The Populist Moment, Chapter 2:
The Erasure of the Left/Right Divide, Part 2

France’s Estates-General of 1789, where the concepts of a political Left and Right were allegedly born.

5,436 words

Introduction here, Chapter 2 Part 1 here

Translated by F. Roger Devlin

Many people who sincerely consider themselves to be on the Left or Right are glad to give a definition, often quite clear, of what this means, but their definition is rarely accepted by others of the Left or Right. Everyone is of course convinced he knows what the “true Right” or “true Left” is, but these subjective definitions — everyone privileges the notions most important to himself — are merely the reflection of an entirely personal conviction. Debate is still poisoned by the polemical use of some of these labels (“extreme Right”, “Leftism,” etc.), as well as by certain discursive strategies which aim to reduce what is new to what is familiar, or group in the same category antagonistic concepts or opposed families. For liberals, socialists and fascists belong to the same family (“totalitarian”); for socialists, fascists and liberals belong to the same family (“capitalist”); and for fascists, socialists and liberals belong to the same family (“the heirs of the Enlightenment”). All of this prevents us from getting to the bottom of things.

If one turns to specialists in political science, the result is scarcely more satisfactory. To demonstrate the pertinence of the Left/Right divide, they usually invoke the historical character of this dichotomy and allege the existence of two fundamentally opposed political cultures to which the dyad Left/Right applies. But their conclusions have never found unanimous acceptance. Political scientists have never arrived at agreement on a criterion or concept which could serve as a common denominator for all forms of the Left or Right. Many propositions have been set forth, of course, practically all of them based on binary oppositions: freedom or equality, conservatism or progressivism, order or justice, immobilism or movement, belief in or rejection of the idea of human nature, the perfectibility or imperfectability of that nature, the primacy of the innate or primacy of the acquired, a taste for the concrete or a taste for the abstract, nostalgia for the past or confidence in the future, anthropological pessimism or optimism, transcendence and imminence, etc. But whatever criterion is chosen, there are always too many exceptions.

Let us take the pair equality/freedom as an example. In 1994, the famous political scientist Norberto Bobbio published a book that was enormously successful in Italy.[1] In it he maintained, after many others, that equality is the key concept which allows us to distinguish Left and Right: the former will always be hostile to it, the latter always favorable (even if, as Bobbio recognizes, the Left has also created new forms of inequality). Bobbio distinguishes an egalitarian and authoritarian Left; a center-Left both egalitarian and liberal; a liberal and non-egalitarian center-Right; and an authoritarian, non-egalitarian Right. But this thesis does not stand up to careful examination: Not all the political forces habitually classed on the Left can be defined by the demand for greater equality. In both camps we find parties which consider that certain inequalities are not unjust (which raises the question of when they become so). Besides, legal equality and social equality are not the same thing. An old dilemma: Is it better to distribute less wealth in a more equal fashion or accept inequality in order to accumulate greater total wealth? Finally, what should we think of the concept of community, which seems to resolve and overcome the opposition between equality and freedom?[2]

Marx, moreover, explicitly disavowed egalitarianism and never structured his conception of the classless society around any idea of equality. Equality is in his eyes a fundamentally bourgeois idea which allows the justification of labor power’s exploitation. Thus, the abolition of inequality is not to be confused with the abolition of domination, the latter being defined as the subordination of one group’s interests to those of another. Engels himself writes that “the proletarian demand for equality amounts to a demand for the abolition of classes. Any demand for farther-reaching equality necessarily falls into absurdity.”[4] The slogan Marx takes from Louis Blanc — “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!” — is no egalitarian slogan, either. “If people have unequal needs, explains Wood, then we cannot expect that they should have both equal wealth and equal satisfaction of their needs.”[5] We may add that in September 2016, an IFOP poll sponsored by L’Humanité revealed that the word invested with the highest value by persons declaring themselves on the Left is “freedom” (with “equality” coming in third).

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Another classic dichotomy is that of order (or conservation) and movement (or progress). But no sooner have we stated this than the equivocation can be seen: What is to be conserved? In what direction does one want to move? Edmund Burke, in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), stated that “a State without the means of some change, is without the means of its own conservation.” Moisei Ostrogorski also noted that “it is as impossible for a social order to preserve itself without change as to transform itself instantly.”[6] “There is,” said de Gaulle, “the eternal current of movement toward reforms, toward changes, which is naturally necessary; and then there is also a current of order, rule, and tradition which is also necessary. It is with all of this that France was made.” “Conservatism and progress,” observes Vincent Coussedière, “are categories that in themselves do not mean anything: Everything depends on what one wants to conserve and toward what one wants to progress.”[7]

Jean-Claude Michéa, for his part, has shown that socialism, if often associated in people’s minds with the spirit of progressivism, is at its origin completely foreign to it, just as it is foreign to “blank slate” ideology which rejects all the traditions of the past in the name of “sunny tomorrows”: “The memory of practices of mutual aid proper to traditional village communities — from which the rising industrial proletariat generally issued — certainly played an important role in constituting the socialist imagination.” Better still, he adds, it was undoubtedly because of its association with the idea of progress that it invited people into communion with the scientistic cult of modernity, in which it is possible to see a threat to individual autonomy, which socialism has so often rejected.[8] The Left ended up confusing that which was innovative (or “modern”) with that which was genuinely liberating. It did not see that modernity is rich in all sorts of new forms of alienation.

The ideology of progress is at first a bourgeois liberal ideology that secularizes the old Biblical idea of a linear conception of history oriented toward the best by restricting it to the secular sphere. Theorized by Turgot, and then by Condorcet (Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, 1794), it postulates that humanity as a whole is being directed — thanks especially to scientific progress — toward a moral progress without end. This is the basis of Enlightenment philosophy.[9] Fundamentally oriented toward the future, and having nothing but distrust of what Pasolini called the revolutionary force of the past, it demonizes the concepts of tradition, custom, and rootedness, seeing in them only obsolete superstitions and obstacles to the triumphal forward march of humanity. Aiming to unify the human race, it demands that one repudiate every archaic form of belonging, and that the organic base of all traditional forms of solidarity be systematically destroyed. The new world must necessarily be built upon the ruins of the previous one. As Jacques Julliard correctly noted, this also goes

in tandem with individualism, that form of individualism which asserts itself with the French Revolution. It is associated with the political and moral flourishing of the individual, while the absolutist doctrine of the Ancien Régime gives priority to communal values, those found within the family, social bodies [la corporation], the province, and the State itself. The “revolution of the rights of man” (Marcel Gauchet) is essentially a revolution of individuals: They and they alone bear rights.[10]

In his works, Louis Dumont has also demonstrated that individualism is fundamentally an ideology of the Left. “It is the human individual who is the measure of all things,” said Jaurès.

Thus, the concept of change is not fundamentally characteristic of the Left. With the idea of progress, the cult of novelty, especially in the technical sense, affected all political families. Progress has been challenged on the Left (by ecologists and the partisans of degrowth) as it has been on the Right (by positivists and liberals). Today it is rather the liberal Right which wants to “get things moving” in the face of a Left intent on preserving social gains (and which for this reason finds itself charged with being “archaic”). We could say the same about the conventional scheme that puts social justice and generosity on the Left, and authority, tradition, and the defense of the family and private property on the Right. Only going back to configurations of circumstance, this amounts to plastering concepts over an accidental cleavage which cannot themselves be derived from that cleavage.

There have also been attempts to relate the difference between Left and Right to a question of “temperaments.” André Siegfried, e.g., in his celebrated Tableau politique de la France de l’Ouest sous la IIIᵉ République (1903), lists three “principal temperaments,” five principal parties, and five “basic tendencies.” The procedure is tempting, since temperaments, i.e. constant psychological dispositions, are a reality. Arising long before the Left/Right divide, and attesting to the diversity of human nature, they even have a biological basis which numerous studies have allowed us to grasp. But what political conclusions can we draw from this? That there are more conservative temperaments and others more drawn to change is obvious, but historical experience has never allowed us to make any of them the prerogative of a single political family. The same goes for the “authoritarian personality” (Theodor W. Adorno), which was said not so long ago to be coextensive with men of the Right’s temperament. Nor do temperaments and characters allow us to predict actions exactly. Besides, it is not temperaments which delineate the field of politics, but ideas.

“There are several ways to be on the Right and as many to be on the Left,” remark Michel Marmin and Eric Branca.[11] This is the least one can say. What is there in common — e.g. between the counter-revolutionary Right, the personalist and communitarian Right, the European federalist Right, the liberal Right, the bio-hygienist Right, the libertarian Right, the national-revolutionary Right, the racialist Right, the Christian democratic Right, the monarchist Right, the national liberal Right, the Gaullist Right, the Pétainist Right, the regionalist Right, the Jacobin Right, the nationalist Right, the positivist Right, the aesthetic Right, the anarchist Right, the fascist Right, the Hussard Right, the entrepreneurial Right, the activist Right, the moralistic Right, the republican Right, the anti-Communist Right, the technocratic Right, the organicist Right, the Poujadist Right, the atlanticist Right, the moderate Right, the romantic Right, the militarist Right, the Catholic Right, the völkisch Right, the conspiratorialist Right, the traditionalist Right, the ecological Right, and the esotericist Right? And we could pose the same question regarding the various Lefts.

Thus, we observe the impossibility of identifying a common denominator that could describe all forms of the Left or Right. This is all the more so in that there exists no airtight barrier between the ideologies and themes which compose them (all combinations are possible), and a number of these themes, far from being assigned a particular residence, have historically never ceased passing from Right to Left or Left to Right.

“In 1815 nationalism, ‘La Marseillaise,’ and the tricolor flag were symbols of the extreme Left. In 1900 they had become those of the extreme Right,” observed Dominique Venner.[12] “Certain themes frequently pass from Left to Right and vice versa,” confirms Arnauld Imatz. “This is the case with imperialism, colonialism, racialism, anti-Semitism, anti-Masonry, anti-Christianism, anti-parliamentarism, anti-technocracy, federalism, centralism, anti-statism, anti-capitalism, anti-Americanism, and more recently, regionalism, ecologism, anti-immigrationism, and anti-Islamism. All completely evade the opposition, the obsessive Left/Right debate.[13]

For example, historically liberalism is a doctrine of the Left, which was dominated for the entire nineteenth century by the English ideology, and which the rise of socialism and then of Communism displaced toward the Right (which explains the sense which the word liberal has preserved in the United States). Racialism, eugenics, and social Darwinism were also born on the Left at the same time as scientistic materialism. The same goes for modern nationalism, which is tied to a political conception of the nation not older than the Revolution, and also the reference to “our ancestors the Gauls” (which originally sought to minimize the Franks’ importance). Colonialism was at first defended by the Left before being defended by the Right. Contrariwise, ecologism first appeared on the Right before passing to the Left. As for the Republican idea, it completely changes meaning depending on whether it is perceived by way of the French Revolution, French-style secularism, or civic republicanism from Titus Livius to Harrington.

It is no less difficult to situate certain individuals. Napoleon, Clemenceau, and de Gaulle have in turn been rejected and claimed by both Left and Right. Likewise, certain unexpected declarations also confuse things. In 1945, it was the Communist Jacques Duclos who shouted, “France for the French!”[14] while ten years earlier the Falangist José Antonio Primo de Rivera condemned nationalism and saluted the “genius” of Karl Marx![15]

Many other examples could of course be cited. “The historian of ideas,” as Arnauld Imatz reminds us, “knows that according to historical ages, places, and sensibilities, the various forms of Right and Left have in turn been universalist or particularist, globalist or patriotic, free-tradist or protectionist, capitalist or anti-capitalist, centralist or federalist, individualist or holist, and organicist, positivist, agnostic, and atheist, or theist and Christian.”[16] There has been a revolutionary Right and a conservative Left, an anti-colonialist Right and a colonialist Left, a communitarian Right and an individualist Left, a materialist or atheistic Right and a Christian Left, a Right that wanted everything to be uniform and a Left which defended differences, a mechanistic Right and an organicist Left, a conspiratorial Left and a rationalistic Right, an optimistic Right and a pessimistic Left, a philo-Semitic Right and an anti-Semitic Left, a permissive Right and an authoritarian Left, a cosmopolitan Right and a nationalist Left, an anti-racist Right and a racialist Left, a Right involved in the Resistance and a Left involved in Collaboration. Equally, there have been Left- and Right-wing productivists, Left- and Right-wing anti-productivists, Left- and Right-wing Statists, Left- and Right-wing anti-Statists, Left- and Right-wing centralists, Left- and Right-wing local autonomists, and so on.

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Things get still more complicated once we cross national frontiers. From one country to another, the same political families are differently configured, and the same concepts do not necessarily have the same content. In Spain, Carlist traditionalism explicitly rejects Maurassianism and the traditionalism of a de Bonald or Joseph de Maistre. The German concepts corresponding to the völkisch or bündisch movements scarcely have equivalents in the Latin countries. Spanish anarcho-syndicalism is not the same thing as revolutionary Italian syndicalism, and so on.

In the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon countries, the division occurs between Conservatives and Labour, conservatives and liberals or social-democrats. In the United States, the Left/Right distinction had practically no meaning until after the Civil War. It only appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century as the result of the pre-existing political infrastructure’s disintegration, which essentially rested on communal life and local autonomy. Moreover, on the other side of the Atlantic this distinction only covers an opposition between “two different versions of liberalism: the classical version of laissez-faire inherited from the nineteenth century as against the twentieth century version based on the welfare state.”[17] In Israel, Left and Right only really oppose one another concerning peace with the Palestinians and the annexation of the occupied territories.

Whereas in Germany, England, the United States, or Canada, the conservatives constitute a family unto themselves and the term is widely employed to designate a current of thought benefiting from a strong intellectual tradition (from Hume to Oakeshott by way of Burke and Coleridge, in the case of the English Whigs), the word “conservative” (or “conservatism”) is remarkable for its absence from the French political vocabulary, as André Siegfried observed in 1930 in his Tableau des partis en France. François Huguenin advances a historical explanation for this.[18] Observing that in Germany and the Anglo-Saxon countries, we find among conservatives both “nationalists” and “liberals,” he believes such an alliance was made impossible in France by the Revolution of 1789. The Revolution in fact irremediably opposed those who absolutely rejected the revolutionary ideas (from Joseph de Maistre or Louis de Bonald all the way to Charles Maurras) and those who, on the Right, accepted the essential even if they rejected the practice (from Tocqueville and Benjamin Constant to Raymond Aron and Bertrand de Jouvenel). So the two camps split definitively, thereby making any “conservatism” impossible. All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the liberal Right, won over to the ideology of progress, attached to the primacy of the individual, and traditionally mistrustful of political power, has never ceased opposing a Right which, traditionalist or not, defended the State’s prerogatives, the concept of the common good, and an organic and communitarian conception of society.

The question remains, however, whether it is possible to be both liberal and conservative. In 1960 the great liberal theoretician Friedrich Hayek answered in the negative in a text which has remained famous: “Why I am not a conservative.”[19] He explained that conservativism is a form of constructivism while liberalism presupposes no social project. At most, as partisans of “spontaneous order” (as opposed to “constructed order”), liberals can admit the well-foundedness of some traditions or “traditional values.” Analyzing society beginning from the individual, they can only reject any collective approach to society’s problems.[20]

So across space as across time, we observe an extreme diversity of Lefts and Rights. This diversity explains why certain Rights have recognized greater affinity with certain Lefts than with other rights — or certain Lefts with certain Rights than with other Lefts. It also explains why appeals to a “union of the Rights,” indefatigably preached in certain milieus, have never resulted in anything: “If we call Right everything which is not Left, this leads to strange groupings so heterogeneous that they cannot result in any common political action.”[21] As for the “union of the Left,” it existed only during the Popular Front (1936-38); within the National Council of the Resistance (1943-47), when the “common program” was adopted in 1972; and when the Communist Party participated in the government between May 1981 and July 1984 — in other words, for less than 13 years over nearly three centuries.

Since it is not possible to reduce all the forms of the Left and Right to a single criterion, most political scientists have stopped talking of them in the singular, preferring to speak in the plural of Rights and Lefts.[22] At the same time, they have undertaken to class them by means of a certain number of typologies.

One of the best-known classifications is that proposed by René Rémond, who distinguishes the traditional and counter-revolutionary Right — supposedly the “original” Right — from the liberal or Orleanist Right, as well as from the Bonapartist or plebiscitary Right represented not only by properly so-called Bonapartism, but also by fascism and Gaullism:

Other authors distinguish two Rights: radical and conservative, and two Lefts, progressive and revolutionary. Others hold that there is only a single (eternal or sublime) traditional Right and four Lefts: authoritarian-nationalist, liberal-bourgeois, anarcho-libertarian, and socialist-Marxist. Still others mark out a single reactionary Right and two Lefts, bourgeois and totalitarian. Finally, there are some who think there are a dozen tendencies: six Rights and six Lefts.[23]

Marc Crapez for his part distinguishes an egalitarian Left, a fraternitarian Left, a liberal Left, a liberal Right, a conservative Right, and a reactionary right.[24] In 1999, the journal Eléments even identified 36 “families of the Right,” each of which can be described by certain watchwords, references, theoreticians, writers, films, and so on.[25]

On the Left, Jacques Julliard discerns four principal families: the liberal Left, the Jacobin Left, the collectivist Left, and the libertarian Left. The liberal Left mainly favors a certain culture of government. It advocates for the market economy, the separation of powers, the ideology of the rights of man, and the distinction between civil society and the State. It is distinct from Right-wing liberalism only by its principled attachment to the concept of equality. The Jacobin Left also favors a “society of individuals,” but insists on “republican” values at the same time. It preaches civic virtue, gives the State a prominent role, and is instinctively hostile to “communitarianism,” regionalism, and decentralization. It strongly professes secularism, a single national form of education, uniformity of lands [l’uniformisation des terroirs], and the one and indivisible republic (“unity is the philosophical and political name of centralization,” says Julliard). The collectivist Left, which is not historically limited to the Communist Party, is distinguished from the Jacobin Left in that it believes in the power of organization, rejects the idea of a general reconciliation under the auspices of procedural reason, and remains convinced that the antagonism between the world of capital and the world of labor is irreducible. The libertarian Left, the Left’s least familiar form (it has never had legislative representation), goes back at least to Proudhon. It does not reject order, but power (“The highest perfection of society,” writes Proudhon, “is found in the union of order and anarchy,” proof that in his eyes these terms are not incompatible). Hostile to parties and to intellectuals, it puts all its confidence in the ability of producers to organize themselves on the basis of freely negotiated contracts.

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None of these typologies is without interest, but none succeeds in “explaining the complexity of possible combinations and alliances within a constellation of elements between which movement is continuous.”[26] Their very diversity — and their contradictions — show that none is a permanently valid truth. At best, they can help us better understand the disposition of forces at a given moment. At bottom, the categories that flow from them remain problematic, and are inevitably oversimplifications. Jacques Julliard, in his book on the varieties of the Left, himself recognizes this when he tries to discern “aggregates” which unite — e.g. collectivism, traditionalism, and fascism (those who above all want to avoid a society only formed of rights-bearing individuals); Jacobinism and Bonapartism (those who make the State the founder and organizer of the social bond); or Left-liberalism, Orleanism, libertarianism, and Christian Democracy (those who share a similar distrust of the State and have confidence in civil society’s capacity to resolve its own problems). “There are now Jacobins of the Left and extreme Left, but also of the Right and extreme Right,” he observes. This demonstrates well the relative character of any typology.

So there is no eternal Left or Right, nor any man of the Left or Right constituted from all eternity. Left and Right are labels which do not rigorously correspond to distinct ideas or different strategies of action. They are certainly not insignificant, but they cannot be dissociated from particular topoi. If circumstances change, if the relations of topos to topos are overturned, the representation of the political system as a binary axis becomes unable to give an account of the situation.

“I deny that there exist ‘permanent values of the Right’ and ‘immortal principles of the Left,’” concludes Arnaud Imatz:

I am not unaware that numerous politicians and journalists of the Left (and of the Left of the Left) and of the Right (and of the Right of the Right) cling desperately to the old dyad as to a sacred relic, but I think they are mistaken. . . . The constant ideological crossover in the course of the years . . . demonstrates that this obsessive dichotomy does not in any way correspond to any intangible opposition between two kinds of temperament, character, or sensibility; they are not inalterable essences, original and absolutely irreducible data of public life; there is no eternal definition of Right and Left valid for all times and in all places. Right and Left are relative positions; each clarifies and explains the other. They are the result of contingent situations.[27]

In 1955, in The Opium of the Intellectuals, Raymond Aron already characterized the concepts of Left and Right as “equivocal.” Since then, there has been no lack of observers and authors to observe that this dyad, which has been so widely employed, no longer means anything. Regarding the Left/Right distinction, described by Costanzo Preve as “an artificial prosthesis of political science,”[28] Jean Baudrillard writes: “If one day the political imagination, political demand, and will have a chance to recover, it can only be on the basis of the radical abolition of this fossilized distinction which has negated and disavowed itself over the course of decades, and which is only held together today by complicity in corruption.”[29] “For a long time now,” states Cornelius Castoriadis, “the Left/Right divide in France and elsewhere has no longer corresponded to the great problems of our time or to radically opposed political choices.”[30] For his part, Régis Debray observes: “When there are no more differences between Left and Right than between the services of a nationalized bank and a private bank, or between the news program of a public network and a commercial network, we can, with no cause for regret, get by without either, and, who knows, perhaps even without realizing it.”[31]

We seem to have reached this point, and it gives one the impression of the end of an epoch. “The political form of modernity is exhausted, because it has run its course,” thinks Serge Latouche:

The Left and Right have essentially achieved what they set out to do. The game of alternation has succeeded extraordinarily well. The enlightened Right and the Left claim the Enlightenment’s heritage, but neither claims it entirely. Each has seen part of its program realized. The Left, whose imagination is attached to the Enlightenment’s radical side, is in love with progress, science, and technology; from Condorcet to Saint-Simon, we find these same themes. The liberal and enlightened Right, from Montesquieu to Tocqueville, exalts individual freedom and economic competition. The Left demands welfare for all, the right to growth, and the right to enjoy the fruits of one’s undertakings. The modern State has realized all of these things, albeit not without jolts and crises.[32]

What has rendered the Left/Right distinction obsolete most of all are society’s deep transformations that have been induced by mutations of the capitalist system. But we also see that all great events cut transversally across all political families. Whether the question is the Gulf War; the intervention of NATO forces in the Balkans; negotiations within the framework of the projected Transatlantic Treaty; the reunification of Germany and its consequences; the attitude to be adopted with regard to Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the debate on the construction of Europe and the common currency; controversies with regard to ecology, Islam, secularism, cultural identities, or biotechnologies — all the debates which have taken place in these last years have produced divisions irreducible to the traditional cleavages. The fracture lines are henceforward transversal: They run through the Left as well as the Right. Henceforth they sketch out new divisions.

Born of modernity, the Left/Right divide is disappearing along with it. Only those who fail to understand that the world has changed, and that obsolete conceptual tools no longer allow us to analyze it, still cling to this cleavage for reasons of habit, convenience, laziness, or interest. In the domain of public opinion, the concepts of Left and Right can still create illusions because they continue to form part of political and parliamentary language, which uses them as mantras in the hope of calling upon conditioned reflexes. Then people have recourse to phantasmagorical repoussoirs[33] (an anti-fascism without fascism, an anti-Communism without Communism), while those who notice the end of the traditional divide are criticized for “deliberately creating confusion” [taxés de « confusionnisme »] or are accused of muddying the waters for their own obscure purposes. In the world of politicians, the theatrical use of Left/Right opposition in fact aims principally at masking the convergence of camps whose identities have been lost. Arnaud Imatz is not wrong to see in this a “debilitating myth designed to break popular resistance to an oligarchy’s crystallization.”[34] All this will only go on for just so long.

* * *

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Notes

[1] Norberto Bobbio, Destra e sinistra. Ragioni e significati di una distinzione politica (Rome: Donzelli, 1994).

[2] Cf. Marcello Veneziani, Sinistra e destra. Risposta a Norberto Bobbio (Florence: Vallecchi, 1995); and Sergio Benvenuto, “Par-delà droite et gauche,” in Krisis, May 2009, 74-87.

[3] Cf. Allen Wood, “Marx et l’égalité,” in Krisis, June 2009, 51-73, who believes we should view Marx as an opponent of the ideal of equality, although “he was also an opponent, and not the least important, of all forms of social privilege and oppression” (52).

[4] Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring [1878], Moscow 1954, 143.

[5] Allen Wood, “Marx et l’égalité,” 61.

[6] Moiséi Ostrogorski, La Démocratie et les partis politiques [1902] (Paris: Seuil, 1979), 221, Cf. also Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: “Qui dit révolution dit nécessairement progrès, dit par là même conservation” (Idées révolutionnaires [1848], Tops-Trinquier, Antony 1996, 223).

[7] Vincent Coussedière, interview with Alexandre Devecchio, website Figaro Vox, March 18, 2016, 5.

[8] “Jean-Claude Michéa répond a dix questions,” in Gilles Labelle, Éric Martin, & Stéphane Vibert (eds.), Les Racines de la liberté. Réflexions a partir de l’anarchisme tory, op. cit., 302-304; 317. Cf. also Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York & London: Norton, 1991).

[9] “It is absurd to say that the philosophes of the Enlightenment were on the Left,” writes Jacques Julliard, “but it is legitimate to hold that the Left is the party of the Enlightenment” (Les Gauches françaises, 1762-2012).

[10] Ibid.

[11] Michel Marmin & Éric Branca, Gauche-Droite. Le tour de la question (Paris: Chronique, 2016).

[12] Dominique Venner, in Enquete sur l’histoire, no. 6, “L’âge d’or de la droite 1870-1940,” Spring 1993.

[13] Arnaud Imatz, Droite/gauche: pour sortir de l’équivoque. Histoire des idées et des valeurs non conformistes du XIXe au XXIe siècle (Paris: Pierre-Guillaume de Roux, 2016), 71.

[14] Jacques Duclos, in L’Humanité, November 26, 1945.

[15] “We are not nationalists, because nationalism is the individualism of peoples,” he said on November 17, 1935 (Escritos y Discursos, op. cit., 811). Echoing this thought, we may cite Jean Mabire: “I am not a Communist because I am a revolutionary” (L’écrivain, la politique et l’espérance [Paris: Saint-Just, 1966, 50). On April 9, 1935, José Antonio Primo de Rivera declared in Madrid: “From the social point of view, I find myself in agreement (without trying to be) on more than one point of Karl Marx’s critique. . . . What did he do? Just this: He sat beside the living reality of an economic form of organization, that of English manufacturing at Manchester, and he deduced from it, implacably, that within this structure certain constants prevailed which would end by destroying it. Karl Marx wrote this in an enormous book . . . but truly just as interesting as it was enormous, a densely written book [un livre d’une dialectique serrée] full of genius.”

[16] Arnaud Imatz, “Le clivage droite/gauche en question,” in La Nouvelle Revue d’histoire, July-August 2016, 17. Cf. also “L’antagonisme droite/gauche en question,” in Arnaud Imatz, Droite/gauche : pour sortir de l’équivoque, 35-115.

[17] Paul Piccone, “De la Nouvelle Gauche au populisme postmoderne,” in Krisis, February 2008, 77.

[18] François Huguenin, Le Conservatisme impossible. Libéraux et réactionnaires en France depuis 1789 (Paris: La Table Ronde, 2006).

[19] Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1960).

[20] Cf. Pascal Salin, “Est-il possible d’etre ‘libéral-conservateur’?”, in Les Cahiers de l’indépendance, Summer 2016, 59-65.

[21] Henri Guaino, in Valeurs actuelles, September 8, 2016, 20.

[22] Cf. Jean François Sirinelli (ed.), Histoire des droites en France, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1992); Jacques Julliard, Les Gauches françaises, 1762-2012. René Rémond, who in 1954 published La Droite en France, significantly adopted the plural beginning with the fourth edition: Les Droites en France (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1982). In it he describes the Right as “a hybrid being, full of contradictions.”

[23] Arnaud Imatz, Droite/gauche: pour sortir de l’équivoque, 23.

[24] Marc Crapez, La Gauche réactionnaire. Mythes de la plèbe et de la race dans le sillage des Lumières (Paris: Berg International, 1997).

[25] Alain de Benoist, Charles Charpentier, Michel Marmin, & Grégory Pons, “Les 36 familles de droite,” in Éléments, February 1999, 24-32.

[26] Arnaud Imatz, Droite/gauche: pour sortir de l’équivoque, 32.

[27] Arnaud Imatz, “Le clivage droite/gauche en question,” 16.

[28] Constanzo Preve, “Une discussion pour l’instant interminable,” 2-15.

[29] Jean Baudrillard, De l’exorcisme en politique ou la conjuration des imbéciles (Paris: Sens et Tonka, 1998), 19-20.

[30] “Castoriadis, un déçu du gauche-droite,” in Le Monde, July 12, 1986.

[31] Régis Debray, Que vive la République (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1989).

[32] Serge Latouche, “Le MAUSS est-il apolitique ?,” in La Revue du MAUSS, third trimester 1991, 70-71.

[33] The use of an object such as a curtain or tree extremely close up to the picture plane, especially in Baroque painting, to create a sense of depth. It could be translated as “foil.” (Tr.)

[34] Arnaud Imatz, Droite/gauche: pour sortir de l’équivoque, 13-14.