Norberto Bobbio’s Right and Left between Classic Concepts and Contemporary Crises

In 1994, in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Norberto Bobbio penned one of the classic statements about Right and Left. Eighteen years later, the dichotomy is as central as ever to the functioning of democratic institutions and to the political self-perception of ordinary people, but its content has been eroded to the point where many have claimed it lingers merely as an empty signifier. In order to account for this discrepancy, the paper, in dialogue with Bobbio, pursues two coordinated lines of inquiry. The first focuses on the historical dimension of the Left-Right cleavage, tracing its origin to 19th century debates regarding the speed of progress, understood as a linear process ultimately productive of social leveling. I contend that the historical arc of this debate regarding the transition to economic and social modernity was decisively closed by a crisis of violence in the 20th century, which rendered unavailable for the present any return to the ‘Victorian modernity’ of the ‘first globalization’ by severing the constitutive link of democracy and revolution. The second line of inquiry considers the contemporary predicament not as a transcendence of the antagonism of Right and Left, but as a displacement of the locus of political decision that renders national politics irrelevant for the issues that characterize the Right-Left dichotomy. Such a state of affairs is not interpreted as a decisive victory of the free-market, globalizing Right, but rather as a general failure of democracy, an abrogation of collective subjectivity most clearly seen in the withdrawal of economic and social rights guaranteed by protected liberalism. On this basis, the task of the day is seen to consist in a theory and practice of the politics of Left and Right at the international level, which the 20th century signally failed to accomplish.