and subcategorizations, are classed as ‘centre-left’ (e.g. social democracy, green ideology, social liberalism, some forms of Christian socialism) and others as ‘centre-right’ (e.g. Christian democracy, market liberalism, liberal conservatism), to give the groups more of a ‘spectrum’ feel.
Both approaches bring to bear the familiar dynamics of essential contestation and cooption onto the question of defining ‘left–centre–right’. This brings both advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, it zeroes in on one of the most important aspects of ideological discourse in society today. People and groups, organizations and institutions routinely stake out ownership claims over which ‘side’ of the ideological spectrum ‘really stands for’ particular values. Freedom, or liberty, is a classic case in point. Those on ‘the right’ regularly insist on tying the concept to connotations such as market commerce and entrepreneurship, limited regulation and taxation, property-ownership, weapons-ownership, unrestricted expression and a high scope for personal worship, with ‘the state’ often presented as the most drastic source of ‘unfreedom’. Those on ‘the left’, meanwhile, tie the concept more to emancipation from enslavement or punitive/impoverishing labour, personal opportunity and creative flourishing, social peace, bodily autonomy and welfare, and minimum levels of social support and protection, with ‘capitalism’ or ‘the market’ often eclipsing ‘the state’ as the author of ‘unfreedom’. Each one proclaims the unique coherence and credibility of their own morphological offering. Each one dismisses the others, especially other ideological families, as ‘all as bad as each other’ and out of touch – preoccupied with concepts that are light years off the mark, removed from the ‘real concerns’ of ‘ordinary people’, ‘what actually matters’ in society, and so on.
On the minus side, by recognizing that the meaning of ‘left’, ‘right’ and ‘centre’ is not only up for debate but interminably subject to it, these approaches actually get us barely closer to a durable morphological diagnosis of these terms. Worse, in order to make any analytical headway at all, they force us (however reluctantly or expediently) to take a side in conceptual and familial ownership disputes. Concepts such as ‘equality’, ‘justice’ or ‘democracy’ have to be broken apart into their different connotations, in order for each of the different ‘readings’ of these concepts to be ‘awarded’ to a different ‘part’ of the ‘left–centre–right’ spectrum. This creates fictitious divides between these ‘readings’, which obscure how they bleed into and inform one another. The same thing happens whenever we decide to ‘allocate’ ideologies with ‘divided loyalties’ to only one ‘part’ of the spectrum, artificially inflating their morphological affinities and overlaps with some of their neighbouring families at the expense of others. For instance, social democracy and green politics look very different if grouped together with communism or liberalism, while the same is true of Christian democracy vis-à-vis liberalism or fascism. By the same measure, the trade-off of embracing an ‘expansive’ reading of ‘left’ and ‘right’ is a ‘restrictive’ reading of ‘the centre’, and vice versa.
From the perspective of ideology research, as far as the quest of integrating ‘left–centre–right’ as an important and meaningful object of enquiry, locus of analysis and source of insight goes, these strategies are essentially an admission of defeat. The scale of this defeat, or to be exact, of the defeasibility of these two morphological approaches, becomes starkly clear when we consider how easy or difficult it is to translate the way they characterize ‘left–centre–right’ in comparative terms. Groups on the highest versus lowest rungs of vastly imbalanced hierarchies of social power, or on either side of factional oppositions of need and interest, or physically situated in different places and hence facing different circumstances and experiences, or living at different points in time and hence through different historical periods: all of these tend to offer up very different ideological distributions across their respective memberships.
The ‘right’ of a landed aristocracy, of corporate or financial fractions within a (trans)national commercial class, of small-and-medium-sized business-owners, of a gig economy precariat, or of a plantation peasantry, differ from each other on the meaning and significance of everything from ‘sovereignty’ to ‘property’, ‘honour’ to ‘opportunity’, ‘work’ to ‘well-being’. Meanwhile, the ‘left wing’ of a conservative party or movement often has a fair amount in common with the ‘right wing’ of a socialist group on questions of taxation, education policy, constitutional rights or sustainability – while the conservative ‘right’ and socialist ‘left’ are, quite literally, poles apart. Even just on the issue of national integrity, being ‘on the left’, ‘on the right’ or ‘in the centre’ about Xinjiang or Tigray, Donetsk or Nagorno-Karabakh comes with connotations of territorial occupation, ethnocultural diversity, sectarianism and violent repression that do not quite attach to this issue in the same way when talking about Ceuta and Melilla, the Chagos Archipelago, the Kuril Islands or Gibraltar. And on women’s or LGBTQ* rights, labour conditions, the general franchise and total war, what counts as a ‘centre’ ideological position has evolved dramatically more-or-less across the globe depending on whether we are considering these questions in 1823, 1923 or today.
In all of these cases, contextual differences break the superficial affinity between those on ‘the left’, those on ‘the right’ and those in ‘the centre’. In fact, often the ‘positions’ scattered across the spectrum in any given context may have far more in common with each other than they do with anyone occupying a notionally equivalent ‘position’ on a different spectrum elsewhere (or elsewhen).
The upshot of this is that, even though we can come up with more-or-less detailed lists of the ideological concepts and families that populate the ‘left’, ‘centre’ and ‘right’, these lists are only ever going to be contingently accurate descriptions. As rigorously granular and imaginatively considered as they are, they can only ever be true as far as we are concerned, true from the situated perspectives and within the bounded horizons of the contexts into which we are ‘thrown’. If we are lucky, some of our diagnostic morphological characterizations may translate passably well across vertical, horizontal, geospatial and intertemporal boundaries, and hold water in multiple contexts. But these cases are more likely to be the results of accidents of convergent ideological evolution than evidence that we have tapped into some transcontextual ideologological ‘higher truths’.
Likelier still, they may be the direct ideological legacies of specific well-documented and easily-identifiable historical dynamics that broke down some of the barriers between these contexts, leaving them (however briefly or partially) functionally unified and aligned. For instance, a class alliance between industrial workers and peasants to overthrow an equivalent alliance between latifundist landowners and merchantry can lead to cross-fertilization and strategic harmonization in how each ‘side’ decontests their respective ideas of ‘dignity’, ‘safety’, ‘democracy’, ‘cooperation’ and so on. Meanwhile, processes of party-political ‘renewal’ and ‘modernization’ trade extensively in essential cooption, with parties always looking to absorb visibly successful ideas and policies from their rivals – exacerbated by a constant churn of personnel, median-voter electoral targeting and alternating periods in power and in opposition. The legacies of colonialism and imperialism can leave traces in the form of very specific ideological ‘inheritances’ that the ex-occupied retain from their ex-occupier: former British colonies keeping first-past-the-post voting as part of their ‘renderings’ of parliamentarism and electoralism, the role of ‘Indigenous Historical Trauma’ in debates around ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ in North America, or the quasi-‘left–right’ ‘Poland A and B’ division that tracks erstwhile Prussian-German and Russian ownership. As a final example, many of the core concepts of libertarianism are explicitly based on a restoration or ‘reawakening’ of liberalism in its 19th-century ‘classical’ guise, including limited government, civil liberties, low taxation and market deregulation, which has significantly contributed to the ‘rightwards’ shift in its contemporary spectrum placing.
In other words, if we are going to look for a robust morphology of ‘left–centre–right’, we need to go beyond these appeals to contingent conceptual and familial connotations, and take a more direct approach, rooted in the lexical connotations of ‘left’, ‘right’ and ‘centre’ themselves.
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So, if we strip away any such contextually mediated connotations, how much are we left with? Is there a danger that, by doing so, we not only trim away excess fat but cut deep into flesh and bone, leaving our ideas of ‘leftness’, ‘rightness’ and ‘centreness’ too thin and fragile to be of much analytical use? Mercifully not. Even without the solid buttresses of the connotations we borrow for ‘left–centre–right’ from our political environments, each of these terms enjoys a semantic richness that opens up many new avenues for ideologological exploration. In fact, if anything, it is by excising the conceptual and familial connotations we have grown used to prioritizing in ideological analysis that we actually allow the transcontextual, perhaps even perennial connotations of ‘left’, ‘right’ and ‘centre’ to come properly to the fore.
We can give a succinct account of ‘left’, ‘right’ and ‘centre’ in the following terms. Ideas, people, groups, and so on, that are on ‘the left’ typically want to subvert or overturn the prevailing social order; they do so in order to achieve sweeping changes and improvements in society, usually to do with sharing power more evenly among all of us; they aim to discover new understandings of the world and create new opportunities within it; and they often embrace drastic action, ranging from incendiary agitation to institutional force to violent revolution.
Those on ‘the right’, meanwhile, tend to want to maintain the current order as it is, or even better return it to a certain way it used to be; they do so to preserve and restore lost virtues, especially traditions and conventions (taste, style, manners) for how we relate to one another; they stress the value of our current understandings and opportunities, and the comforting stability they give our lives; and they prefer steady inaction to drastic action except where our social order faces an existential threat.
Finally, those in ‘the centre’ tread a middle path that sets out to keep the best and amend the worst aspects of our social order; they look for reforms that redesign our social fabric without tearing it apart, expanding empowerment while respecting virtuous social ties; they carefully filter through both new and current understandings and opportunities to craft a social reality that all of us can reasonably recognize, at least in part; and they try to keep up a steady pace of judicious action with moderate scale and scope.
We can get a sense of how all three positions pan out morphologically in spectrum space by visualizing their core concepts as a series of parallels and comparisons (see ).
Table 1. The core concepts of left, centre and right.
Perhaps the most intriguing element here is the open question about how exactly to conceive of ‘left’ and ‘right’ as opposite ends of a scale. For some connotations, it is clear that they are meant to act as semantic mutual contrasts, or contradictions of one another. In this scenario, ‘centre’ becomes a kind of ‘half-way house’, either a makeshift hybrid compromise or an explicit synthesis between (aspects of) the contrasting ‘left’ and ‘right’. However, there are other connotations that present ‘left’ and ‘right’ as mirroring variants of a wholly separate contrasting relationship. For these connotations, it is the ‘centre’ that acts as a counter-pole, contradicting or opposing both ‘left’ and ‘right’ as functionally equivalent, as two ‘sides’ (flanks, wings, margins) of the same coin. That scenario is familiar to us from vernacular rhetoric about an ideological ‘horseshoe’, which presents a spectrum that curves back on itself so far that ‘left’ and ‘right’ end up at a broadly interchangeable ideological ‘point’. This, in turn, is often countered by claims (usually from ‘the left’ or less commonly ‘the right’) about an ideological ‘fishhook’, which typically sees half the spectrum as a straight line, and the other half as tightly curled up in such a way that the opposite ‘end’ and the ‘centre’ are ideologically indistinguishable. Both ‘horseshoe’ and ‘fishhook’ logics have, in turn, found their way into vernacular presentations of the political ideological spectrum, especially in the portrayal of quasi-partisan ideological families.
Some of these connotations may sound a dim and distant echo of the ideological concepts and families we examined earlier. But the majority are not necessarily connected to either of them, and are a far cry from the staple currency of morphological analysis. It is worth noting that the basic social connotations we have given ‘left’, ‘right’ and ‘centre’ here are already more refined than the baseline meaning these have when we use them in their generic topographical or positional senses. In a social, ideological sense, what we are doing when we talk about ‘left–centre–right’ is rather more specific than just describing where things are in a room or on a football pitch, or working out our best route to get from A to B on a map. Socially, we are concerned with the material distribution and relational arrangement of power among ourselves and others, individually and collectively. And ideologically, we are positing that a viable way of representing this aspect of reality – of making it make sense diagnostically, interpretatively, critically – is by applying the logic of topography and position to what it is, and to how and why it works.
However, this salutary reminder that we are dealing with ‘left–centre–right’ in a social sense raises two caveats that modify, and expand, what ideological research needs to consider when tackling these terms in a morphological way. First, the conceptual and family-group associations that ideology studies has traditionally given these terms skew quite heavily towards the political domain of social activity. ‘Democracy’, ‘justice’, ‘order’, ‘rights’ and other ideological concepts that are arrayed in spectrum space often refer in the first instance to the operations of state or state-like governance arrangements and police/security authorities. By the same token, ‘conservative’, ‘green’, ‘social democrat’ and similar ideological families tend to relate most directly to partisan or factional sectional groupings of politicians, voters or activists aiming to take directive control of these arrangements and authorities. In other words, the way that ideology studies has parsed ‘left–centre–right’ up to this point narrows the range of social activities it considers salient to ‘spectrum analysis’ to those predominantly associated with social administration or coordination, and social coercion or repression.
Yet when we describe something colloquially as ‘left’, ‘right’ or ‘centre’, these are hardly the only kinds of social activity we have in mind. For a start, even some of these notionally political concepts and quasi-partisan family associations spill over semantically into other domains: the economy (production, exchange/distribution and consumption), law (regulation), religion (devotion), culture (ideation, communication), curation (nurture, caregiving) and education (instruction, study). ‘Socialism’ and ‘communism’ are, at heart, economic as well as political descriptors. ‘Conservatism’, meanwhile, slides into religious and cultural space. And ‘liberalism’ is used to cover elements of all three, with curative and educational dimensions too.
Beyond this, however, the key point here is that ‘left’, ‘right’ and ‘centre’ have a rich and nuanced variety of meanings in these other domains that are logically independent of what they mean when applied to politics specifically. There may well be contingent analogical similarities in certain contexts between people, institutions and so on that identify as being variously on (e.g.) the political ‘left’, economic ‘left’ and educational ‘left’ around extensive mass empowerment, flexible procedures or individual self-expression, and likewise on (e.g.) the legal ‘right’, religious ‘right’ and cultural ‘right’ about respect for authority, strict punishment or the value of complex traditions. But crucially, in order to ‘depoliticize’ how ideology studies understands what ‘left–centre–right’ mean in everyday discourse – and to cash out what these terms mean in domains for which they are not as commonly used – we need to look at how their lexical connotations play out in the specific activities that belong to each domain separately (see )
Table 2. Examples of left, centre and right concepts in different social domains.
The second caveat is that, by focusing so heavily on concepts and how these become grouped into families, ideology studies underplays how ‘left–centre–right’ terminology is used to code for a large variety of other societal phenomena as well. Specifically, it neglects another set of spillovers: how ideas of ‘leftness’, ‘rightness’ and ‘centreness’ inform, become attached to, or are realized by particular social entities and associations, beliefs and behaviours, processes and outcomes. Like any idea, and any ‘ism’ as a combination and arrangement of ideas, ‘left’, ‘right’ and ‘centre’ exist on different levels of thought and action, abstraction and concreteness, individuality and collectivity, and so on. They give us vantage-points from which to overview and self-orient within our social reality; lenses that calibrate the focus of our gaze and attention towards it; primers and scripts that tell us how to correctly engage with it; design plans that show how its edifice fits together around us; and simulations for how we are to move through it.Footnote7
In other words, ‘leftness–centreness–rightness’ is not just a spectrum of ideas by which we represent what is going on in society, but a spectrum of more-or-less well-developed habitus that shape how we ourselves and others navigate our social surroundings and steer their future contours and trajectory. These habitus cut across ‘domain’ divisions between our different kinds of social activity, bridging the independent vantage-points, lenses, primers, etc., that ‘leftness’, ‘rightness’ and ‘centreness’ endow us with for each one (see ).
Table 3. Examples of the social habitus of left, centre and right.
From a pared-back lexical starting-point, it is therefore possible to (re)construct a detailed and sophisticated ideological morphology of all three parts of the ‘left–centre–right’ triptych that gives due weight to their social significance. But to get to this point, ideology studies has to do away with the restrictive limitations imposed by automatically disaggregating ‘left–centre–right’ – and, for that matter, a great many other ideological signifiers – only into context-specific (political) concepts and (quasi-partisan) families. This creates space for a thicker, more systematic, more comprehensive approach to recontextualising these terms. It also gives them back their social associations (1) beyond politics and (2) beyond the realm of abstract ideas. Now that we have found our way to this thicker ideological morphology of ‘left–centre–right’, how do we bring this all back to a ‘spectrum’ logic? How do we return this proliferation of semantic clusters to the more terminologically unified language in which these terms are used in vernacular ideological discourse? In the most brutally simplistic way possible, if we want to draw a single line from the ‘left’ via the ‘centre’ to the ‘right’, how do we go about doing so?
In essence, our focus on (1) differentiation across social domains and (2) the various components of social habitus has created two alternative multidimensional ways of modelling ‘left–centre–right’ in absolute/relative and discrete/continuous space. One is perhaps best treated as a way of extending and further disaggregating the economic-versus-sociocultural mapping popularized by the ‘ideological compass’. It places particular emphasis on prising apart the many subsidiary elements jostling for primacy on its ‘sociocultural’ axis. The other model is a similar expansion, this time of the reductive analysis of ‘left–centre–right’ in terms of concepts and families. It cuts across the boundaries between domains to enumerate the perspectives and dispositions, norms and practices, structures and systems that reflect how ‘leftness’, ‘rightness’ and ‘centreness’ manifest in society.
Instinctively, as multidimensional models, the way to present them both in graphic form would be as more complex versions of the ‘ideological compass’. But to do that in a ‘true’ way would take us beyond three-dimensional visualization into the (fascinating but interpretatively challenging) realm of n-dimensional polytopes and manifolds, so for present purposes it is better to see them as two sets of ‘sliders’. We can cluster together the epicentral ‘left’, ‘right’ and ‘centre’ placings on each ‘slider’ to indicate the rough contours of an overall ‘average’ or ‘summary’ spectrum for each set.
But what happens if we want to ram the point home that, in vernacular usage, ‘left’, ‘right’ and ‘centre’ really are supposed to be a single spectrum? That when we use these terms in our everyday, casual ideological language, we are using them to code for a whole implied cluster of content from across social domains and across different bits of (our own, others’) social habitus? This needs a bit of interpretative derivation. Clustering together the ‘left’, ‘right’ and ‘centre’ placings on our ‘sliders’ gives us a pair of notional poles and a midpoint for both dimensions of morphological analysis: (1) a conceptual ‘social left–centre–right’ spectrum from countervailing empowerment to traditional reassertion; and (2) a habitus ‘social left–centre–right’ spectrum from stochastic transformation to steadfast maintenance. If we think of these spectrums as straight-line axes, we can reduce our social characterization of ‘left–centre–right’ to a new form of two-dimensional ‘compass’ space, where the ‘master’ or ‘headline’ ideological spectrum is the 45° line in between these axes (see ). This spatial depiction gives us a new analytical tool, whereby any of our objects of analysis (ideas and ‘isms’, people and groups, organizations and institutions, and so on) can be ideologically placed in social ‘left–centre–right’ terms.
Figure 1. Modelling left–centre–right in conceptual (horizontal) and habitus (vertical) space.
What is the force of this two-dimensional model? In brief, it allows us to capture in a novel and analytically meaningful way those social movements and groupings that do not easily map onto the familiar ‘left–centre–right’ spectrum. Of course, many familiar social ideologies – from Luxemburgism to Toryism, from mercantilism to neo-Keynesianism – will cleave closely to the 45° spectrum in the middle of the graph. But there is also a sizable number that will not. Think of political ideologies such as Strasserism and the Nouvelle Droite, legal ideologies such as Lochnerism and ‘common sense constitutionalism’, or cultural ideologies such as Identitarianism and ‘anti-wokeism’, which garb themselves in the habitus of ‘the centre’ or ‘the left’ (i.e. stochastic transformation) while seeking to implement the concepts of ‘the right’ (i.e. traditional reassertion). Or think of the social presence of economic factors such as trade unions and the welfare state, educational phenomena such as ‘liberal arts’ colleges and Steiner–Waldorf schools, or religious groups such as charismatic denominations or millenarian sects, which (at least historically) aspire to manifest the concepts of ‘the left’ (i.e. countervailing empowerment) but have increasingly taken on a habitus more commonly associated with ‘the centre’ or ‘the right’ (i.e. steadfast maintenance). This model allows us to respond more directly and accurately to any claims that such ideologies or social entities are ‘neither right nor left’, or ‘beyond left and right’: they are not neither, but both; not beyond, but bridging the two.
Where does this leave the morphological analysis of ‘left–centre–right’? Ultimately, what emerges from the careful lexical and social disambiguation of all three terms is a sense of the sheer surplus of meaning attached to how they are used in ideological discourse. To properly acknowledge and integrate the semantic wealth that this conceptual trio has to offer, ideology research needs to operate on two simultaneous levels of analysis. Within our own contexts, we can do more to diagnose and critique the precise connections that are drawn between ‘left’, ‘right’ and ‘centre’ as terms, and specific groups of established political concepts and quasi-partisan ideological families. But in a more transcontextual vein, we also need to engage in deeper study of how claims about our own and others’ (self-)identification and (self-)grouping in ‘left–centre–right’ terms reflect specific differences in our general approaches to social ideologization. Some of this is quietly evident with the ideological connotations that parts of the ‘left–centre–right’ triptych carry already. Yet ideological research will become immeasurably enriched if it extends these levels of analysis to cover spectrum analysis in its entirety.
Notes
1. For early examples of this debate, see S. Bartolini and P. Mair, ‘Report on a new framework for the analysis of changes in Western European party systems’, ECPR Joint Sessions (Aarhus: ECPR, 1982); F.G. Castles and P. Mair, ‘Left–right political scales: Some “Expert” judgments’, European Journal of Political Research, 12(1) (1984), pp. 73–88; R. Inglehart and H.D. Klingemann, ‘Party identification, ideological preferences, and the left–right dimension among Western mass publics’, in I. Budge, I. Crewe, and D. Farlie (Eds), Party Identification and Beyond (New York, NY: Wiley, 1976), 243–73; G. Sani and G. Sartori, ‘Polarization, fragmentation, and competition in Western democracies’, in H. Daalder and P. Mair (Eds), Western European Party Systems (London: SAGE, 1983), p. 307–40; G. Sartori, Parties and Party Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
2. See, for instance, N. Bobbio, Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996); A. Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (Cambridge: Polity, 1994).
3. For a selection of some of the major interventions in this area, see L.W. Ferguson, ‘Primary social attitudes’, Journal of Psychology 8(2) (1939), pp. 217–23; R. Inglehart and C. Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); M. Rokeach, The Nature of Human Values (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1973).
4. See, for instance, M. Freeden, The Political Theory of Political Thinking: The Anatomy of a Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
5. R. Manwaring and P. Kennedy (Eds), Why the Left Loses: The Decline of the Centre-Left in Comparative Perspective (Bristol: Policy Press, 2018); C. Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London: Verso, 2018); R. Samuels, The Psychopathology of Political Ideologies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022).
6. P. Anderson, Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (London: Verso, 2007); O. Cramme, P. Diamond, and M. McTernan (Eds), Progressive Politics after the Crash: Governing from the Left (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013); A. Giddens, The Progressive Manifesto: New Ideas for the Centre-Left (Cambridge: Polity, 2003); S. Guillaume and J. Garrigues, Centre et centrisme en Europe aux XIXe et XXe siècles: Regards croisés (Oxford: PIE–Peter Lang, 2006); J. McGregor, Right and Left: The Next Divide (London: Conservative Political Centre, 1991); M.S. Ostrowski, Left Unity: Manifesto for a Progressive Alliance (London: Rowman & Littlefield / Policy Network, 2020); R. Shorten, The Ideology of Political Reactionaries (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021).
7. For deeper analysis of these different functions of ideology, see J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (New York, NY: Semiotext(e), 1983); P. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, R. Nice (Trs) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, NY: Routledge, 1990); b. hooks, ‘The oppositional gaze: Black female spectator’, in A. Jones (Ed), The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003 [1992]), p. 94–10; M.S. Ostrowski, Ideology (Cambridge: Polity, 2022), p. 48–59; S. Tomkins, ‘Script theory’, in J. Arnoff, A.I. Rabin, and R.A. Zucker (Eds), The Emergence of Personality (New York, NY: Springer, 1987), p. 147–216; S. Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).