Norberto Bobbio's Left and Right
Scheuer, Jeffrey
ASEEMINGLY OFFHAND personal note toward the end of this slim but remarkable volume of political theory conveys the earthy origins of an abstract egalitarian impulse. As the child of a bourgeois...
...112 DISSENT / Summer 1998 and the proud (but naive) American tradition of pragmatism, which implies that neutral solutions can be found to political and scientific problems alike, and that no immutable values are at stake, least of all any based on class inequalities...
...I bequeath $ to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...Either way, Bobbio amply confirms the validity of that spectrum, and the importance of competing notions of equality to all democratic struggles...
...But ideology persists despite those forms of institutional repression, because politics by definition embraces disagreement about individual ends and social purposes...
...but we could not help noticing the contrast between our houses and theirs, our food and theirs, and our clothes and theirs...
...And it is hard to dispute his conclusion that "the left has not only not completed its task, it has hardly commenced it...
...Affirming that spectrum, and making the narrower case for the liberal view of equality, are the twin enterprises of Left and Right...
...Left/right is not the only distinction in the political sphere," Bobbio writes, "but it is encountered everywhere...
...with brilliance by George Lichtheim in a seminal essay rehearsing the complex career of this powerful but slippery idea...
...But the primary aim of Left and Right is rather different and, if anything, more admirably successful: that is, to make a broad theoretical argument not for liberal egalitarianism or the left, but for ideology as such...
...Political discourse must always allow for the new, the insightful, the imaginative...
...10017 (212) 5953084...
...In doing so, he effectively demolishes a tendency, common in American political debate, to view ideology in this conventional sense, the continuum between "left" and "right," as exhausted, irrelevant, or otherwise defunct...
...later, with disdain by Napoleon...
...It was used originally by Destutt de Tracy and his followers in postrevolutionary France...
...Every year when we started our holidays, we learnt that one of our playmates had died the previous winter from tuberculosis...
...The issues engaged include the distribution of wealth, the scope of government regulation to curb or offset the market, the desirability of class mobility and the acceptable means of achieving it, the power of labor vis a vis capital, the proper balance between public and private investment, and so forth...
...A LEGACY OF IDEAS A bequest of any size can be of lasting benefit to Dissent and help ensure that the ideas and beliefs you hold dear will continue to have a public forum...
...Now emeritus professor of legal and political philosophy at the University of Turin, an Italian senator, and a nonagenarian, Bobbio offers a compelling blueprint of the architecture of modern liberalism...
...THE MASS media disdain ideology because it's abstract, complex, and can't be sold...
...In any case, the notion that this bipolar sense of ideology is archaic is put to rout...
...This is because virtually every significant political argument is about the relative importance of one or another form of equality: of political rights, of opportunity, of welfare, of dignity and toleration...
...After distributing the specific bequests listed above (to others in your will), I leave the remainder of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...It has been used polemically by both left and right to disparage any belief system or orthodoxy that systematically blinds its adherents to certain presumed realities...
...But it is precisely this conflict between fundamental choices which, in my opinion, characterizes so well the opposing camps which for a long time we have been in the habit of calling left and right: on the one hand, people who believe that human beings are more equal than unequal, and on the other, people who believe that we are more unequal than equal...
...114 DISSENT / Summer 1998...
...Others join the democratic babble on the Internet...
...3. You can leave the remainder of your estate...
...In the democratic context, such questions are ideological...
...and the more specifically American and libertarian individualism that exalts the isolated, anarchic self and is uniformly hostile to government...
...Much as Machiavelli assayed the use of brute power by sovereign princes in early modern city-states, Bobbio systematically explores the range and structure of the political spectrum...
...But if anything, Bobbio does not go far enough...
...Amazingly, Left and Right was the best-selling book in Italy in 1994, selling over two hundred thousand copies...
...I don't necessarily share Bobbio's certitude that equality is the ultimate foundation of the political spectrum...
...they are themselves, after all, ideological stakeholders...
...This is partly, perhaps, because politics itself is an essentially abstract framework for public morality—and Americans tend to abhor abstraction...
...There is Francis Fukuyama's neo-Hegelian idea that political history is over because liberal democracy has triumphed over communism...
...JEFFREY SCHEUER is writing a book about television and ideology, based on his essay in the Summer 1995 issue of Dissent...
...As the child of a bourgeois Italian family, Norberto Bobbio recalls how he would go to the country during summer holidays and play easily with the children of peasants: Our friendship was based upon a perfect understanding, and the class differences were completely irrelevant...
...2. You can leave a specific percentage of your estate...
...Daniel Bell's similar argument of a generation ago...
...A longer book, and perhaps a more tedious one, might have dwelt at greater length on the history and hollowness of contrary claims...
...The general American antipathy to ideological debate seems to echo the vaguely philistine centrism of the mass media, and especially of television, where commercial imperatives muffle controversy...
...School vouchers...
...Television is especially susceptible to the viral strain that evacuates politics of meaning and engagement, and equates it instead with spectacle and celebrity...
...All are more or less parallel, and more or less permanent, features of the core debate about the demands of justice and the division of power and wealth...
...and on the left it has also served as a wider, and more freighted, idea...
...It would be hard to imagine a democratic political culture that did not ultimately revolve around such issues of equality, and competing positions advocating more or less of it, in more or less complex forms, and relative to one or another criterion for distributing goods and rewards...
...Confusion and ambiguity attend the concept of ideology...
...But there is also a relatively unambiguous and neutral sense of "ideology"—Bobbio's sense: to identify the central axis of debate, and the shades of political value from left to right, in open societies, the very currency of democratic discourse...
...Without offering strikingly original insights, and without scoring polemical points that would mar the force of his analysis, Bobbio makes his case so concisely and adroitly as to deserve the wide attention of egalitarians and their adversaries, not least in America...
...or on the more interesting, but still flawed, view (of Anthony Giddens, among others) that we live in a "post-ideological" age...
...Here we might wish to add, or substitute, "ought to be" for "are...
...But they also abhor any sort of claim against the individual, which is a profoundly ideological stance...
...Timing played an important part: the book's appearance coincided with the first bipolar election campaign in memory...
...One symptom of this is the recent popularity of talk radio, a more democratic (or at least more populist) medium, and a refuge for the anger and alienation—and often the bigotry— of its audience...
...In this "end of ideology" supposition several dubious notions converge...
...But that is not to contradict his thesis, only to suggest that there may be a deeper philosophical axis on which the left-right spectrum rests...
...But they invariably return to basic questions about power and public life...
...Many Americans, despite getting the bulk of their information and political socialization from television, are alienated from the media-driven political culture...
...Affirmative action, anyone...
...In a democratic and capitalist society —a society in which people have divergent interests and status, and the right to talk about and act upon them politics inevitably focuses on conflicts over wider vs...
...But cogency and lucidity helped...
...so are the pages of the glossy magazines...
...For more specifics on this or other information on gift planning, feel free to phone or write Dissent, 521 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y...
...I ELUSIONS ALL...
...It is a broad, but not an unbounded, universe...
...and some, despite a firm sense of morality, lack the political passions of the radio crowd or the cybernauts...
...The polarity of left and right endures because democratic politics is chiefly about equality, and the innumerable shades of opinion between two basic polar views...
...narrower distribution of political and economic power: in short, on issues of equality...
...for DISSENT / Summer 1998 113 them, contempt for politics can translate into ideological illiteracy...
...According to Umberto Eco, ideology in this broad sense "constitutes a system of assumptions and expectations which interacts with the message and determines the selection of the code with which to read it...
...Even if liberal democracy has indeed triumphed once and for all over despotic government, collective or otherwise (and I think the smart money is elsewhere), the age of ideology isn't over, but rather coming into maturity...
...Here again, different senses of individualism must be distinguished: the Enlightenment and Jeffersonian idea, shared by modern liberals and conservatives, that only individuals, and not metaphysical phantasms, count in the end...
...I bequeath % of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...I do not remember a single death among my school-friends in the city...
...political questions can apply to art, science, the media, or virtually any other sector of public life...
...We ask you to consider one of the following options: 1. You can leave a specific amount or a particular asset...
...with elusive profundity by Marx and his followers...
...Certain debates must take place: if they do not (and frank discussion of class is glaringly absent from the American political conversation) they become silent fissures below unsteady ground...
...Despite these various anti-ideological currents, several historical constants generate polarized argument between competing moral-political visions...
...But it's a complicated picture, and one that isn't free of contradictions...
...Our legal name is the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...Most serious conservatives are too sophisticated to make such arguments, even if they enjoy the rhetorical pretense that liberalism is defunct...
...Bobbio writes: It is very difficult to know the complex origin of this fundamental choice...
...with renewed contempt by cold war anticommunists...
...Bobbio might, for example, have elaborated on his claim that "The ideological tree is always green . . . there is nothing more ideological than declaring the demise of ideologies...
Vol. 45 • July 1998 • No. 3
