Metamorphoses of the Left and the Right

Left and Right as political terms, belong to the turn of an era, from agrarian society to whatever comes now. The Left came first. The Right only emerged as a reaction.

(Picture: Midjourney)

The dispute over what is actually right-wing is not (!) as old as the Right itself. Instead it is one that has increased in intensity and decreased in clarity over time. In the beginning, it was quite clear. The Right stood for the social order from the time before the French Revolution. The Right was for throne and altar. In fact, one would hardly have used this term independently back then. One was a conservative, or in the language of the opponent: a reactionary.

Today, people call themselves right-wing, and they write philosophical treatises about what this right-wing is, without arriving at a reasonable result. The reason for this is very simple: The Right is nothing in itself. The Right is not the Left. The Right is negatively defined, and the Left was already there long before the Right. But both are the product of a transitional period.

When we draw the broad lines of our era, we tend to forget that we are living in a historical transitional period, the likes of which last occurred five millennia ago. Back then, the first high cultures of the agrarian age emerged. In a relatively short time, not agriculture itself developed—that is older—but something less tangible yet equally significant: organization beyond local settlements in the first empires on the Nile and Euphrates. Enabled by writing and, through writing, by administration. When cuneiform was deciphered, romantics expected to read the oldest poetry in the world, religious seekers hoped for secrets from the time of the creation of the Bible. Instead, museums' storage halls house several hundred tons of baked clay inventory lists, invoices, and complaint letters. The poetic and religious romantics were disappointed, but these prosaic relics testify to much more than a poem about Moses' exodus from Egypt.

These invoices and inventory lists are the material remnants of a way of organizing human coexistence that, in its basic features, did not change from the days of King Narmer to those of Frederick the Great: A broad base of rural population, at least 80 percent of the total population, works in food production. This makes large landowners the dominant social class. As an estate with its own customs and culture, these landowners develop into the nobility. The rural population generates a modest agricultural surplus that feeds the cities with their artisans. These cities are also home to the comparatively tiny number of magistrates, merchants, and priests, who are indispensable for materially and spiritually organizing this society—many times more complex than the preceding village and tribal communities. And they do this with the help of writing, without which none of it would have been possible. Even the more abstract institutions of this agrarian age, such as theology or credit, are all demonstrable in antiquity. How quickly this change occurred back then exactly can no longer be said with certainty today due to sources almost not existing, but it must have been a matter of a few generations, not a slow development over many centuries or even millennia. Even if we are wont to throw around such numbers when talking about in the furthest past. I consider it not unlikely that there were people who were born as inhabitants of a village by the river and died as subjects of the god-king Horus of Upper and Lower Egypt.

What triggered our change of an era? Was it, as Rolf Peter Sieferle wrote, the use of energy sources not dependent on the current photosynthesis on this planet, or something else? This is a question we do not need to answer here. What is certain is that we are living through this monumental change or, if the technical change is now slowing down again, as some believe it does, we have just left it behind.

The political directions of the Left and the Right are fundamentally tied to this turn of an era. They only arose when the old, organically grown social orders were no longer sustainable. This raised the question: "How shall we shape our society?"

To anyone for whom this question seems very left-wing, reminding them of the babble from university politics, they are correct. This question was only raised because, with the end of agrarian society, a space suddenly opened up that was not filled by orders that had arisen through long social evolution. The Enlightenment thinkers believed that an age of obscurantism was finally coming to an end and that people, now finally making use of their own reason, would suddenly recognize that there was no rational justification for the rule of monarchs or the privileges of the nobility. This image has persisted even among reactionary opponents, who then saw in this use of one's own reason human hubris against an eternal order ordained by God. Even in conservative lamentations about the disenchantment of the world, this reactionary error has persisted. Ironically, this granted the revolutionary order, which soon settled down in moderation as the liberal order, an equal standing with the traditional order that the former does not deserve. For the traditional order was not the result of a rationalistic social experiment, but the result of social evolution, of trial and error over centuries and millennia. As long as the basic conditions of its existence in the agrarian age persisted, these organically arisen societies were vastly superior to any artificial construction. But to the extent that humanity left the agrarian age behind, they became obsolete and untenable.

This created space for rationally devised social concepts. Of these, the Left one, based on the legal equality of all people, is the most easy to intellectually convey. This concept leads to the idea of the social contract. The social contract starts from a set of equal people who conclude a contract with each other that founds society. That this contract conclusion never actually took place was, of course, already clear to Hobbes and Locke, but the social contract was not meant to describe the practical founding of a state, as was the goal of Machiavelli's writings, but to provide its ethical justification, actually its justification in natural law. According to this idea, people have certain rights by nature, and based on these natural rights, society is legally constructed. Anyone who has read the contract theorists of the Baroque will notice that they argue in a formal, legalistic way. The social contract and thus the powers of the state are founded through transfers of rights, whose legality is examined, as every law student still learns today. For example, no one can transfer a right that he did not have in the first place. This leads to difficulties, for instance, in justifying the death penalty if one—like Locke—rejects the right to suicide.

In some form or another, the ethical justifications of all left-wing theories are variations of the social contract. There are leftist social theories that dispense with a fundamental justification of their goals and simply presuppose the value of their slogans. And because in intellectual history there is nothing that does not exist, there are even leftist theories that explicitly reject natural law, but then suddenly make a fuss about human rights. But all left social theory that attempts to cleanly justify its goals is based on the social contract. Even the "veil of ignorance" of the American ethicist John Rawls is a conceptual aid with which the question is to be answered as to which social contract is the just one, by placing us in the hypothetical situation where we do not know what position we will occupy in society. From Hobbes to Rawls, however, the core assumption of all these intellectual edifices is the legal equality of humans.

This idea of the legal equality of all human beeings is not ín itself new. From antiquity through Mazdak, who preached the community of goods and women in 6th-century Persia, to the Peasants' Wars, it has repeatedly arisen throughout history. Christianity alone has produced countless sects that preached the equality of people. Contrary to the progressive view of history, no special progress, no enlightenment, was needed for people to ask the question: "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" And back then as today, no, back then far more than today, hardly anyone could give a rational answer to it.