On July 1st, 2022, Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (also known as AMLO) inaugurated the Dos Bocas oil refinery in his home state of Tabasco. The inauguration was a huge publicity coup for the president, who had promised to build the refinery when he first took office.
 
One of the highlights of the ceremony was the moment when the president unveiled—and fawned over—“La Aurora de México” (1947). La Aurora de Mexico [“The Dawn of Mexico”] is a painting depicting a woman embracing several oil towers as if these were her babies. La Aurora was painted by the late Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. It celebrates the expropriation of foreign oil companies and the nationalisation of the Mexican oil industry in 1938 by then-President Lazaro Cárdenas. Cárdenas appears at the top left of the painting together with Vicente Lombardo Toledano, a labour organiser who helped oil workers unionise.
 
La Aurora harkens back to a product of an era in which the Mexican state actively supported artworks and monuments in public plazas, crossroads, and buildings around the country. That the authoritarian Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) was able to maintain a one-party rule for over seventy years (1929–2000) can, in part, be explained by its ability to tie its political achievements to those of the nation and ideologically interpellate the public into its political project through widespread political communication. The latter included supporting the production of artworks and monuments, many of which were was based on the idea of “art for the people” and, like La Aurora, are characterised by their “narrative style, realist aesthetic, populist iconography, and socialist politics”.[1]
 
AMLO’s public celebration of La Aurora is noteworthy because the Mexican state’s support for the arts and its collaboration with artists has been waning for decades. This decline has accelerated in the wake of the country’s transition to a formal electoral democracy in 2000. Market-oriented reforms have enabled an unprecedented incursion of private corporations and collectors into the art world, who have increasingly supplanted the state as the arts’ main patron.[2]
 
Despite AMLO’s declared opposition to the neoliberal turn in Mexican politics and his nationalist rhetoric that recalls the PRI era, this process has accelerated during his time in power. One of the most surprising characteristics of AMLO’s tenure has been his vocal disdain for artists and intellectuals. Rather than bringing artists back under the aegis of the state, the president has excluded them from his populist project by consistently accusing them of being members of a nebulous, neoliberal elite, and by cutting resources earmarked for artistic institutions as part of his fiscal policy of austeridad republicana or republican austerity.[3]
 
In this context, the display of La Aurora de México during the Dos Bocas refinery’s inauguration is telling. Instead of commissioning a new artwork or monument for the new infrastructure, the government used an old painting that harkens back to the country’s post-Revolutionary authoritarian era and one that celebrates a key political accomplishment that has been framed by official history as a major act of anti-imperialist sovereignty.
 
By displaying this painting at the inauguration, AMLO sought to signify a new era of assertive Mexican sovereignty and nostalgia for a time when Mexico’s economy grew rapidly through a politics of economic nationalisation. As he has argued repeatedly, the refinery will generate a “massive turn” (“un gran viraje”) back from the “neoliberal turn” of the 2000s and 2010s that had made Mexico dependent on imported petroleum.[4] In so doing, it will pave the way for the country to become more economically self-sufficient, which in turn suggests the return of an accompanying economic prosperity.
 
The Aurora itself, meanwhile, is not actually publicly owned. Instead, it belongs to a private owner who loaned the piece to AMLO for the occasion. The Aurora will not remain at the refinery; the painting was returned to the owner as soon as the inauguration was over.[5]
 
AMLO’s one-day exhibition of Siqueiros painting during the Dos Bocas inauguration is paradoxical. On the one hand, AMLO is using the Aurora to signify continuity with a past that is associated with the assertion of Mexican sovereignty and a state-driven economic policy, as a way to signal a break with neoliberal policy. On the other, the brevity of the display, and the fact that the artwork is privately owned also signifies the decline of the Mexican state’s support of public art and thus a continuity with the neoliberal turn rather than a break with it. But what if this interpretation is missing the point? What if rather than focusing on the Siqueiros’ painting as the refinery’s aesthetic and ideological locus we focused on the refinery itself? What if AMLO’s works of infrastructure—of which the Dos Bocas refinery is one among many—are the current administration’s monuments and works of art?
 
Traditionally, monuments have been defined as interventions into the landscape that are built with the purpose of celebrating, commemorating, and glorifying a particular person or event and doing so by conveying a sense of permanence.[6] Extending J.L. Austin’s famous definition, Kaitlin Murphi argues that “monuments effectively function as speech acts: they are public proclamations of certain narratives that are intended to simultaneously reify that narrative and lay claim to the space in which the monument has been placed.”[7] In other words, Murphi maintains, in addition to conveying information, monuments also do things: they usher in or create a new state of affairs simply by laying claim to a space through their presence.
 
While the Siqueiros painting cannot be said to have achieved this, given its impermanent presence, the refinery itself certainly did. Briefly framed by La Aurora, the refinery draws selectively from that celebrated past of oil nationalisation, thus operating like a monument. Indeed, works of infrastructure, much like monuments, possess a sign value that enables them to engage in similar meaning-making and political operations.[8] The Dos Bocas refinery instantiates the ways in which infrastructures may be attributed the symbolic power to effectively function as monuments.
 
Monuments are “focal points of a complex dialogue between past and present,” connecting historical events that are worthy of monumentalisation and spectators who engage with the past via these objects.[9] The relationship that Dos Bocas establishes with that past and its glory is, crucially, mediated through the current political significance that this refinery is expected to have: it is not merely meant to be a repetition of the past, but rather another such moment of revolutionary change. This change, in the president’s words, is marked by a revival of the nationalised oil industry, which had been weakened by neoliberalisation, and thus a recovery of the nation’s lost dignity as a notable producer of oil. The refinery may then be mobilising the past of the Aurora towards its self-fashioning as part of an autonomous aesthetic-political project, making this infrastructure both a monument to the past and to itself. It is also, in many ways, a monument to an economic ideology that once proved to be quite fruitful and an attempt to revive the historical moment in which it did.
 
However, when AMLO inaugurated the refinery, it was not yet ready to be used. Dos Bocas was rushed into being so as to mark a milestone of the current administration, but it was still at least a year away from beginning production. According to several news outlets, only the administrative part of the plant was ready, which represented 30% of the infrastructure. This was not lost on commentators, including prominent critical journalists who described the inauguration as a simulation, forcing AMLO to admit that the refinery was in fact just starting a trial period and would begin operations in earnest in 2023.
 
In a sense, the incomplete—and, in a technical sense, useless—refinery merely constituted the staging of AMLO’s celebration of himself. By inaugurating it before it was finished, the president set the refinery in what Marrero-Guillamón calls a state of suspension, which is not “a temporary phase between the start of a project and its (successful) conclusion, but as a mode of existence in its own right.”[10] Without performing any technical function, the refinery’s power and meaning remain purely aesthetic and discursive, rendering it a monument.
 
By being inaugurated in pieces, infrastructures may work as promises[11] and, therefore, as monuments to those who build them. For AMLO, this was not the first time he used Dos Bocas to stage a political event. On December 9, 2018, barely a week after his inauguration, AMLO laid the first stone at a massive event at the same site. This was marked by the attendance of several high-ranking politicians and a lengthy presidential speech that framed the refinery as part of an urgent solution to a profound crisis in Mexico’s oil industry, caused by waning investment in the state company, Pemex, and the failed effort to open the oil sector to private companies. This event circulated widely: its video was uploaded that same day to AMLO’s personal YouTube account, where it has been streamed over half a million times. The president has also frequently spoken about the refinery during his daily press conferences, showcasing other milestones in its construction, each time setting off discussions in the press and on social media.
 
Following Isaac Marrero-Guillamón, we may see the materiality of Dos Bocas as “redistributed… into multiple instantiations other than its construction, such as exhibitions, technical documents, and public presentations.”[12] We can further extend this redistribution by considering how the extensive media coverage of these public events stretched the refinery’s visibility throughout the public sphere in its capacity as a monumental setting of presidential power. Indeed, a large part of the refinery’s public presence depends not on the concrete and steel of the infrastructure itself, but rather on the circulation of its representations. Given its remote location in a small coastal town in southwest Mexico, the refinery is only connected to most Mexican citizens in these highly indirect ways, much as the gasoline it will (eventually) produce will make its way through the pipelines and into the gas tanks of the vehicles transporting them.
 
Like a monument, the meaning and experiences around Dos Bocas are produced in its abundant “verbal and textual sources.”[13] In official discourse, the refinery is meant to materialise the president’s project of soberanía energética, or energy sovereignty, which, in turn, points to a broader notion of sovereignty—that of an autonomous nation, no longer the object of its commercial partners’ imperial power. More than that, Dos Bocas is meant to be exemplary of the president’s political-economic project, dubbed the Fourth Transformation (4T). Though a precise definition of the 4T is lacking, the president usually invokes it “to describe a revindication of national pride, a political project of aligning the presidency with the popular will, and the creation of a social movement that could do away with the old party system, social inequality, and the economic status quo.”[14] It is meant to match the magnitude of three previous watershed moments in Mexican history: the Independence War (1810–1821), the Guerra de Reforma (Reform War, 1858–1861), and the Revolution (1910–1917). One could perhaps wonder whether the construction of a refinery can in fact be seen as revolutionary in an era of climate change, or whether it in fact constitutes an anticolonial, sovereign act.
 
The refinery’s value rests less (if at all) in its technical function than in its performative capacity. Going back to Murphi’s definition of monuments, Dos Bocas, even in its unfinished stage, does things: it reifies the profound political transformation that AMLO claims to be spearheading and gives AMLO’s discourse concrete reality, thereby conjuring it into being. In so doing, the refinery ushers in a state of affairs that connects multiple temporalities. It draws on a glorified sovereign past and heroic struggle to shape a present that is rendered permanent through the infrastructure’s claim to space. In this scenario, artworks and monuments that celebrate AMLO’s political project are no longer needed, it is the infrastructure itself that does the work.
 
The effectiveness of this infrastructure’s performative power vis-à-vis the old regime’s use of public art remains, however, an open question. To evaluate it, one may need to delve more deeply into the features of the ideological projects that each one is a part of and the conditions that have sustained them. These may include the actors involved in their orchestration and their aims; the distinct ways in which each project’s message has circulated—the former, for instance, privileging visual form in artistic representations of infrastructure, while the latter has resorted to discourse and spectacle; and the ways in which each has been taken up by those they are meant to address; as well as the possibilities for each message to be debated and challenged. But rather than thinking of these two projects separately, as competing endeavours, we must look at their mutual intertwinement as the source of their power. As we saw, La Aurora’s brief display at Dos Bocas’ inauguration meant to transfer its dense meaning to this infrastructure. The refinery’s symbolic force then hinged upon La Aurora’s own (historical) force, which AMLO sought to take in new directions. And, as he did so, he reaffirmed, perhaps reinvigorated, the force of an old, superseded medium, making it part of a new form of political communication.



[1] Mary Coffey, How a revolutionary art became official culture (Durham: Duke University, 2012): 22.

[2] Daniel Montero, El Cubo de Rubik. Arte Mexicano en los Años 90. (México, RM, 2014).

[3] https://www.diputados.gob.mx/LeyesBiblio/pdf/LFAR_191119.pdf

[4] Jon Martín Cullel. “López Obrador defiende la “autosuficiencia” en gasolinas en la inauguración de la refinería de Dos Bocas,” El País (July 1, 2022): https://elpais.com/mexico/2022-07-01/lopez-obrador-defiende-la-autosuficiencia-en-gasolinas-en-la-inauguracion-de-la-refineria-de-dos-bocas.html

[5] Leticia Sánchez Medel. “Obra de Siqueiros es exhibida en la inauguración de la Refinería Dos Bocas,” Milenio (July 1, 2022): https://www.milenio.com/cultura/refineria-bocas-exponen-obra-siqueiros-inauguracion

[6] James Young, The Texture of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).

[7] Kaitlin Murphy, “Fear and loathing in monuments: Rethinking the politics and practices of monumentality and monumentalisation,” Memory Studies 14 (6): 1143-1158.

[8] Hannah Appel, Nikhil Anand, and Akhil Gupta, The Promise of Infrastructure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018)

[9] Peter Carrier, Holocaust Monuments and National Memory Cultures in France and Germany since 1989 (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005, 7).

[10] Isaac Marrero-Guillamón, “Monumental Suspension: Art, Infrastructure, and Eduardo Chillida’s Unbuilt Monument to Tolerance,” Social Analysis 64 (16): 28.

[11] Appel, Anand, and Gupta 2018; and Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327-343, 2013.

[12] Marrero-Guillamón 2020, 28.

[13] Carrier 2006, 22.

[14] Humberto Beck, Carlos Bravo Regidor, and Patrick Iber, “Year One of AMLO’s Mexico,” Dissent (Winter 2020): https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/year-one-of-amlos-mexico

It is a well-established argument in the economics and political science literature that a country’s level of economic development has an impact on people’s political orientations. Following the central tenets of Social Modernisation Theory, high income levels and solid welfare provisions at the national level facilitate the fulfilment of people’s basic survival needs, so that post-materialist issues (relating e.g. to questions of multiculturalism, LGBTQ+ rights or the protection of the environment, rather than questions of economic survival) are likely to play a bigger role for the ideological identities of those individuals who grow up under conditions of macro-economic security compared to those who do not.[1]
 
Based on these insights, we ask how the relationship between individuals’ understanding of what it means to be “economically well off” and their self-placements on a left-right scale may differ depending on their macro-economic context. In a novel contribution to existing scholarship, we use different conceptualisations of economic well-being to analyse research participants’ political orientations. Using original data from a cross-country survey with 3,449 undergraduate students, our findings show distinct patterns for research participants in high-income countries (Italy, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK) as opposed to those in non-high-income countries (Bolivia, Brazil, and Kenya).[2] In the latter countries, research participants’ left–right orientations are associated with a materialist conceptualisation of economic well-being which centres on assessments of their family’s real-life economic status. In high-income countries, by contrast, Left-Right self-placements correlate with a post-materialist conceptualisation of economic well-being that is based on normative judgments about inequality aversion. These findings support the central tenets of Social Modernisation Theory, as they highlight the relevance of research participants’ macro-economic context for their ideological orientations.
 
‘Left’ and ‘Right’: A Contested but Useful Tool to Map Political Preferences
 
The left–right distinction is a contested but useful tool to map political preferences. Tracing its origins to the seating arrangement in the French revolutionary parliament—‘where “radical” representatives sat to the left of the presiding officer’s chair, while “conservatives” sat to the right’[3]—the left–right distinction provides important ‘simplifying’ functions for the benefit of individuals, groups, and the political system as a whole:[4] For the individual, ‘left’ and ‘right’ help to make sense of ‘a complex political world’[5] around them, to orient themselves within this world, and make political decisions.[6] At the group level, ‘left’ and ‘right’ serve to summarise political programmes and, in doing so, contribute to the development of group cohesion and social trust.[7] For the political system as a whole, the left–right distinction provides shortcuts for the identification of key political actors and issues, facilitates communication between citizens and their political representatives, and helps to make political processes overall more efficient.[8] Not surprisingly, given its multiple benefits, ‘worldwide evidence shows the continued relevance of the L[eft] R[ight] divide for mass politics’.[9]
 
At the same time, however, it is important to note that—despite its usefulness as a category of practice as well as analysis—the left–right distinction comes with a range of conceptual and empirical challenges. The arguably most notable challenge is that ‘left’ and ‘right’ have no fixed meaning, as their definition—and their specific association with attitudes towards issues such as taxation, welfare spending, multiculturalism, foreign policy, or group rights—tend to vary depending on space, time, and even individuals.[10] Previous research has identified multiple factors that influence the context-dependent meaning of ‘left’ and ‘right’, including, for instance, a country’s political regime type,[11] its geopolitical location,[12] political elite behaviour,[13] and levels of economic development.[14] As scholars of International Development, we are particularly interested in the interaction effects between levels of economic and political development (here: countries’ macro-economic context and their populations’ political orientations), which leads us to Social Modernisation Theory as our analytical framework.
 
Economic Conditions and Ideological Orientations
 
Broken down to its central tenets, Social Modernisation Theory argues that a country’s economic conditions have an impact on its people’s political norms, values, and beliefs.[15] Put differently, economic conditions at the macro-level are seen as an important driver of ideological orientations at the micro-level, as a high level of economic development combined with a robust welfare state (at the national level) is expected to enhance people’s feelings of material security, their intellectual autonomy, and social independence (at the individual level).[16] This is because a macro-economic context of high economic development and solid welfare provisions makes it generally easier to fulfil basic survival needs, thus reduces the urgency of economic security concerns for large parts of the population, and opens up space for greater engagement with post-materialist issues.[17] As we discuss in further detail below, this is not to say that there is a linear, irreversible and unidirectional pathway of economic and political development—but rather an expectation that ideological orientations are likely to change when the macro-economic context does, too.
 
Following Social Modernisation Theory, rising income levels and improved welfare provisions in highly industrialised societies after the end of the Second World War have had a twofold effect: on the one hand, they helped to meet crucial (material) survival needs for a majority of the population in these societies.[18] On the other, they made economic security concerns less urgent and allowed non-economic issues to become increasingly relevant for the ideological identities of those individuals who experienced macro-economic security in their pre-adult years.[19]
 
Of course, none of this is to say that economic issues cease to play a role for people’s ideological orientations once a country has reached a certain level of economic development—economic issues still matter for the content of ‘left’ and ‘right’ also in advanced industrial societies.[20] What Social Modernisation Theory does point out, however, is that the economic bases of ideological orientations may become weaker (and their non-economic bases stronger) when there is a sustained rise in levels of income and welfare provisions.
 
Put differently, Social Modernisation Theory explains how economic conditions affect the relative relevance of materialist and post-materialist issues for people’s political identities:[21] For individuals who grew up at a time of economic prosperity and solid welfare provisions, post-materialist issues are likely to play an important role for their ideological orientations—meaning that attitudes towards issues which go beyond material survival needs and instead centre on questions of self-expression, belonging, and the quality of life (such as attitudes towards LGBTQ+ rights, multiculturalism or the protection of the environment) form an important part of their political identity.[22] Conversely, materialist issues—which centre on questions of material security, such as the stability of the economy or levels of crime—are likely to play a more prominent role for the ideological orientations of individuals who did not experience macro-economic security in their pre-adult years.[23]
 
Two qualifications are important to note at this point: First, changes in the relative relevance of materialist and post-materialist issues for the social construction of ideological identities do not happen overnight, but are notable especially in the form of intergenerational differences.[24] Second, these changes are not irreversible, as rising inequalities in the distribution of economic wealth, economic crises, and associated economic insecurities can lead to shifts in the proportion of materialist and post-materialist values amongst a given population.[25] As highlighted by authors such as Inglehart and Norris,[26] the development of ideological orientations does not follow a linear, unidirectional pathway, but is itself subject to changes and reversals depending on broader contexts, including e.g. the recession of 2007–9 or—one can assume—the current cost-of-living crisis.     
 
Irrespective of these qualifications, Social Modernisation Theory’s fundamental insight still stands, as multiple studies, using different research designs, have corroborated the political value shifts to which economic development can lead.[27] We expand on these findings by asking how the relationship between left-right political orientations and conceptualisations of economic well-being may differ depending on research participants’ location in either a high-income or non-high-income country. 
 
 
Economic Well-Being and Self-Placements on a Left-Right Scale
 
In a nutshell, Social Modernisation Theory describes a process of social construction—driven by economic development—in which post-materialist issues become increasingly important for the content of ideological identities, while materialist issues decrease in relevance.[28] Following this line of argumentation, we should expect materialist issues to be particularly relevant for left-right self-placements amongst research participants in non-high-income countries, and post-materialist issues to be particularly relevant for left-right self-placements amongst research participants in high-income countries.
 
For the purpose of our analysis, we use different conceptualisations of economic well-being to quantify materialist and post-materialist value orientations. In doing so, we make an original contribution to public opinion research, as economic well-being is a widely-discussed term in the economics literature that, so far, has been hardly used in assessing political orientations.[29]
 
In its broader meaning, economic well-being refers to the socially constructed nature of what it means to be economically well-off.[30] A more refined definition allows us to distinguish between the materialist and post-materialist dimension of economic well-being: In its materialist conceptualisation, economic well-being centres on (absolute and relative) assessments of one’s own, ‘real-life’ economic standing, which affects feelings of economic (in)security.[31] In its post-materialist conceptualisation, economic well-being reflects normative judgments about different types of economic inequality, which go beyond one’s own real-life economic standing.[32]
 
Disaggregated into its materialist and post-materialist dimension, we can use the different conceptualisations of economic well-being to analyse correlates of ideological identities which may relate either to feelings of economic security (the materialist dimension of economic well-being) or value-judgments about economic inequality (the post-materialist dimension of economic well-being). Following the central claims of Social Modernisation Theory, we would expect left-right self-placements to be associated with the post-materialist dimension of economic well-being in high-income countries, and the materialist dimension of economic well-being in non-high-income countries.
 
Quantifying the Materialist and Post-Materialist Dimension of Economic Well-Being
 
Our findings are based on survey data that were collected from 3,449 undergraduate students in three non-high-income countries (NHICs hereafter: Bolivia, Brazil, and Kenya) and four high-income countries (HICs hereafter: Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK) in 2007. We rely on World Bank data to distinguish HICs from NHICs, with NHICs’ GNI per capita ranging from US$ ≤ 935 to US$11,455, and HICs’ GNI per capita at US$ > 11,455 in 2007.[33]
 
The fact that we only include data from university students in our sample limits the external validity of our findings, which means that we cannot (and do not seek to) draw inferences for the entire population of the countries under analysis. At the same time, there are multiple benefits to gathering data from university students only, as it enables researchers to reach a relatively large number of highly literate respondents in one setting[34] and reduces the potentially confounding effect of different education levels.[35]
 
The survey that we presented to university students asked respondents to place themselves on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from ‘extreme left’ to ‘extreme right’, with an additional option to state ‘I don’t have a political view’. In the English version of the questionnaire, this was presented as follows:
 
How would you define your political views?
o extreme left   o left   o centre-left   o centre   o centre-right   o right   o extreme right  o I don’t have a political view
 
To capture the materialist dimension of economic well-being, we asked respondents to assess their family’s actual economic status in absolute and relative terms, by referring first to their family income without any benchmark, and then to their family’s relative standard of living compared to other families in the respondent’s country. In the English questionnaire, the relevant survey questions read as follows: 
 
How would you evaluate the current income of your family?
o very low       o low      o sufficient     o high      o very high     o excellent
 
How would you compare the standard of living of your family with that of other families in your country?
o very much lower      o lower      o almost the same      o higher      o very much higher
 
Based on research participants’ answers, we coded two variables that capture the materialist dimension of economic well-being, labelled ‘Income’ and ‘RelStandard’ respectively.
 
To capture the post-materialist dimension of economic well-being, we use two variables that quantify respondents’ normative judgments of hypothetical inequality situations. For the first variable, respondents were asked to take the role of an external observer and assess the condition of two individuals, John and Paul, living in two isolated societies, A and B, which are identical in everything other than inhabitants’ income levels. Respondents were given six hypothetical scenarios and asked to assess whom of the two individuals (John or Paul) they regarded as being economically better off in each scenario. To illustrate, the numbers in the example below represent income vectors that describe hypothetical income distributions in societies A and B. An absolutist attitude to economic well-being would indicate Paul as being better off, because Paul has a higher income, even though John enjoys a higher hierarchical position. A relativist attitude, by contrast, would indicate John as being better off due to his relative economic standing.

Author's Note: The expectation to communicate from personal experience is a crucial driver of modern politics. A recent book I have written, The Ideology of Political Reactionaries, shows how reactionaries have mastered, but subverted, this expectation. Therefore, progressives need to do better. Voice has ‘who’, ‘how’ and ‘what’ aspects that need exploring both more explicitly and more creatively. My short discussion distils voice into six foremost elements: argument style, emotional tone, metaphor, prioritising, humour, and personality. Together, these can be wrested into ways for exercising voice in greater (and more meaningful) equality, co-operation, and solidarity: respectively, to reflect, to feel, to connect, to weigh, to confide, and to become energised.

* * *

Academics used to like to define politics as a matter of ‘who gets what, when, and how’. Lately, it has become a matter of who can say what. And how, and when.
 
‘Culture wars’, ‘wokeism’, and ‘cancel culture’ are all names for things that make people more aware that there is nothing irrelevant or nondescript about voice. Nor is there anything innocent about it. Voice is what people—not just politicians—use to make them real for others. And, it might be added, for themselves. Hence the two parallel expressions, to ‘find one’s voice’, and to ‘give voice’ to others (via an originating act of the giver’s own voice, that is). But ever since the global financial crisis of 2008, progressives have surrendered this ground, and done so meekly. So, in relation to predictable but also unpredictable public issues, reactionaries have grown mutating and enlarging constituencies of support, many proving storm-like and short-lived, but some showing worrying signs of being longer-lasting: enthusiasts for Trumpism post-Trump; immigration and climate change deniers morphing into Covid vaccine sceptics; Zemmouristes, as well as Lepenistes, outlasting the gilets jaunes in France.
 
The Ideology of Political Reactionaries tries to distill the reactionary voice, to break it down into its ingredients and make it plain. There is a baseline unity to reactionary ideology, notwithstanding its varying content across particular iterations: all reactionary ideology (from Euroscepticism in its mild form to neofascism at its strongest) participates in the prominent sounding of a rhetorical core comprising indignation, decadence, and conspiracy. Aside from the getting the historical and contemporary records straight (reactionism has a shady border with conservatism; reactionary ‘nostalgia’ is chimerical because the message is always more embittered than melancholic; the explanation by post-truth ignores the persistent fetishisation of facts), the study is intended as a nudge towards building a more desirable rhetorical public culture.
 
How do language, tone, and style connect reactionaries in and across Europe and America’s past and present? What starts to look enduring at least once the fascination with the apparent novelty of digital media is scaled back just a bit? And what do things look like when we lay out beside one another quite diverse packages of words and gestures for comparison and inspection? Such examination ought to be revealing, even if the lessons for progressives will, in the first instance, have to emerge by default inversion. And equally, it will show that ‘who can say what, when, and how’ is not simply a topical problem of politics and culture. It is actually quite an old one.
 
Reactionaries do not reject the in-vogue imperative to communicate from personal experience. Publicly, and on the surface, they might demean it. But, in truth, they subvert it. Reactionaries know that the authority to speak is closely bound up with personal involvement in what is spoken (i.e., having skin in the game); timing (e.g., taking care not to speak before others have been heard); and manner. They know this, even if their ‘knowing’ should really be understood more as the product of habit and inclination than of implausibly all-seeing calculative intent. On a tentative estimate, they know, and subvert, voice in at least six ways.
 
Argument style
 
Perhaps the first rule of voice in politics is that the task is to make space. Reactionaries recognise this, and one thing they are always sure to do is to make space to reflect. They upend progressive calls to reflection. They do their best, in written and spoken word, to steer any thinking about politics whatsoever through the prior filter of a story about the unstoppability of decline. Such stories—which technically are ‘narratives’ (in the meaningful way, not in the way dulled by generalised over-use to refer to any sense-making exercise whatsoever)—vary in content. But invariably, they are all-absorbing.
 
Progressives ought to do nothing so grandiose as to craft sweeping counter-narratives. But they must find ways to open up, and in due course expand, alternative spaces for reflection, spaces that that are focused around objects of concern that are simultaneously human and humane. Human, because they will resist being formed around immovable abstractions (which is the historical case of adaptable reactionary fixation around ‘revolution’, ‘defeat’, ‘feminism’, etc.).[1]). Humane, because space-shaped reflection would be unapologetically ethical, impatient with the conjuring of ‘liberalism’ into the enemy, or with the celebration of conflict for opposition’s sake.
 
Emotional tone
 
Not only as an afterthought, making the space to feel must take up an important place next to making the space to reflect. The objects of concern created by the reactionary voice are self-referencing: reactionaries pity themselves and those like them. This is the glue that binds. It is also the basis for feelings that are externally directed towards what are made into targets, specifically, targets of anger. The sense conveyed that this anger is not something that has been heard to date—that it has been suppressed, unacknowledged, allowed to fester—is how a circle is squared with the timing rule: licence for reactionaries to speak is to have successfully created the impression that those people being spoken ‘for’ have long been unheard, and remain still unheard. But used creatively in collective life, emotional tone of voice makes people attentive—thereafter receptive—to the vulnerability of others, who, moreover, are others in their fullest diversity. Hence moral philosophers talk of the ‘circle’ of concern.
 
The task, by modulating tone of voice, is to expand that circle, and to do so without de-intensifying attachments in the process. Uplift, good will, faith in others: the promotion of all these things is often made to seem trite, a pathology of the extension of psychotherapeutic language into politics. But that itself is a function of the snare of cynicism in contemporary rhetorical public culture; in turn, a complex cause and effect of reactionary ‘edginess’ in its particular alt-right incarnation. Feelings liable to be dismissed as trite in any case do not exhaust the range of emotions far more likely to be timely to any moment than unspent self-pity: sorrow at wasted lives and livelihoods; outrage, not festering anger, at perpetration, complicity, or indifference.
 
Metaphor
 
Making the space to connect is another capability of voice. Metaphor connects the person to other people; it also helps that person to connect things to things. Reactionaries cement fellow-feeling with others who are not really like them, not in a way that couldn’t be challenged by more plausible connections; connections far more immanent in the the structures of social and political experience. Reactionaries do so by act of making the particular universal, or the part into whole (which more technically belongs to the branch of metaphor that is metonymy). In this way, dethroned monarchs, culturally-mocked millionaires, and failed artists can all be made mirrors to the hardships of the truly vulnerable, because the suffering in each of these scenarios—and the suffering of individuals—becomes representative: not statistically or descriptively representative, but symbolically representative. (Victimhood becomes the state of being belittled in whichever way makes meaning reflect back in this conveniently dangled mirror.)
 
How reactionaries connect things-to-things is by metaphors that are dominantly naturalist and hyper-masculinist. Metaphors from ecology or biology, in particular, dramatise what thereby becomes deep-rooted, health-threatening decline, in idioms that can extend to the frankly carnal. An under-appreciated aspect of the ideology of Eric Zemmour, for example, is the loss of male virility (which, inside his 2014 book The French Suicide, is far more a trope than the national ‘suicide’ of the title). Decoding reactionaries by metaphor is one step towards disarming them, but the next task is to turn the metaphors inside out, to craft them to more humane purpose and effect. One way of doing this is by explicitly reclaiming bodily metaphor, for it is the body which provides human vulnerability with its shared site.  Another way of doing so is to take the structure of analogical reasoning (which works on the idea that because you accept something similar already, you will accept something else proposed), to wrest it away from its dominant reactionary or conservative uses (in idealisation of the status quo or status quo ante), and to place it into progressive use. Co-opted analogical reasoning would work on the idea that what has most meaningful prior acceptance is not overtly bound to parochial culture: people’s most pre-existing commitment of all is to be their best selves.
 
Prioritising
 
Prioritising by voice is identifying issues and embracing the task to weigh. Reactionaries weigh issues often with outward portent, but, ultimately, trivially. They do so habitually by lists, or by acts of either linguistic or literary brutalism. List arrangements of projected wrongs and grievances allow for the heaping up of externally-directed criticism and censure, fabricating the illusion of rising gravity. By imagined actions (or sometimes by sheer temerity of existing) migrants, ethnic Others or cartoonised social justice warriors can made to bask in the negative spotlight, and on that basis be made to shoulder blame for whole unlikely catalogues of sins. Brutalism in words and sentences is the creation of heightened urgency by graceless transition, jolting an audience into attention; and, by unfortunate correlation, repeated jolting has the simultaneous effect of deadening human sensitivity.
 
Lists plus brutalism may not exhaust reactionary techniques for deleteriously amplifying concerns, but above all this is a faux seriousness, a seriousness of the shrill or the pompous. What it doesn’t need is more of the same in reply. In the political act of prioritising—which is necessary not primarily because decision-making capacity is finite, but rather because the political imagination is drawn towards specific things and/ or specific persons—the practice of hierarchical ordering is hard to dispel in its entirety, but comes with downsides that may nevertheless be counter-acted. To be sure, listing bona fide wrongs has a dignity that listing imagined injustices does not. However, within contemporary culture, bona fide wrongs have frozen into competitive victimhoods: injury by racism versus class; by sex-based versus gender-based oppression; by historical fascism versus historical colonialism. And one way of chipping away at this (by wakening metaphor again) is to try to introduce alternative spatial orientations into public language: suffering that is neither ‘above’ and ‘below’, nor ‘before’ and ‘after’. Are there ways of juxtaposing experiences that are more consensual than conflictual? Ways that will not cancel out sympathy generated, but render sympathy liable to be reproduced in many directions, even perhaps in ever more fine-grained complexions?
 
Humour
 
Humour in voice is, or can be, a way by which to commune: to confide, to reassure. In reactionary voice, it is anything but. Psychologists of humour talk of humour style, and reactionary styles of humour tend strongly towards the maladaptive, i.e., aggressive. Rarely do reactionaries participate in the affiliative style of humour which (to play upon the original religious meaning of ‘to commune’ from communion) is capable of firming up human relationships by exchange of thoughts and feelings. Reactionary humour is the humour of put-downs and jibes at out-groups, destructive of bridge-building between people. Fairly recently, in the United States, Sarah Palin—the vice-presidential contender and under-emphasised forerunner of Donald Trump—developed a political style that gave a lot of time to unkind mimicry. In British politics, Nigel Farage experimented with a humour style that drifted into bullying, offset only partially by the kind of jocularity that gestured beyond the aggressive by virtue of being self-effacing and buffoonish: the notional punches-upwards could be unceremoniously dumped for punches-sidewards, soon becoming punches-downwards (recall the public humiliation of Herman van Rompuy in the European Parliament).
 
In the terms of theories canvassed across the history of thought, then conspicuously often—to the point of being a rule—the humour of reactionaries matches the comedy identified by Hobbes, operating by ridicule and superiority; not the tension-release by laughter observed by Freud, and still less the comedy that arises out of incongruity (between expectation and occurrence, between unconventionally paired ideas). Alternatively, non-Hobbesian humour is only at a very crude level urbane and elitish, or metropolitan because cosmopolitan. And it is very far from being exclusive since (in a last piece of humour taxonomy) it is open to expression in whole range of types: from the dark, dry and droll, through to the satirical, slapstick, and screwball. In France, currently, Eric Zemmour does possess a more stylish line in witticism. His niche in The French Suicide is to observe paradox, presented as incongruity between the intentions of both leftists and liberals and the effects of their policies. But his paradoxes are not really paradoxes: they are wilfully dark contrasts (such as that gay people were freer when encouraged to be discreet about their sexuality, or that straight women could be less guilty about sex when there existed rigid social norms to police their access to it). And in the process, there may be an instructive lesson about the need to unpick nuances in the uses of dark humour: Zemmour’s are wilful contrasts not only in the sense of being false, but also in the sense of being, ultimately, victim- (and not victimiser-)mocking. As such, shorn of the more appealing victim-empathising quality of ‘gallows humour’, the humour in his book is reduced to word-play. Which is clever, but not funny.
 
Personality
 
Voice also offers, lastly, the chance to inspire, in the possibility of positive response to the comportment of others. This last thing reactionaries know is that expressing viewpoint is simultaneously opportunity to display the virtues one carries. In reactionary practice, those are shallow virtues at best, and misguided inspiration. Charisma is more often bombast. Authenticity is double-edged, and in any event is contradictory to charisma. Bravery is martyring. Bragging should not be mistaken for much inspirational at all. And publicising insider knowledge—Trump’s business prowess, Farage’s Brussels days, Joseph McCarthy’s dogged curiosity—is (as well as in tension with flagging outsider credentials to denigrate ‘expertise’) the accomplice of community-destroying conspiracy claims that are reliably present.
 
This is not collegiality; not integrity or honesty; not gentleness and generosity; not constancy or meaningful self-knowledge. There is, to appreciate, an intrinsic difficulty in trying to craft the progressive articulation of personality in voice: the infra-person location of vocal chords, or the hand-gripped wielding of the pen, point to the hazard of carrying over-exaltation of individual action into the securing of new collective space, pushing against the collective exchange of perspectives. So, minimally, one part of comportment must tasked with trying to find a balance with modesty, as well as with trying to achieve a particular split: between twin tasks of showing one’s skin in the game and bringing others into it.
 
It is here, finally, that some existing conceptualisations of voice on the progressive side of politics are suspect. To be sure, from out of the conventions of academic political science, these present accounts improve vastly on the most established, most frequently-cited account: a 1970 text which makes voice into an alternative to ‘exit’, into a grossly individualised phenomenon, and, fundamentally, a matter of interest, not principle (in effect: ‘I’m not very happy about this, so I’m saying so’). But the dominant, progressive accounts are suspect nevertheless, and suspect, specifically, in respect to the conceptualisation of movement. Rightly, they contest the uniform flatness—the stuckness—of reactionary representations of ‘vox populi’: instead, at their best, they stress the importances of co-creating the meaning of experience, and fashioning demands on that basis. And rightly (albeit from a distinct angle), they stress the ‘situatedness’ of voice.  Yet working against these stresses, they tend to portray the who-ness of voice as if the issue were pre-settled. Plus, on the issue of what people ought to do with voice once they get there, they are hesitant, such that they under-estimate the complexities of ‘when’ and ‘how’.
 
Enabling voice, whether for progressives of either a moderate or more radical kind, presently tends to be understood as a single movement: either to or from a single location. Just the direction is reversed. For moderates, the movement is dominantly ‘toward’—in which voice is something graciously presented to somebody, as though receiving a gift-giving guest (‘there you go, here is voice, now use it’). For radicals, the movement is ‘away from’—by beseechment to join something at some distance from a starting point (‘“come to voice” with us’)—and with just a hint that before being exercised, the new joiners’ voices will need to pass through a final stage of screening by older occupants.
 
The future situational pressures on voice cannot, by nature, be foretold. But if the inverted lessons from reactionary practice are instructive, then the desiderata for better voice will—centrally—comprise maximal inclusion, minimal coercion, or pluralism in balance with empathy. From this starting set of features: to reflect, to feel, to connect, to weigh, to confide, be energised. To genuinely co-create. To use voice so that it sounds—then echoes—in a multitude of directions. Above all, to use voice to make space so that others might find space in it of their own.
 


[1] Note that this immovability by abstraction can even be a risk for contemporary progressives, who, following a very timely call for an appreciation of what is ordinary (cf. Marc Stears, Out of the Ordinary: How Everyday Life Inspired a Nation and How It Can Again [Belknap Press, 2021]), can often be drawn towards abstractifying the value of the ‘everyday’.

Although the study of social movements has shown that state institutions are not the only vehicles for societal change, the political forces which emanate from civil society and challenge state authority require theorisation. Near the end of his life, in 1967 Theodor Adorno conceptualised the post-1945 far right as a potent movement with social and cultural attitudes spread widely in West German society and still capable of attracting mass political support.[1] Nazism’s defeat in 1945, the partitioning of Germany and the process and legacy of denazification kept the re-emergence of a similar threat at bay, but the ideology did not disappear. By rejecting a monocausal social-psychological explanation of post-war fascism, Adorno also rejects the pessimistic idea of it as something that people must accept as an inevitable part of living in modern and democratic societies.

Anti-fascists have the agency to change society for the better and they have used it for as long as fascism has existed. Fascist street movements in the UK were defeated in the 1930s and again in 1970s by anti-fascists who mobilised against them in larger numbers at counter-demonstrations. Students took anti-fascism into the National Union of Students (NUS) by voting for the ‘no platform’ policy at the April 1974 conference. The aim of the policy, which built on earlier anti-fascist praxis and has returned in different forms since then, is to deny spaces in student unions to the ideas espoused by fascists and racists, thereby making them less mainstream and limiting the size of the audience reachable by fascist and racist ideologues. By no platforming, students were able to use their unions instrumentally to counter the influence of the extreme right. They were driven by moral revulsion at fascism and racism, a near-universal positive commitment to democratic freedom in society, and in smaller numbers commitments to anti-fascism and anti-racism as social movements and to left-wing politics.

The same tactics were later used against homophobic, sexist, and transphobic speakers. Evan Smith’s critically acclaimed study of ‘no platform’ historicises the tactic’s use in the contexts of anti-fascism in Britain and contemporary fear on the right, which he argues is unfounded, for free speech on campuses.[2] Three essential points can be made from Smith’s study about what ‘no platform’ is. Firstly, it is a political decision made against a particular person or group of people. Secondly, those decisions rely on the judgement of the validity of specific demands for restrictions on free speech. Thirdly, ‘no platform’ is a specific type of restriction on free speech that is set apart from the functionally synchronous restrictions put in place by national governments.

Governments have legislated limitations on free speech and protections on citizens’ rights to express it in a variety of ways. Free speech is not immutable because political dissidents occupy a contradictory space that leaves them permanently open as targets of state repression and targets of co-optation in the repression of the other. Marxist and anarchist theorists of fascism before 1945 conceptualised it in similar terms to their analyses of states, societies and ideologies: historical formations driven by class interests.[3] As a researcher of student activism, I notice how little can be found in their perspectives about student unions compared to united and popular fronts, revolutionary unions, and vanguard parties. Students’ involvement in political activities and adherence to different ideologies is well-documented. It suggests that student unions affiliated to universities remained peripheral in the organising activities and theoretical interventions of the interwar left.

Meanwhile, the growth of free speech as a talking point for the right is unexpected judging by the norm in European and North American history, because of the state repression and censorship that accompanied reaction to political revolutions from the seventeenth to the late twentieth century.[4] While there is no reason to imagine this as any different from state repression outside of European and North American contexts, this chronology can be extended into the twenty-first century with consideration of the rise of new authoritarian governments in Poland, Hungary and Russia.[5] In the twentieth century the British government put limits on the freedom of speech to espouse extreme and hateful views using the Public Order Act 1936 and the Race Relations Acts passed in 1965, 1968 and 1975, but as Copsey and Ramamurthy have shown it has been anti-fascist and anti-racist movements rather than government legislation that has most to counter fascism and racism.[6] In the late 1960s and 1970s, when the National Front (UK) was at the height of its popularity posed a danger with the possibility of winning seats in local elections, it turned its hatred on Black and Asian immigrants under a thin veneer of populist opposition to immigration and criminality. It added Black and Asian people to Nazism’s older enemies—Jews, communists, the Romani, and LGBT people—while it kept its ideological core out of public view.[7]

The brief and limited success of the National Front (UK) can be read patriotically as an aberration or an anomaly in a society that was utterly hostile and inhospitable to it. In this view, civil society would eventually have defeated the National Front without the help of anti-fascists or any compromise on free speech at universities. One problem with that interpretation is the racialisation of religious communities after the September 11 attacks in 2001 and the initiation of the War on Terror. Anti-Zionism, the broad-brush term for opposition to Israel, includes anything from criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians on human rights grounds to opposition to Israel’s existence as a country. Left-wing anti-Zionism has received more attention in research about student activism than the anti-Zionism of the extreme right. NUS leaders opposed left-wing anti-Zionist uses of ‘no platform’ in the 1970s, when it was introduced to student unions.[8]

After the September 11 attacks, anti-Zionism drew renewed criticism but with greater emphasis on Islamism. Pierre-Andre Taguieff explained the growth of a new type of European anti-Semitism in those terms.[9] In the popular press, a debate about Islamism spilled over into Islamophobic racism. For example, the printing in Charlie Hebdo and Jyllands-Posten of the Mohammed cartoons were acts of mainstreaming Islamophobia in France and Denmark that supported moral panic about Islam. The attack in France on Charlie Hebdo in 2015 had a chilling effect on free speech by contributing to a political climate where it became impossible for ‘those who felt unfairly targeted’ to respond and be heard.[10]

Understanding the problem of Muslims being shut out of debates about them, and of being transformed into a debateable question in the first place, requires a consideration of counter-terrorism measures that have marginalised Muslims. In England and Wales, the regulation of charities and the government’s Prevent duty which covers the whole of the UK have added such pressures to the free speech of Muslim students and workers at universities.[11] The positioning of the presence of Muslims in majority White and Christian countries by non-Muslims as a question of cultural compatibility instead of Islamophobia as a racism morally equivalent to anti-Semitism makes it harder for multiculturalism to function there. That said, explanations of the racialisation of religious minorities are incoherent without analysing race. The number of examples that could be given to prove why restrictions on freedom of speech are too harsh in some instances but not harsh enough in others are practically without limit. Anti-fascists who also consider themselves to be communists or anarchists support the administration of justice in ways that are radically different from those in our own societies but which are nonetheless constructed on the same principles that adherents of liberal democracy follow, including freedom of speech. The same statement descends into nakedly racist prejudice when it is used to refer to racialised religious communities.

Free speech is at the centre of a cultural conflict. The first two decades of the twenty-first century saw a world economic crisis and the growth of populism and authoritarianism on the right, which according to Francis Fukuyama capitalised on the need for social recognition felt by resentful supporters. As economic inequality grew, identity politics showed an alternative way for people to articulate difference.[12] Identity politics itself changed little through these processes. For example, a prevailing idea among American conservatives is that universities and colleges, like other levels of the education system and other sectors of civil society, are dominated by a left that threats freedom of speech. Dennis Prager sets the stage for a battle for liberal opinion between the left and, he argues, the centre’s natural allies on the conservative right.[13] His views about universities should not be decontextualised from his commentary on religion. In his book written with Joseph Telushkin, Prager explains anti-Semitism using a history of it and an engagement with Jewish identity. They acknowledge the influence of Taguieff’s research on their taking anti-Semitism more seriously as a tangible threat to Jews. Opposing Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, which they barely distinguish, is a key part of their argument.[14] From another perspective, in his defence of classical liberalism, Fukuyama dedicates a chapter to discussing the global challenges in the twenty-first century to the principle of protecting freedom of speech. One argument he makes is that critical theory and identity politics, when they appear together in the contexts of free speech in higher education and the arts, mistakenly give too much importance to language as an interpersonal mode of political power and structural violence instead of the main targets of leftist critique: the coercive function of institutions and physical violence, capitalism and the state. With universities engaging with a wider definition of what constitutes harm than they have in the past, the parameters for unacceptable speech have widened too.[15] Free speech is no less a political issue today, by which I mean it is a term that people use to express their ideological attachments and experiences of real socio-economic conditions, than it has been in the past.

Different conclusions can be drawn from these points. One option is to join socialists and progressives in their fights for equality and social justice through a movement that simultaneously counters the hegemony of right-wing ideology. Another option is to join the right’s defence of freedom of speech on campuses against ‘woke’ students and academics, ‘safer spaces’ and ‘trigger warnings’. Far from simply being bugbears, they are central concepts of opposition for the right in their wider defence of what they value most in their idea of Western civilisation. A more analytical response would be to engage more critically with what identity politics is and engage with the probing questions of how social movements driven by identity politics affect the inclusiveness of societies.

Religious, secular and post-secular nationalisms are relevant here because they have a greater determining role than economic interest on political beliefs constructed around identity. However, their influence on politics organised along a left-right axis has never been negligible and the claim that a purely economistic political ideology can exist is highly dubious. Understanding identity politics gives context to the right’s fear for freedom of speech. Another approach is to take the right’s claim at face value and begin to think of freedom of speech as a legislated guarantee for the conditions of voluntary social interaction, without which civil society becomes an impossibility. It would therefore be morally necessary to consider the figuration of the right’s semi-invented enemies. The presentation of these enemies is not necessarily a racist act of subjective violence, and this caveat demarcates a large section of the right from fascists and identifies them as fascism’s serious competitors. At the same time, the right delegitimises its opponents by tarring them as enemies of freedom of speech and therefore a step closer to fascism. What these examples show is how complex an issue freedom of speech at universities is. Freedom of speech must be defined in recognition of that complexity because we are at the greatest risk of losing this freedom when we express ourselves under assumptions that lead us to oversimplify and decontextualise it.



[1] Theodor W. Adorno, Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism, trans. Wieland Hoban (Medford: Polity, 2020).

[2] Evan Smith, No Platform: A History of Anti-Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech, (Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2020).

[3] Dave Renton, Fascism: History and Theory, new and updated edition (London: Pluto Press, 2020).

[4] Dave Renton, No Free Speech for Fascists: Exploring ‘No Platform’ in History, Law and Politics (Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2021), 11-34.

[5] Dave Renton, The New Authoritarians: Convergence on the Right (London: Pluto Press, 2019).

[6] Nigel Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain, second edition (London; New York: Routledge, 2017), 56; Anandi Ramamurthy, Black Star: Britain’s Asian Youth Movements (London: Pluto Press, 2013), 25.

[7] Dave Renton, Never Again: Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League 1976-1982 (Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2019), 14-36.

[8] Dave Rich, The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti-Semitism (London: Biteback Publishing, 2016).

[9] Pierre-André Taguieff, Rising from the Muck: The New Anti-Semitism in Europe (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004).

[10] Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter, Reactionary Democracy: How Racism and the Populist Far Right Became Mainstream (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2020), 75-9.

[11] Alison Scott-Baumann and Simon Perfect, Freedom of Speech in Universities: Islam, Charities and Counter-Terrorism (Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2021).

[12] Francis Fukuyama, Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition (London: Profile Books, 2018).

[13] Jordan B. Peterson, No Safe Spaces? | Prager and Carolla | The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - S4: E44, YouTube, vol. S4: E44, The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHXxtyUVTGU.

[14] Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism, the Most Accurate Predictor of Human Evil (New York: Touchstone, 2007).

[15] Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents (London: Profile Books, 2022).

​In an old textbook on populism, the psycho-sociologist Alexandre Dorna described the phenomenon as a 'volcanic eruption': a surge of the repressed impulses, instincts and fantasies of the masses onto the political scene.[1] This analysis is very common today, especially in relation to the so-called 'far-right populisms', such as the governments of Trump, Bolsonaro, or Orbán. We will not be talking here about the fantasies (in a Freudian sense) of which populism would be the political vector, but about those that it expresses in the speaker who speaks about it. What exactly are we saying when we categorise something as 'populist'? It is well known that the word is used more to stigmatise than to designate positively. Its proliferation in public debate over the past decade has been unprecedented: in 2017 the Cambridge Dictionary awarded it 'word of the year'. Its inflation in the public debate points to the undeniable re-emergence of the ‘people’ as political operator, especially since the subprime crisis of 2008. On the extreme right, this resurgence is expressed in xenophobic nativist movements that oppose the national people to immigration and to ethnic and sexual minorities. On the far left, it appears in plebeian movements that oppose the ‘people’ as a democratic subject to a ruling class, judged to be in collusion with neoliberal economic elites, and accused of corrupting democracy. Both renewals emerge in the global political space. While the former may be compatible with a neoliberal economic orientation, as in the cases of Trump and Bolsonaro, the latter is in frontal opposition.
 
The fantasies of populism
 
Contemporary uses of populism, whether they see it as a threat or as a chance to radicalise democracy, assume that both phenomena lie in the same direction; that they are politically and historically univocal. This is the fantasy I am talking about: in the Freudian sense, the main imaginary production by which those who speak of populism today escape from reality. Here, the historical and sociological reality is that the 'people' of the extreme right have very little to do with the 'people' of the far left. Each of us can easily see that their projects, situated on opposite sides of the political spectrum, have more differences than similarities. In spite of this, the majority of studies in political science persist in seeing in these two phenomena some variants of the same reality: populism. This would be anchored in the extremes, which would therefore be strictly comparable in terms of their political use of the ‘people’. With a touch of irony, I call 'populology' the scholarly discourse structured around this thesis, which takes up the old 'horseshoe theory' in French political science.[2] A thesis that seems to describe, in a clear and transparent way, our political actuality in the 21st century. But its simplicity tends to oversimplify it to the point of obscuring its real socio-political dynamics for at least three reasons.
 
The first reason is that the only thing in common between the extreme-right and the far-left 'populists' is nothing other than the opposition between the 'people' and the 'elites'. However, this opposition takes on such different and even opposite meanings in its two ‘variants’ that it is no longer sufficient to qualify something common. The 'people' is an extremely polysemous concept, since classical Greece, where there are about twenty words used to describe it: dèmos or the whole of the citizens, laos or the whole of the individuals sharing a common culture, ethnos or the whole of the members of a clan, genos or the whole of the individuals sharing a common ancestor, hoi polloi (‘the most numerous’) or the social majority of a population, ochlos or the people in tumult, ekklesia or the assembled people, etc.
 
Each of these terms designated this intangible and ineffable entity that was the ‘people’, based on a specific property or operation that it is supposed to perform in the polis. This definitional difficulty has been further complicated by modern political ideologies, all of which have more or less adopted this central word of democratic modernity. This is why the term is now invoked to designate political projects that have more differences than similarities between the extreme right and the radical left. Unless we consider, as the vast majority of contemporary theorists of populism do, that it is an essentially discursive phenomenon. That it is therefore extremely plastic, reflecting the emptiness of the word ‘people’ and the appeals that invoke it. But are the affects and political behaviours that these populist appeals aggregate really comparable? In reality, if populism is discursive by nature, all politics is discursive; in the same way, liberalism would be a political discourse centered on the word 'freedom', which is also fundamentally ambiguous. Would we then be ready to assert that all political actors who have claimed or are claiming today 'freedom' against a regime that deprives them of it, whatever the political project defended, are comparable? Are we ready to compare feminists, socialists, Berlusconi, the Austrian FPÖ, and so many others? We should recognise that almost all the political phenomena of our modernity are 'liberal' in this sense. Just as today we end up thinking that everything is potentially populist, when we talk about the 'people' against the 'elites'.
 
The second reason is that behind this idea that populism refers to any appeal to the ‘people’, we are in fact confusing distinct political phenomena: social movements, such as Occupy Wall Street, the Indignados or the Gilets jaunes, all structured by the opposition ‘people vs. elites’; political organisations, such as the Rassemblement national, Podemos, and the Labour-affiliated group Momentum, all calling for the ‘people’ against the establishment; modes of appealing to the electorate by the ruling class, more or less demagogic, such as those of Silvio Berlusconi, Nigel Farage, or Donald Trump; finally, political regimes based on the principle of the embodiment of the people by the Head of State, such as those of Erdogan, Putin, or Orbán. These phenomena are ontologically heterogeneous. Here the concept of populism is more confusing than elucidating, because it leads to abandon more precise historical concepts, such as demagogy, neo- or post-fascism, Bonapartism, and authoritarianism, in favour of a vague and fuzzy word. In other terms, there is more in common between authoritarian regimes, whatever their modes of legitimation, than between an authoritarian regime claiming to represent the people against corrupt elites, and a social movement claiming to constitute one against the ruling elites. Similarly, if populism describes modes of appealing to the electorate based on proximity, illusion, and overpromising, it would be more correct to speak of demagogy; it would then be necessary to question the reasons for its rise in contemporary political communication, as much among the establishment parties as among the anti-establishment ones.
 
The third reason is that behind the idea that populism is a plastic discursive construction, there is a tendency to confuse positive and value judgements. The ‘people’, like all our political terms, is a controversial normative word: as a synonym for collective sovereignty, it can be seen as the quintessence of democracy, or as a symbol of an oppressive totality, representing a threat to individual freedoms. If we do not empirically observe the concrete practices that this 'people' produces in the social space, we can be led to take our own value-judgments about 'the people' as science. Depending on the different ways of defining democracy (this concept which is also inseparably descriptive and normative), one will thus make a different case for populism.[3] If, like Jan-Werner Müller, we define democracy as a procedural horizon for safeguarding individual liberties, the 'people' inevitably becomes suspect, both in the political discourse of the extreme right and the far left.[4] If, like Chantal Mouffe, we define democracy as an agonistic horizon of conflictuality, the ‘people’ becomes the very quintessence of the democratic dynamic, because it is always constructed by opposing groups claiming democracy against the elites.[5] Thus, on Müller's side, we lose sight of certain emancipatory uses of the ‘people’, which can radicalise a democracy conceived in a strictly procedural way. But on Mouffe's side, we lose sight of the fact that certain conflictual constructions of the ‘people’ are actually anti-democratic, such as those proposed by the neo-Nazi movement FPÖ in Austria or by the ‘Golden Dawn’ in Greece, because they challenge the liberal foundations of our democracies.
 
A new genetic approach
 
In fact, before we can even discuss whether populism is progressive or regressive for our democracies, we need to agree on what we are talking about. We need to clear up the many ambiguities to which contemporary uses of populism give rise: ambiguities in the classification and in the comparison that is proposed. In reality, we still do not know what populism is: not only do we not really know how to explain it, but we continue to disagree, among scholars, on what it encompasses empirically.
 
Despite the huge inflation of books and articles on the subject, we are still at the first steps of a scientific method. This makes the enterprise questionable for those who consciously choose not to use the concept. But it also makes it exciting and thrilling for those who take the problems posed by the concept seriously, seeking new solutions to its enigma. I propose a new 'genetic' approach, which consists in going back to the founding experiences of populism: the Russian narodnichestvo (between 1840 and 1880), the American People's Party (at the end of the 19th century) and the national-popular regimes in Latin America (between 1930 and 1960).[6] Why them and not others? Why this return to the past when populism is such a current phenomenon? For one simple reason: these three historical experiences are defined by the entire scientific community as populist; they do not carry the ambiguities of what is too broadly called populism today. It is therefore a solid starting point for a new analysis. This is all the more true since historical distance makes it possible to look at current events in a more complex way. If there is one lesson of social sciences since Max Weber, it is this: we must analyse the present from the past, and not the opposite. Yet, concerning populism, we often move between presentism (the idea of the radical newness of our present, disjointed from the past) and anachronism (the distorted reading of past populisms from our present).
 
By comparing these founding experiences of populism, we obtain an ideal type: in the sense of Max Weber, a 'logical utopia' resulting from the stylisation of reality and the deliberate accentuation of certain features, which help to understand empirical reality by comparison with the model. The first recurring feature, which will be accentuated, is that populism always appears within the crisis of governments claiming to be legitimated by the people, but excluding them socially, economically, and politically.
 
The second recurring feature is that populism is structured by the opposition between the 'people' and the 'elite', but it gives an ideologically singular interpretation of this opposition, which defies any comparison between the far left and the extreme right. The 'people' appears as the name of a utopia: a democracy restored to its sovereign subject, involved in a dynamic of radicalisation of both freedom and equality. Populist democracy is conceived against the reduction of democracy to representative governments: an ‘elective aristocracy’ that is always potentially oligarchic.[7] The 'elite' is the force that opposes this project of founding a populist democracy. The 'people' and the 'elite' thus do not define two concrete social groups, but two forces of democratic modernity: the 'people' is associated with the insides, with life and tradition; the 'elite' with the outsides, with reason and modernisation. This idea is central to the writings of the founder of populist ideology, the Russian Alexander Herzen (1812–70), who provided a systematic version of it at about the same time as Marx and Engels were working on the idea of communism. The Russian populists (narodniki), who were to deeply influence Lenin (his brother had been one of them), were convinced that the peasantry, the social majority of the people, could provide the organisational forms on which the future democracy could be built.
 
As a radical political ideology, populism is accompanied by the expression of a certain revolutionary charisma. This is the third recurrent feature of the phenomenon. In the Russian and American cases, this charisma is ‘available’ to the actors of the social movement, who can all aspire to embody the mobilisation: it is an ‘acephalous’ charisma. When the American farmers created their own party, the People's Party, this charisma was gradually personalised: the party acquired two brilliant charismatic leaders, James B. Weaver and William Jennings Bryan.
 
The latter, a great critic of the financial system of the Gold Standard, deemed responsible for the American social crisis, gave a speech in 1896 with eschatological connotations: the ‘Cross of Gold’ Speech. This young lawyer from Nebraska attacked the idle holders of capital in the ‘great American cities’, accusing them of strangling the working classes and draining the country's ‘broad and fertile prairies’. ‘The humblest citizen in all the land’, he said, ‘when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the whole hosts of error that they can bring. I come to speak to you in defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty, the cause of humanity’. ‘You come to us’, he replied to the supporters of the Gold Standard, ‘and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the Gold Standard. I tell you that the great cities rest upon these broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country’. ‘If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the Gold Standard as a Good thing’, he concluded, ‘we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a Gold Standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold’.
 
In the Latin American case, populism had powerful charismatic leaders too: Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina, Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico, Getúlio Vargas in Brazil, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in Colombia, Rómulo Betancourt in Venezuela, Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre in Peru, Víctor Paz Estenssoro in Bolivia, Carlos Ibáñez del Campo in Chile.
 
Finally, a last recurring feature of populism is the socially heterogeneous nature of the mobilisations. They involve alliances between impoverished working classes and middle classes made precarious by the economic crisis: they all share the view that the ruling class is disconnected from the needs of the population's majority. Moreover, these mobilisations have no real class basis: they bring together different democratic causes carried by ‘subaltern groups’ in the sense of Antonio Gramsci, whose relations of domination go from class, to gender, to race.[8]
 
Populism is therefore an ideology of crisis. It appears in a context of socio-economic crisis which becomes a legitimacy crisis of a government which, claiming to rule in the name of the people, appears collectively as the expression of an oligarchy's interests. Because of this context, populism operates as a crisis phenomenon. Thus, we can speak of 'populist moments' because populism can hardly survive beyond the crisis that institutes it. Despite its mobilising potential, because of the revolutionary charisma it brings to the stage and its capacity to federate several social demands, it is not sustainable. Why is this so?
 
The Latin American case provides some answers to this tricky problem. From the outset, it is difficult to achieve a programme as ambitious and vague as founding a radical democracy. On the one hand, such a programme should cover all spheres of social life, from culture to education, employment, citizenship. Let's think of Perón's Partido Justicialista, founded in 1946 and charged with democratising Argentinian society in the areas of education, university, civic and social rights, work and social inequalities, gender, culture ... A project that can lead to many disappointments among the mobilised popular base once populism is in power. The radical wing of Peronism—the Montoneros—and the communist left constantly deplore public policies that do not meet the democratic expectations of the Argentinian people. On the other hand, such a maximalist project runs the risk of removing all obstacles to State intervention in society: an intervention which, adorned with the noble objective of radicalising democracy, may end up subjecting to it the preservation of certain freedoms, such as those of the press or the unions.
 
In short, as much as populism is useful and necessary as a protest ideology, it is not very effective as an ideology in power. This is all the more the case because, by giving a central place to charisma, it leads, in the conditions of the organised competition for power, to a strong personalism. The mobilisation's leader who becomes the charismatic Head of State tends to introduce into populism a strongly vertical dimension, which is opposed to the horizontality of the social movement. The opposition between the 'people' and the 'elite' also tends to change once it is transformed into an ideology of public action: from a radically democratic opposition (deepening democracy by injecting more popular sovereignty), it tends to polarise society between 'friends' of the people and 'friends' of the elite. During my fieldwork in Venezuela (2007-11), one of the countries of the populist revival in the twenty-first century, I was confronted daily with the harmful effects of such polarisation, which ultimately undermines democratic communication.[9] In institutional politics as well as in ordinary life, people had stopped debating, and instead fought each other in the name of imaginary plots attributed to one part of society against the other. This logic, combined with personalism and statism, finally legitimated an authoritarian turn within the State that began in 2005 and was reinforced with Nicolas Maduro's election.
 
What is left of populism?
 
As the Latin American case shows, this is the main problem with populism in power: an ideology that aims to re-found or radicalise democracy quickly comes into conflict with the logic of the State. This reflection is useful when considering what to do with populism today.
 
What remains of this historical ideology? What is left is clearly left-wing populism. From an ideological point of view, the so-called 'right-wing populism' refers to a completely different historical matrix: that of ethnic nationalism (or nativism), with strong antisemitic connotations, which was born in Europe at the end of the 19th century, irrigated the fascist movements, and was rebuilt in the 1980s against the migratory globalisation and the emancipatory struggles of the 1970s. Left-wing populism, by contrast, emerged in Europe and the United States after the Latin American ‘left turn’ in a similar context to that of past populisms: a socio-economic crisis, the subprime crisis, which revealed the disconnection of neoliberal elites from the social needs of the majority. The democratic socialism of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Labour Momentum, Podemos, the Five Star Movement, Syriza, La France insoumise: they have canalised the new populist mobilisations.
 
For those of them that have come to power, the same structural problems of Latin American populisms can be observed, even if the danger of an out-of-control statism is less pronounced there, due to the smaller role of military elites in the socio-historical construction of States. Like past populisms, populisms of our time are very ephemeral: none of them are in the same place as they were three years ago. The concessions made to the establishment have almost erased some of them from the electoral map, like Syriza. All of them have strong internal cleavages. One is the opposition between a ‘pragmatist’ wing and a ‘radical’ wing, as in the Italian Five Star Movement during Mario Draghi's government. The other is the split between 'populist strategy' and 'leftist strategy', as in Podemos (between Íñigo Errejón and Pablo Iglesias) and La France insomise (between Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Clémentine Autain). In short, populism still appears as a singular political moment; a moment that already seems, in part, to be behind us. If the populist moment of 2008 has closed, with the disappointments that populist parties in power have generated in their falling electorates, another one may arise in the future.
 
Two points should then be borne in mind. Firstly, populism does not remain the same between the destituting, contesting phase and the reinstituting phase in power; it changes politically. It is therefore necessary to control this mutation. Secondly, it is becoming urgent to separate the destiny of the extreme right and that of the radical left: the idea that there would be a populist dynamic common to both prevents us from thinking about the necessary renewal of a left-wing populism. On the contrary, this idea causes systematic haemorrhaging of left-wing voters who see in a supposedly common strategy with the extreme right a legitimate reason for disgust. Thinking about a left-wing populism for the years to come can only be done on the basis of these two analytical and strategic observations.

​

[1] Alexandre Dorna, Le populisme (Paris : PUF, 1999).

[2] Federico Tarragoni, L’esprit démocratique du populisme. Une nouvelle analyse sociologique (Paris : La Découverte, 2019). On the 'horseshoe theory', see Jean-Pierre Faye, Le siècle des idéologies (Paris : Press Pocket, 2002). For a critical point of view, cf. Annie Collovald and Brigitte Gaïti (eds), La démocratie aux extrêmes. Sur la radicalisation politique (Paris : La Dispute, 2006).

[3] Quentin Skinner, ‘The Empirical Theorists of Democracy and Their Critics’, Political Theory, 1, Issue 3 (1973), pp. 287-306; John Dunn, Setting the People Free. The Story of Democracy (New York: Atlantic books, 2005).

[4] Jan-Werner Müller, What is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

[5] Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London: Verso, 2018).

[6] Federico Tarragoni, « Populism, an ideology without history? A new genetic approach », Journal of Political Ideologies, 26, Issue 3 (2021). DOI : 10.1080/13569317.2021.1979130.

[7] Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

[8] Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks [25 §4, 1934] (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

[9] Federico Tarragoni, L’Énigme révolutionnaire (Paris : Les Prairies ordinaires, 2015).

In recent years, several analysts have contended that the old cleavage between left and right has faded gradually, to become less central politically than it once was. The end of communism, the unchallenged victory of market capitalism, and the rise of neoliberalism narrowed the distance between parties of the left and of the right, and reduced the range of options available in political debates.  Yet, although the left-right distinction may have become blunter as a cognitive instrument for politicians and voters, numerous studies show that it has not been replaced.  In fact, no ideological cleavage is more encompassing and ubiquitous than the opposition between the left and the right.[1]

When asked, most people across the world are able to locate themselves on a left-right scale, which basically divides those who support or oppose social change in the direction of greater equality. Ideological self-positioning also tends to be in line with the values and policy preferences associated with one of the two sides. The strength of this left-right schema, however, varies significantly among countries. In some cases, left-right positions correlate strongly with expected attitudes about equality, the state, the market, or social diversity; in others, they do not. We know little about the factors that make the left-right opposition more or less effective in structuring national debates. At best, existing studies suggest that left-right ideology is a more powerful constraint in Western democracies than elsewhere. To assess this question, we have taken the measure of cross-national variations in left-right ideology in 83 societies, and linked them to various factors, including economic development, secularisation, and the age of democracy.

Instead of focusing on individual determinants of ideology such as social class, gender or education, as scholars generally do, our analysis looks at country-level survey evidence and evaluates how, in each country, political debates are framed, or not framed, in left-right terms. The idea, along the lines suggested by Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, is to take the mass attitudes measured by large-N comparative survey projects as “stable attributes of given societies,” and as indicative of a country’s elites’ success in structuring politics along left-right dimensions. More specifically, we consider answers to twelve survey questions that capture the standard dimensions of the left-right political distinction. All answers were collected between 2008 and 2014 through the World Values Survey (WVS) and the European Values Study (EVS).  The twelve questions include, for each society, one on individual left-right self-positioning, and eleven related to issues that have historically divided the two sides. The varying degree of ideological consistency in citizens’ responses then makes it possible to assess the architecture of a country's political debates and make cross-national comparisons.

This approach to the workings of left-right ideology has two advantages. First, it moves the discussion of ideology beyond Western countries, and makes it possible to draw an extensive map of national ideological patterns. Second, and more importantly, because we use aggregate survey evidence, we can assess national-level causal mechanisms, and weigh, in particular, the respective influence of economic, social, and political factors on the constitution of the left-right cleavage.

Our results indicate that the left-right opposition is unevenly effective in structuring national politics. Individual answers to questions about equality, personal responsibility, homosexuality, the army, churches, or major companies correlate with left-right self-positioning in more than half of the countries considered. But answers to questions about abortion, government ownership of industry, competition, trade unions, or environmental groups correlate with ideological self-positioning in only a third of the cases. In line with the expectations of Inglehart and Welzel, we also find that economic development, secularisation, and the age of democracy are the best predictors of a structured left-right debate.
 
Theorising left and right

The construction of ideological identities is both a top-down and a bottom-up process, whereby people adopt political orientations defined by elites and institutions in line with their own personal predispositions. Psychologists have naturally paid more attention to the bottom-up, personal determinants of ideology, while political scientists have been more interested in the top-down, collective process. As a top-down process, the building of the left-right divide hinges on a country’s elites’ and institutions’ capacity to propose to voters what Paul Sniderman and John Bullock call a “menu of choices.”  For these authors, political institutions—most notably parties—give consistency to the views of ordinary citizens, by providing coherent menus from which they can choose.  As left-right self-positioning is strongly correlated with partisanship, we can hypothesise that a long-established, institutionalised party system contributes to structure ideological debates along left-right lines, compared to the more volatile politics of countries with fragile democracies.

To evaluate if the “menu of choices” proposed by a country’s elites and parties and adopted by voters is organised along left and right lanes, we test whether divisions in a country’s public opinion appear consistent with individual left-right self-positioning. People on the left are likely to be more favourable to equality, state intervention, public ownership, and trade unions, and people on the right better disposed toward markets, individual incentives, competition, and major companies. The left should also be more open toward homosexuality and abortion and more supportive of environmental organisations, and the right more at ease with churches and the armed forces. In countries where the menu of choices is strongly structured by the left-right opposition, there should be significant relationships between individual left-right self-positioning and the expected attitudes on these questions; in countries with a less powerful left-right schema, these relationships should be weaker.

Moreover, one should expect a connection between the structure of left-right discourse and the human development sequence identified by Inglehart and Welzel. Economic development, secularisation, and democratisation broaden the possibility, the willingness, and the rights of people to consider social alternatives. Economic development fosters the material capacity of a people to make choices, secularisation expands the moral frontiers of available choices, and democratic consolidation allows political parties and groups to define over time a menu of choices ordered around the usual left-right patterns. Left-right patterns should thus be associated with these three dimensions of human development.
 
Methodology

83 societies have a complete set of WVS/EVS answers for the questions we select. The core question of interest concerns left-right self-positioning, and it is addressed by asking respondents to locate themselves on a 1 to 10 scale going from left to right. Although the rate of response varies significantly across countries, overall, about three-quarter of respondents proved able to locate themselves on a left-right scale, allowing for valid inferences about ideology.

To verify whether this left-right positioning corresponds to consistent ideological stances, we correlate left-right positioning to responses on substantive political issues. Some of our eleven ideological questions refer to the core socio-economic components of the left-right cleavage (attitudes about equality, private or public ownership, the role of government, or competition), others concern cultural or social values (attitudes about homosexuality and abortion), and others tap respondents’ views about various organisations (churches, the armed forces, labor unions, major companies, and environmental organisations).  We expect people on the left to be more favourable to equal incomes, public ownership of business or industry, and the government’s responsibility “to ensure that everyone is provided for,” and less likely to consider that “competition is good.” Respondents on the left should also be more open toward homosexuality and abortion, and more confident in labour unions and environmental organisations, but less so in the churches, the armed forces, and major companies.

Using national responses to our eleven questions on substantive issues, we build a composite dependent variable, called left-right ideological reach. This variable measures the extent to which, in a given country, left-right self-positioning predicts the expected ideological stances on substantive political issues. If, in country A, the relationship between self-positioning and, say, attitudes about equality is significant (p < 0.05) and in the expected direction, we give a score of 1, and if not of 0. Adding results for eleven questions, a country’s score for left-right ideological reach can then range from 0, when self-positioning never correlates in the expected direction with a substantive left-right political division, to 11, when the expected relationships are present for all questions.

To account for national differences in ideological reach, we use indicators for economic development, secularisation, and democratic experience, as well as a number of control variables, for cultural differences in particular.
 
Results

Left-right ideological reach varies significantly across countries, from 0 for Libya and Moldova to 11 for a number of Western countries, including France and the United States. As Table 1 shows, there are 27 countries with scores of 0 to 3, where left-right self-positioning hardly predicts respondents’ positions on traditional issues dividing the left and the right; 31 where left-right ideological reach is moderate, with scores of 4 to 7; and 25 where a person’s ideological self-positioning predicts her position on most issues, most of the time, with scores of 8 to 11.

​This is a new, multidimensional, and country-scale representation of left and right public attitudes across the world, and the idea of a relationship between left-right self-positioning and substantive political orientations appears validated, at least for nearly two thirds of our sample.             

A cursory look at the data suggests, in line with the literature and with our theory, that left-right ideological reach is influenced by economic and democratic development. Countries with high scores in Table 1 are predominantly rich, established democracies; countries at the low end of the scale tend to be poorer, with authoritarian regimes or newer democracies. Indeed, economic development, measured by GDP per capita, is strongly correlated with ideological reach, and so are our indicators of secularisation and democracy.  In multiple regressions, the three explanatory variables considered are significant, with democracy coming first.  Control variables for cultural differences (religiosity and civilisations) are non-significant. 

These results are consistent with our interpretation of the left-right divide as a political construct that has global resonance but is clearly more structured in countries that have long experienced economic development, secularisation, and democratic politics. They also dispose of the seemingly common sense but misleading argument that would jump from a look at the cases in Table 1 to the conclusion that left and right are a Western specificity. Looking closely at the same table, one can see countries like Uruguay, Argentina, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, and Pakistan with scores of 7 or more, and countries like Hungary, Taiwan, and Brazil with low scores. Fostered by economic development and to some extent by secularisation, the left-right cleavage remains, first and foremost, a product of the enduring democratic conflict for control of the government. Not surprisingly, a host of comparative politics writings lend support to this conclusion, and suggests that the left-right divide is more structuring in countries with a strongly institutionalised party system.
 
Conclusion

The evidence from cross-national surveys is rather clear: around the world, most people are able and willing to locate themselves on a left-right scale and when they do, they tend to understand what this self-positioning implies. Their understanding, however, tends to be more comprehensive in countries that are more advanced economically, more secular, and more solidly democratic. As political parties compete for the popular vote, they construct an ideological pattern that makes sense for both elites and voters, and that gives structure to politics. When they fail to do so, or when democracy is non-existent, political discourse remains more haphazard, driven by context and personalities.

To go beyond these conclusions, we would need to probe further the political mechanisms that contribute to the development of ideology. Looking systematically at the party system institutionalisation hypothesis, in particular, would seem promising. For now, however, we can be satisfied that the language of the left and the right seems to function as an imperfect but critical unifying element in global politics.

​

[1] Russell J. Dalton, ‘Social Modernization and the End of Ideology Debate: Patterns of Ideological Polarization’, Japanese Journal of Political Science, 7:1 (2006), pp. 1-22; John T. Jost, ‘The End of the End of Ideology’, American Psychologist, 61:7 (2006), pp. 651-670; Peter Mair, ‘Left-Right Orientations’, in Russell J. Dalton and Hans-Dieter Klingemann (Eds), The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 206-222; Alain Noël and Jean-Philippe Thérien, Left and Right in Global Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); André Freire and Kats Kivistik, ‘Western and Non-Western Meanings of the Left-Right Divide across Four Continents’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 18:2 (2013), pp. 171-199.

When pursuing the clarification of socialism’s core concepts, according to the methodology advocated by Michael Freeden for the study of political ideologies, equality stands out as one of the undisputed ideas on that complex, variegated, and often quarrelling tradition. The other key concepts or conceptual themes that form the kernel of socialism are, according to Freeden, “the constitutive nature of the human relationship, human welfare as a desirable objective, human nature as active, … and history as the arena of (ultimately) beneficial change”.[1] The method leading to this list involves a particular understanding of political ideologies which differs from the usual approach taken by political theory or political philosophy. It requires a thorough study into the main currents of socialism—not only of the Marxist version—and the specification of the relevant concepts through a process of decontestation. The research aimed at specifying those core concepts is also necessary when it comes to depicting the ideas that comprise the adjacencies and periphery of the socialist ideology. There is a particular difficulty that arises when looking into socialism’s morphology, namely, the fact that socialism is both a critique of capitalist society and also a project of a society yet to be brought about: “unlike conservatism, or even mainstream forms of liberalism, socialism is peculiarly prone to a dual temporal existence. It is centrally founded on a critique of the present, yet significantly projected onto a future of which there is as yet little empirical evidence”.[2] This second aspect demands a “leap of faith and imagination”—to use Freeden’s expression.[3] By and large, the self-awareness of socialism—as an ideology containing at the same time a dominant scientific side and a subordinate utopian (normative) dimension—faded away in the face of different dogmatisms promoted by socialist states. But with the collapse of the socialist bloc, there emerged a need for a revision and updating of key elements of the tradition.
 
Recent scholarship about socialism has largely benefited from the impact of John Rawls’s liberal egalitarianism on several fields of the social sciences and the humanities. After a reckoning of the ethical deficit caused by an extended belief in the scientific prowess of Marxism, a good number of socialist thinkers and activists admitted the need for a normative turn. This is not to deny, of course, the existence of a deep-seated ethical current in Socialism, as it is evident in the works of Eduard Bernstein, R. H. Tawney, G. D. H. Cole, amongst others, but only to highlight the fact that, because of the mainly Marxist anti-moralism, normative work was demeaned and considered powerless in the face of the anticipatory prodigies of historical materialism.  This year will mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of A Theory of Justice,[4] and the shockwaves of Rawlsianism are still highly influential. Discussion of the core concepts of socialism, from a normative perspective, have gained a promising place within academia and also within grassroots organisations. Shortly after the turn of the millennium, Alex Callinicos, in his Anti-capitalist Manifesto, advocated a specific form or socialist democracy that embodies four key values of an anti-systemic program: justice, efficiency, democracy, and sustainability, where justice embraces ideals such as liberty, equality, and solidarity.[5] A recent entry on “Socialism” by Pablo Gilabert and Martin O’Neill for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy singles out equality, democracy, individual freedom, self-realisation, and community or solidarity as paramount values of this tradition.[6] As we can see in these two examples, together with Freeden’s construal, the proposed lists of core concepts do not fully match with each other but have one striking coincidence: equality.
 
This quick exercise seems to support Norberto Bobbio’s famous statement about equality being the Pole Star of the left, as opposed to the anti-egalitarian right. More important, though, is the acknowledgement that values matter to socialism and Marxism in particular, and that it was a shortcoming to eschew any talk of ethical principles, fearfully avoiding a collapse into what Marx and Engels described as petty utopianism. One must only be thankful that this anti-utopianism was not understood as an outright rejection of utopia altogether. So, in defiance of Marx and Engels’s strictures against moral theory, important varieties of moral thinking emerged within the socialist purview, and a strain of ethical socialism came around in the second half of the nineteenth century, paving the way for the post-Rawlsian normative turn. Although the name of Ethical Socialism normally refers to a group of thinkers and activists of the late 1800s in the United Kingdom, it had outstanding representatives in other parts of the world. William Jupp, John Trevor, Thomas Davidson, and Edward Carpenter were key representatives of British ethical socialism. The last two are of particular importance since they were deeply influenced by American Romanticism and immanentism, especially by the works of Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.[7]
 
In the United States, a provincial writer destined to become an almost involuntary political protagonist of the Gilded Age, Edward Bellamy, can be counted as one of the few who, despite the widespread dismissal of utopias, decidedly resorted to this genre—inherent to socialist critique and history—to carry out a double task: to cast a harsh indictment on capitalism as a predatory and unjust system, and to advance a vernacular conception of egalitarianism, which was the most cunning way to bring socialism and Marxist themes to the American public. He was also under the influence of American immanentism, transcendentalism, and the experiences of intentional utopian communities such as the famous Fourierist Brook Farm in Massachusetts. Bellamy’s ideas had a profound impact on the organised labor movement, especially among the Knights of Labor. Eugene Debs, founder of the Socialist Party in the United States, revealed that he became a socialist thanks to Bellamy and even met with the writer in his last days.[8] Daniel De Leon, too, is said to have started his revolutionary career under “Bellamy’s inspiration”;[9] and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the leading feminist activist and writer, was also a prominent member of the Bellamyist movement.[10] John Dewey famously wrote that Bellamy was “A Great American Prophet”, and remarked that “what Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to the anti-slavery movement, Bellamy’s book may well be to the shaping of popular opinion for a new social order”.[11] In short, and in keeping with the morphological approach, I find it plausible to hold that Edward Bellamy’s condemnation of capitalism and the account of the alternative egalitarian society he advocated are founded one a thick idea of equality which, at the same time, involves an outright rejection of the principle of self-ownership. This last rejection, I also sustain, must be either counted as a component of equality as a core idea of socialism or as an adjacent but necessary concept that contributes to making sense of the kind of egalitarianism espoused by Bellamy and, to a large degree, by contemporary egalitarian socialists.
 
It must be noted that the principle of self-ownership, first conceived by John Locke, constitutes the founding tenet of contemporary libertarianism. In its most usual rendition, the principle says that individuals have over themselves the same kind of rights that a master has over a chattel slave and, by implication, those who enjoy self-ownership cannot, as a matter of right, be forced to help others through personal service or any other mandatory scheme of redistribution. Bellamy’s opposition to self-ownership must be understood in the context of his life-long advocacy for egalitarianism, as it is conveyed in his most famous utopian novels: Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888),[12] and Equality (1897).[13] Such opposition—as I will explain—was founded on the idea of the common ancestry of humankind, on the belief that each person has ha debt to society and past generations; and most importantly, on the notion that it is “fraudulent” to believe that individuals deserve and fully own their natural and social endowments and owe nothing to each other. Looking Backward was one of the most significant literary works in the late 1800s in the United States. It sold millions of copies in a few years and was translated into several languages. The plot, as it normally happens in utopias, is a setting for the development of theoretical propositions. Bellamy uses a time-travelling scheme in which the main character falls into mesmerised sleep in 1887 only to wake up 113 later in his home city, Boston, which in the Year 2000 is part of a perfectly egalitarian society. Julian West, the protagonist, learns about the institutions and ethos of the new world in dialogue with his host, Dr Leete, a retired physician, and his daughter Edith. The sequel of Looking Backward, Equality, is a lengthier description of this new society. Bellamy gained almost immediate international recognition and country-wide acclaim, to the point that he became a keynote speaker for many associations, wrote extensively in his own newspaper, The New Nation, and, eventually, the Nationalist Party was created to advance Bellamy’s ideas. Nationalism, it must be said, was the name Bellamy adopted for his proposal, in an attempt to avoid the word socialism which was associated with violence and social unrest in the wake of the Haymarket Massacre and the mass strikes of the 1870s.
 
An in-depth exploration into Bellamy’s rejection of self-ownership reveals that such a stance is an integral part of his particular form of radical egalitarianism. The writer from Chicopee Falls (Massachusetts) thought that some of the dominant currents of socialism of his time were not radical enough as to how far they were prepared to push in the direction of equality. He thought that Fabians were too attached to the mechanism of retribution according to contribution, whereas Marxists allowed personal assets to have undue influence on distributive matters. These critiques of other varieties of socialism were the basis of his own understanding of equality. Bellamy considered equality to be the only relevant moral relationship between persons. From this uncompromising stance, he mounted a full criticism of the notion of self-ownership and propounded a strong egalitarian principle: “From each, equally; to each equally”.[14] The institutional arrangements of the utopian society that Dr Leete presents to Julian West are carefully designed and crafted to meet this extremely high standard, without giving in to the annulment of singularity or individual tastes. 
 
It is well known that William Morris’s News From Nowhere (1890) is a direct response to Bellamy’s vision, from an anarchistic and pastoral perspective, as opposed to the industrialist and somewhat highly regulated Bellamian society. Morris wrote a critical review in which he remarked that Looking Forward should be “considered seriously” but not taken as a “socialist Bible”. He thought that Bellamy only wanted to get rid of the ills of modern life, without changing that life altogether. He described the utopian system as State Communism, criticised its severe discipline, its industrialism, the major role of great cities, and the limited conception of work as productive activity dissociated from pleasure and creativity. But the core of Morris’s critique was aimed at Bellamy’s peaceful “economical semi-fatalism” that lead to the egalitarian society instead of a conscious struggle for a “free and equal life”.
 
Even though Bellamy does not reply to Morris’s review, many of these objections seem to have shaped the more nuanced portrayal of the utopian society in Equality and other writings.[15] At the same time, he comes up with a more straightforward rebuttal of self-ownership. So, when writing in The New Nation, he contends that it would be a “fraudulent” principle that which “would assume that an individual owns himself and has a valid title to the full usufruct of his powers without incumbrance or obligation on account of his debt to the past and his duties toward the social organism of which he is a part”.[16] At the same time, alongside a handful of acute arguments against increasing social inequalities and an outright indictment of monopoly capitalism, Bellamy pulls off a brilliant case against the entailment of the principle of self-ownership which forbids someone from lending assistance to others unless it is done by a consented interpersonal contract. In Equality, he contends that under capitalism it is accepted that “everyone is entitled to … the result of his abilities” and that this is plainly wrong because “they would naturally acquire advantages over others in wealth seeking as in other ways”.[17] Since he thought that abilities and the capacity for effort were due to the mere chance of birth, Bellamy ruled out the claim that the better endowed had a rightful claim over the advantages they could muster by using those undeserved talents. Therefore, it was the mission of social institutions to keep these inequalities from arising. It is easy to see that Bellamy was advancing similar arguments to those that, in the early 1970s, John Rawls used to build his monumental theory of justice as fairness. 
 
If Rawls springs up in this account of Bellamy’s thought, it is because, in my view, they represent a deep-seated egalitarian trend both in American political thought and, more importantly, in the socialist tradition. The egalitarianism of Bellamy and Rawls, as noted before, is part of a rich ethical tradition that overcame the staunch anti-moralism of the more orthodox Marxist versions of socialism. Rawls spent two years in Oxford, at a time when G. D. H. Cole, who thought of Bellamy as a mere “populariser of other men’s ideas”, was teaching about utopian socialism; when the Labour Party was divided between friends and adversaries of public ownership; and when Tawney’s new edition of Equality rekindled the debate over and against equality of opportunity,[18] as he advocated a kind of relational egalitarianism that despised the crude distributive view marked by “details of the countinghouse”. Without openly calling themselves socialists, both Rawls and Bellamy were no foes of socialism. On the contrary, Bellamy was convinced that his egalitarian model was even more radical than any socialist program of his time, and Rawls repeatedly emphasised that his theory of justice as fairness can be realised under a system of liberal or democratic socialism. Rawls believed “that the choice between a private-property economy and socialism is left open; from the standpoint of the theory of justice alone, various basic structures would appear to satisfy its principles”.[19] Moreover, after dismissing laissez-faire capitalism, welfare-state capitalism, and state socialism as incompatible with his principles of justice as fairness, he asserted that “property-owning democracy and liberal socialism [in] their ideal descriptions include arrangements designed to satisfy the two principles of justice”.[20]
 
In Bellamy and Rawls we can see proof of that "dual temporal existence" of Socialism identified by Freeden. As already mentioned, socialism encompasses both a critique of the present and a projection into the future. Bellamy chose the utopian genre to accomplish both tasks; Rawls, in the same spirit, called his otherwise unadorned and formal theory a “realistic utopia”. Above all, both political thinkers were adamant in rejecting self-ownership as part and parcel of their egalitarian views. It should come as no surprise that the first systematic challenge to Rawls was launched from within the liberal tradition, in the guise of the libertarian theory of Robert Nozick, whose endorsement of self-ownership leads to a form of rugged anti-egalitarianism. To sum up: I understand that self-ownership has no place in a radical egalitarian version of socialism and that a good deal of theoretical work needs to be done in order to refine our understanding of the precise place of this rejection in a morphology of the socialist political ideology.



[1] M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory. A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 425-426.

[2] Ibid., pp. 417-418.

[3] Ibid., p. 418.

[4] J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice. Revised Edition (Cambridge, MA.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. First published, 1971.)

[5] A. Callinicos, An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press), pp. 107-108.

[6] P. Gilabert and M. O’Neill, “Socialism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/socialism/>.

[7] M. Bevir, The Making of British Socialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 220-227.

[8] F. Rosemont, ‘Bellamy’s Radicalism Reclaimed’, in Daphne Patai (Ed.) Looking Backward 1988-1888. Essays on Edward Bellamy (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 162.

[9] Ibid., p. 168.

[10] Ibid., p. 176.

[11] J. Dewey, ‘A Great American Prophet’, in Boydston, Jo Ann et. al (eds.) John Dewey. The Later Works 1925-1934. Volume 9: 1033-1934 (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), p. 106. [First published in Common Sense 3 (April 1934), pp. 6-7).

[12] E. Bellamy, Looking Backward. 2000-1887 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

[13] E. Bellamy, Equality (New York: Appleton, 1897).

[14] E. Bellamy, Talks on Nationalism (Chicago, IL: The Peerage Press, 1938), p. 25.

[15] Morris, W., News From Nowhere and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 353-357.

[16] E. Bellamy, Talks on Nationalism, op. cit., p. 27.

[17] E. Bellamy, Equality, op. cit., p. 107.

[18] K. Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice. Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), pp. 18-24.

[19] J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 228.

[20] J. Rawls, Justice as Fairness. A Restatement (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 138.

Political parties have a complex relationship with ideologies. If on the one hand they are their most visible embodiment and are active contributors to their production and contestation, on the other, they are not necessarily their most faithful followers. Indeed, political parties often seek to make ideologies fit their electoral strategies. To complicate matters further, the ability of political parties to reinvent themselves is constrained by ideologies as any attempt to change and revise their programmes must reflect their ideological trajectories across time and space.
 
In short, parties’ relationship with ideologies is both instrumental and constrained. These two understandings of parties’ relationships with ideologies dominate the academic literature on the subject.[1] But there is a third dimension in this relationship that has been overlooked by the literature which shows that ideology is central to the activities of political parties.
 
Because ideology is central to their life, political parties are heavily involved in the production and contestation of ideologies not only because they want to win elections or are historically constrained by them, but also because ideology is what political parties ‘do’. As political institutions that are, as Sheri Berman reminds us, ‘shaped by the ideological projects they championed’, all activities, including power-seeking strategies, pursued by political parties are driven by ideological and ideational consideration.[2]
 
To show how political parties engage in processes of ideological production, this article will use a new methodological approach, which combines V. A. Schmidt’s discursive institutionalism and Peter A. Hall’s historical institutionalism, to analyse how the Labour Party under Ed Miliband used the idea of ‘predistribution’ to drive ideological change. In particular, the article will show how Miliband used the idea of predistribution to develop and articulate an agenda that sought simultaneously to renew the socialist roots of the party, to address the political and policy challenges created by the 2007 global financial crisis and three decades of neoliberal politics, and to win a general election.
 
The Mechanics of Ideological Analysis

The methodological approach proposed here, which combines discursive institutionalism and historical institutionalism, places ideas at the centre of political action. As such, it does not disregard the role of interests in political decision however, it assumes that ‘ideas cause actors to make certain choices’.[3] Each of the ‘new institutionalisms’ offer insights into how that process happens.
 
As an approach that focuses on ‘who talks to whom, where, and when’[4] discursive institutionalism maps how ‘ideas are generated among policy actors and diffused to the public by political actors through discourse’, and shows how ideologies are produced, renewed, and changed.[5] Thus, the key contribution of discursive institutionalism is to propose a method to map the different stages of how ideas influence the behaviour of political actors from ‘thought to word to deed’.[6]
 
To properly understand how ideas can influence or drive processes of ideological change, discourse needs to be contextualised[7] and categorised by degree of generality (policies, programmes, and philosophies), and type of content (cognitive or normative). Moreover, Schmidt identified two types of discourse that need to be analysed: coordinative, among political actors; and communicative, between political actors and the public.[8] This distinction is important because coordinative discourse signals the intentions of political actors as well as their thought-processes, but communicative discourse reveals the constraints they face.
 
Because discursive institutionalism focuses on explaining how ideas can lead to change it pays special attention to the ideational activities of the epistemic community which is responsible for the production of ideas within a party. This epistemic community, composed of professional intellectuals, think-tank experts, party intellectuals and activists from different factions, political advisers, and strategists, performs different but related roles: it prioritises issues; it offers causal explanations to problems; it links ideas and solutions to the morphologies of ideologies; and it devises strategies to make those ideas accessible and attractive to wider audiences.
 
But if discursive institutionalism allows us to map how political actors think, interpret, adopt, and adapt ideas in processes of ideological change, it does not explain why certain ideas gained currency whilst others were abandoned or diluted. The key element missing from discursive institutionalism is a consideration about the power of political actors to choose and impose their ideas on others. To address this weakness, this post proposes to complement discursive institutionalism with insights from historical institutionalism.
 
The key assumption of historical institutionalism is that to be transformative, ideas need to possess certain qualities. Peter A. Hall proposed three criteria to test the power of ideas in processes of third order change, though they can also be applied to processes of incremental change. The first criterion is about the persuasive capacity of ideas, a condition which is also required by discursive institutionalism. The idea in question needs to offer a plausible and persuasive response to a current policy puzzle.
 
But persuasiveness is not merely dependent on the intellectual coherence of an idea or its technical viability. Hence, in Hall’s model, to be successful ideas also need to be comprehensible. They need to resonate with the way the recipients of the idea understand the world. Third, to influence policy ‘an idea must come to the attention of those who make policy, generally with a favourable endorsement from the relevant authorities’. [9] In other words, to be influential ideas need to be sponsored by powerful actors.
 
The next section of the post will show how the methodological approach proposed here shows how the idea of predistribution drove Ed Miliband’s attempts to renew the socialist roots of the Labour Party in the period 2010-15 from thought, to word, to deed.
 
Predistribution and the Renewal of Social Democracy

​The Labour leader Ed Miliband saw the global financial crisis as one of those critical juncture moments which opened the way for a ‘new centre-left moment’.[10] Thus, when he was elected leader in 2010, he proposed to turn the page on New Labour and to renew the party’s socialist roots as a strategy to address the challenges and problems created (and revealed) by the global financial crisis. His blueprint prioritised the goals of reducing inequality and a reform of capitalism which was consistent with post-war social democracy.
 
Miliband’s search for solutions to tackle inequality, involved setting up a wide epistemic community which was given the task to lead and contribute to the party’s policy review. Several of his advisers were political scientists, philosophers, and public policy experts. Miliband also cultivated a diverse ideational network composed of academics, think-tanks researchers, senior media commentators, party strategists, influential Labour and centre-left groupings (for example, Compass), which benefited from the occasional contribution from famous public intellectual from Britain, the United States (Michael Sandel, for example) and Brazil (Roberto Unger).
 
The discussions between a cross-section of intellectuals, political strategists, and activists, resulted in a remarkable outpouring of new ideas and let to multiple dialogues and encounters between Miliband’s team and intellectuals, researchers, and activists from within and outside the Labour Party.  
 
It was in one of these encounters that Miliband first heard about predistribution, a new and barely fleshed-out idea developed by the Yale political scientist Jacob S. Hacker. In 2011, Miliband attended a Policy Network event in Oslo, where Hacker spoke about predistribution for the first time. From that moment on a dialogue was established between the Yale academic, Miliband and his team, think-tanks associated with Labour, and party intellectuals from a variety of factions.
 
Roughly a year after this encounter, Miliband introduced the idea of predistribution in a speech delivered at a Policy Network event.[11] Henceforth, the concept of predistribution made regular appearances in the political debates of the time and quickly gained the status of big idea in party and media discussions.
 
If the term became ubiquitous there was no settled interpretation for its meaning. To gain a better understanding of how Miliband used this idea it is useful to look first at how its author defined it. Hacker, proposed predistribution as an approach to ‘stop inequality before it starts.’ As a transformative idea, predistribution required a change in the relationship between the state and the market which recognised the role of the state in creating and shaping markets. As such, predistribution advocated the regulation of markets to serve the public good as well as a new role for the state as an investor in innovation and public infrastructures[12]
 
Hacker was not overly prescriptive about what a predistribution agenda would entail. He argued, however, that it would touch upon three main planks of public policy. The first focused on market reforms that encouraged a more equal distribution of economic power and included proposals as varied as a stronger regulation of financial markets and executive pay, and the strengthening of trade unions.[13] The second plank concentrated on what Hacker called expanding equality of opportunity,[14] and included proposals like the expansion of pre-school education, investment in vocational training and in affordable housing, and improving working conditions by raising wages, introducing a living wage, and improving job security.[15] The third plank was about organising what Hacker called a ‘countervailing power’ to the market[16] which aimed to empower ‘new forms of work organisations’.
 
Miliband and his team were keen on the transformational potential of a predistribution agenda. This was, after all, an idea that sought to tackle the root-causes of inequality and to reform capitalism, two goals associated to the party’s ideology, but which sounded reassuringly technocratic. the political backlash that traditional redistributive strategies normally attracted.
 
The interest in a predistribution agenda extended beyond Miliband’s office. Different factions of the party showed interest in the idea. Several MPs and Labour-leaning think-tanks like Policy Network, the Resolution Foundation, the IPPR, and the Fabian Society were quite supportive. The think-tank Policy Network hosted Hacker several times and devoted a number of seminars and publications to its discussion and dissemination.
 
Unsurprisingly, the different Labour factions interpreted the concept in a variety of ways. Whilst figures associated with the Right presented it as an alternative to redistribution, others emphasised its potential either to promote ‘responsible capitalism,’ or to promote equality, or to strengthen an emancipatory agenda centred around ideas of economic democracy and mutualism.
 
Interestingly, Miliband’s engagement with the idea of predistribution evolved over time. In his first explicit reference to the idea, Miliband presented predistribution as a transformative idea:
 
Predistribution is about saying:
We cannot allow ourselves to be stuck with permanently being a low-wage economy.
It is neither just, nor does it enable us to pay our way in the world.
Our aim must be to transform our economy, so it is a much higher skill, higher wage economy.[17]
 
Tellingly, predistribution would not replace redistribution, because redistributive measures would always be necessary. Thus, Miliband’s predistribution agenda was about tackling the causes of inequality by promoting what he called ‘a more responsible capitalism’. This would be achieved by changing the rules that ‘shape the ways markets work’, namely by ‘changing the relationship between finance and the real economy. To deliver this agenda, Miliband proposed the creation of a British Investment Bank, an active industrial policy which would focus on investments in infrastructure and skills. He also defended state intervention in markets to ensure they served the public good.
 
The political reaction to this speech was mixed. Whilst commentators on the left thought the idea was interesting and had potential, others resisted it because it was a nebulous concept that was difficult to sell on the doorstep. This reaction largely explains the fact that following this speech, Miliband rarely mentioned the word predistribution again and his press team banned him from using it in public.[18] In a recent podcast devoted to the idea, Miliband said that predistribution was a ‘throwaway remark’[19] that was then presented in the media as his big idea. He also said that ‘the word was ugly’,[20] though he recognised its importance.
 
In its place, Miliband developed other narratives—namely, the squeezed middle, the ‘producers versus predators’ narrative (which was also dropped very quickly), the power agenda, One Nation,[21] the ‘cost of living’ crisis, the zero-zero economy—to promote a predistribution agenda that followed the three planks suggested by Hacker. For example, his senior policy adviser Stewart Wood explained that the ‘One Nation’ approach aimed ‘to change the rules of markets, so that we get to a more equal distribution of economic power and rewards even before government starts to collect taxes or paying benefits’.[22]
 
Miliband was equally interested in the second plank of the predistribution agenda about expanding opportunity and he used a variety of narratives to promote it. For instance, his ‘power agenda’; his ‘producers vs predators’ agenda was used to defend a capitalism that protected the public good; and his ‘cost of living crisis’ narrative were used to address issues like low wages, job insecurity, and work-life balance. To this end, he proposed to widen the adoption of the Living Wage, the extension of free nursery provision, and the introduction of new apprenticeships.
 
The Labour leader was equally supportive of Hacker’s ideas about developing ‘countervailing power to the market’. To that effect he talked about extending power to individuals and grassroots organisations in several speeches. His ‘power agenda’[23] was the focus of lively discussions within Miliband’s circle and led to proposals like the devolution of power to local communities through mutualisation, participatory budgeting, and bringing workers into company boards.[24]
 
Though rarely uttered in speeches, the idea predistribution informed several sections of Labour’s 2015 electoral manifesto which promised to reform the relationship between the market and the state. Labour’s manifesto promised, as well, a rise to the minimum wage, the promotion of the living wage and the expansion of free childcare, the banning of some zero-hours contracts, freezing energy prices, and investing in infrastructure and in the green economy. Finally, there were proposals to create a bank bonus tax, and to introduce workers’ representatives in the boards of companies.
 
The author of the idea was encouraged by Labour’s 2015 manifesto. For him, it was ‘the idea, not the label, that mattered’. However, Hacker was less encouraged by Labour’s approach to developing countervailing power. In his appraisal of Miliband’s take on predistribution he noticed the ‘notable lack of serious discussion of the alternative to unions that could provide some degree of representation for workers’. This omission was so glaring that Hacker even questioned whether ‘predistribution of the sort I have discussed is even possible given the decline of labor [sic] unions’.[25] Hacker was not the only one to be disappointed by this omission. Jon Cruddas, one of the co-authors of the manifesto, admitted that Labour’s failure to strengthen trade unions undermined the idea of predistribution.[26]
 
There were other problems with Miliband’s predistribution agenda. Some of the proposals to ‘widen opportunities’ were almost tokenistic. The promise of a Living Wage, an idea that had been at the centre of Miliband’s campaign to become Labour leader, was presented as an aspiration.
 
Assessing Miliband’s Take on Predistribution

​The mapping of the idea of predistribution ‘from thought to word to deed’ showed us that Labour Party under Ed Miliband ‘thought’ and ‘discussed’ it as a transformational idea by Miliband however it was watered down when it reached the ‘deed’ stage. To understand why, the next section of the article will apply Peter A. Hall’s three criteria to explain why Miliband diluted his approach to predistribution.
 
The first difficulty Miliband encountered was presentational. Predistribution was a complex idea to present to voters on the doorstep. It was a term with an unclear meaning and was therefore not a persuasive concept. To overcome this constraint Miliband and his team developed different narratives to promote the predistributive agenda. But this approach was ineffective because the narratives kept changing from speech to speech, preventing voters from gaining a familiarity with it. As it challenged voters’ understanding of how a predistribution agenda could be compatible with the goal of reducing the public deficit, it was not a persuasive and comprehensible idea.
 
But the greatest obstacle to the success of Miliband’s predistribution agenda was his inability to attract the support of relevant actors both inside and outside the Labour Party. Private interviews with Miliband’s senior advisers, Labour MPs, activists, observers close to the Labour leader, as well as media and academic accounts suggest that Miliband was isolated in the party and shadow cabinet. In reality, the Shadow Cabinet was divided about the extent of Labour’s radicalism. Whilst one powerful group believed that a few retail offers would suffice for Labour to win the election, there were others who argued that Labour had to be more radical and transformative.
 
Miliband’s team also had reservations about giving more powers to trade unions in economic policy. Some of Miliband’s advisers thought that British trade unions were not ‘sufficiently responsible’ to be awarded co-determination powers. The party was equally divided about the scope of reforms to the regulation of the banking industry. Labour signalled a desire to introduce tighter regulation of the banking industry with the purpose of reducing risk and increasing competition, but the reforms to the banking industry it ended up proposing were modest in scope.[27]
 
 Miliband himself was ambivalent about the extent of his own radicalism in general and about these proposals to strengthen trade unions and devolve power to cities and local authorities in particular. His ambivalence was also manifested in the party’s policy development. The reality was that there were, as Stewart Wood explained, two Ed Milibands: ‘There’s Ed Miliband the son of Ralph Miliband, and there’s Ed Miliband the special advisor in Treasury for ten years’.[28] Interestingly, in a recent interview Miliband admitted this problem and regretted not having been more radical in his approach.[29] Miliband’s admission is telling. Though it is clear that he was constrained in his decisions by the lack of institutional support, ultimately he had the agency to decide on the direction of the party. His own interpretation of Labour’s challenges and possibilities led him to choose a more cautious policy and ideological path.
 
The party’s divisions and Miliband’s ambivalence impacted Labour’s predistribution agenda. That much was admitted by one of the authors of Labour’s manifesto. ‘Definition, energy, vitality, clarity’ were the price to pay for party unity, admitted Cruddas.[30] These tensions led to the dilution of the most innovative and potentially transformative proposals, namely those that concerned the creation of greater countervailing power, the regulation of financial markets, the devolution of power to local authorities, the strengthening of workers’ rights and citizens’ voice. Instead of presenting ambitious ideas and a clear vision that renewed the socialist roots of the party, the 2015 manifesto and the party’s electoral campaign focused on modest retail offers that did not seem to cohere around a powerful message. This dilution resulted in a predistribution agenda that looked disjointed and far from transformative.
 
But if context, institutional and political pressures, and electoral considerations led to the dilution of Miliband’s predistributive agenda, there is no doubt that this idea drove his attempt to change the party’s ideological direction and develop an egalitarian programme that renewed Labour’s socialist roots, and sought to address voters’ concerns and aspirations.
 
If Miliband lost the 2015 general election, his attempt to renew Labour’s socialist roots with a predistributive agenda outlasted his efforts. His successor, Jeremy Corbyn, picked up on Miliband’s predistribution agenda and drove it into a more radical direction. The 2017 Labour Party manifesto, entitled For the Many not the Few,[31] revisited all the themes associated with predistribution, and was seen by Guinan and O’Neill as a follow-up of that agenda.[32] Tellingly, Corbyn’s successor, Keir Starmer has promised an agenda that builds on Labour’s 2017 manifesto. For an idea that was seen as ‘ugly’ and too complex, predistribution has surely demonstrated an impressive resilience.



[1] These accounts can be seen in J. Adams, M. Clark, L. Ezrow, G. Glasgow, ‘Understanding Change and Stability in Party Ideologies: Do Parties Respond to Public Opinion Or To Past Election Results, British Journal of Political Science, 34 (4) (2004), pp. 598-61, at p. 590. See also I. Budge, ‘A New Spatial Theory of Party Competition: Uncertainty, Ideology and Policy Equilibria Viewed Comparatively and Temporally’, British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 24 (4) (1994), pp. 443-467, at p. 446.

[2]S. Berman, The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), at p. 11.

[3] C. Parsons, A Certain Idea of Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), at p. 6.

[4] V. A. Schmidt, ‘Taking Ideas Seriously: Explaining Change Through Discursive Institutionalism As The Fourth New Institutionalism’, European Political Science Review, 2010, 2:1, 1-25, at p. 16.

[5] V. A. Schmidt, ‘Reconciling Ideas and Institutions through Discursive Institutionalism’, D. Béland and R. Henry Cox (editors) Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), at p. 55.

[6] V. Schmidt, ‘Discursive Institutionalism: The Explanatory Power of Ideas and Discourse’, in Annual Review of Political Science Review, 2008, 11: 303-26, at p. 309.

[7] C. M. Radaelli, V.A. Schmidt, ‘Policy Change and Discourse in Europe: Conceptual and Methodological Issues’ in C. M. Radaelli and V. A. Schmidt, Policy Change and Discourse in Europe, (London: Routledge, 2015), at p. 15.

[8] V. A. Schmidt, ‘Bringing Ideas and Discourse Back Into The Explanation of Change in Varieties of Capitalism and Welfare States’ CGPE Working Paper Series, Working Paper No. 2, University of Sussex, May 2008, pp-305-307.

[9] P. A. Hall, ‘Conclusion: The Politics of Keynesian Ideas’, in P. A. Hall (editor) The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism Across Nations, (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), at p. 370.

[10] Ed Miliband interviewed in Jason Cowley, ‘Ed Miliband: He’s Not For Turning’, New Statesman, 05 September 2012.

[11] E. Miliband, ‘Speech to Policy Network – Labour’s New Agenda’, 06 September 2012, http://www.labour.org.uk/labours-new-agenda, accessed on 22 August 2013.

[12] Hacker quoted in G. Easton, ‘Interview to Jacob Hacker: Ed Miliband’s Wonkish Pin-Up’, in New Statesman, 11 February 2013.

[13] J. S. Hacker, ‘The Institutional Foundations of Middle-Class Democracy’, Progressive Governance, Oslo, Policy Network, 06 May, http://www.policy-network.net/pno_detail.aspx?ID=3998&title=The+institutional+foundations+of+middle-class+democracy, accessed on 07 September 2012.

[14] See J. Hacker, “The Free Market Fantasy”, Policy Network, 23 April 2014, http://www.policy-network.net/pno_detail.aspx?ID=4628&title-The-Free-Market-Fantasy, on 28 August 2014.

[15] J. S. Hacker, ‘The Institutional Foundations of Middle-Class Democracy’,

[16] J. Hacker, B. Jackson, M. O’Neill ‘The Politics of Predistribution’, Renewal 21, 2-3, (2013), pp. 54-64, p. 56.

[17] E. Miliband, ‘Speech to Policy Network – Labour’s New Agenda’, op. cit.

[18] R. Behr, ‘The Making of Ed Miliband’, The Guardian, 15 April 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/apr/15/the-making-of-ed-miliband, accessed on 24 July 2016.

[19] E. Miliband and G. Lloyd, ‘Predistribution: What the Hell Does It Mean?’, Reasons To Be Cheerful Podcast, 22 April 2019, https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/83-predistribution-what-the-hell-does-it-mean/id1287081706?i=1000436007357, accessed on 17 May 2019.

[20] E. Miliband, ‘The Inequality Problem’, London Review of Books, 38, 3, 4 February 2016, pp. 19-20.

[21] J. Atkins, ‘Ideology, Rhetoric and One Nation Labour’, Politics, 2015, 35, 1, 19-31, at p. 21

[22] S. Wood, ‘Explaining One Nation Labour’, The Political Quarterly, Vol. 84, No. 3, July-September 213, 317-320, at p. 318.

[23] E. Miliband, ‘The Hugo Young Lecture’, 10 February 2014, http://labourlist.org/2014/02/ed-milibands/hugo-young-lecture-full-text/, accessed on the 15 April 2014.

[24] M. Stears, Private Interview, 18.06.2013; J. Cruddas, Private Interview, 02 September 2013.

[25] J. Hacker ‘Miliband’s Not Talking About Predistribution But He Has Embraced My Big Idea’, op. cit., Ref. 80.

[26] J. Cruddas, Private Interview, 04 March 2015.

[27] Ed Miliband, ‘Speech to the CBI’, 25 October 2010, http://www.labour.org.uk/leader-of-the-labour-party-ed-milibands-speech-to-the-cbi,2010-10-25), accessed 10 January 2012.

[28] S. Wood interviewed by David Kogan, D. Kogan, Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party, (London: Bloomsbury Reader, 2019), at p. 173.

[29] D. Kogan, Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party, op. cit., Ref 123, at p. 173.

[30] J. Cruddas, Private Interview, 04 March 2015.

[31] Labour Party, For the Many Not the Few: The Labour Party Manifesto 2017, (London: Labour Party, 2017), p. 47.

[32] M. O’Neill and J. Guinan, ‘The Institutional Turn: Labour’s New Political Economy’, Renewal, Vol. 26, No. 2, 2018, pp. 5-16, p. 7. 

In a recent piece in ROAR Magazin, William Callison and Quinn Slobodian make a provocative claim: they argue that a short-lived German leftists’ populist experiment, Aufstehen (literally: ‘Stand Up’ or ‘Get Up’), and the far right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) both lay claim to ordoliberalism, a German variant of neoliberalism. Callison and Slobodian argue that “while the partial symmetry between new would-be populist movements on the left and right is often observed—and the similarities often exaggerated—the curious fact that both the AfD and Aufstehen [draw] on the heritage of the German form of neoliberalism, better known as “ordoliberalism,” is often overlooked.[1]
 
As Callison and Slobodian point out, the AfD’s neoliberal leanings are well known. Aufstehen’s ordoliberal overtures, on the other hand, seem not just surprising but quite perplexing. What, one might ask, is going on with the German Left? Why would a nascent left populist movement turn to a variant of neoliberalism as a source of inspiration?
 
The political figure that best represents this ordoliberal turn on the German Left is Sahra Wagenknecht, the former parliamentary chairperson of the Die Linke, and a co-founder of Aufstehen. In fact, Callison and Slobodian are not the first to point out Wagenknecht’s turn to ordoliberalism. While the scholarly literature, especially in English, has only remarked in passing on Wagenknecht’s ordoliberal turn, Wagenknecht’s appeals to ordoliberalism have been widely noted and discussed in the German press, especially in reviews of Wagenknecht’s recent books, Freiheit statt Kapitalismus (2011) and Reichtum ohne Gier (2016).[2] The titles alone foreshadow a shift in Wagenknecht’s rhetoric--Freedom instead of Capitalism is a play on the 1976 CDU campaign slogan Freedom instead of Socialism (it sounds catchier in German, I promise), and Prosperity Without Greed evokes the Christian-democratic former German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard’s Prosperity for All, published in 1957.
 
But one hardly needs to decipher clues like these in order to notice Wagenknecht’s—some might claim fatal—attraction to ordoliberalism. In both Freedom instead of Socialism and Prosperity without Greed, Wagenknecht draws heavily on the writings of ordoliberals such as Walter Eucken, Alexander Rüstow, and Alfred Müller-Armack, and evinces a certain nostalgia for the so-called ‘golden years,’ the ‘economic miracle’ of postwar West Germany, when ordoliberalism, as a political ideology, was arguably at its most influential.[3] Wagenknecht portrays ordoliberalism as an alternative to neoliberalism understood as a doctrine of market radicalism, the destruction of the welfare state and rampant privatization, and sees Eucken, Rüstow, and Müller-Armack as proponents of a third way between capitalism and a planned economy.[4] In other words, Wagenknecht contests the understanding of ordoliberalism as a German variant of neoliberalism by interpreting it as a German alternative to neoliberalism. She strongly implies that her own political vision of a “creative socialism” has more in common with the ordoliberal tradition than the current neo-liberal policies of the FDP, CDU, and SPD.[5]
 
She has also repeated these claims in interviews and political speeches. In a 2017 interview with WirtschaftsWoche, for example, Wagenknecht argues that “if you take Ludwig Erhard seriously, you have to vote for Die Linke”.[6] Similarly, in a 2010 speech before the Bundestag, Wagenknecht cited Eucken and Erhard in support of her own proposals, and suggested, tongue-in-cheek, that none of her conservative or liberal colleagues had ever even bothered to read Eucken’s work.[7] Wagenknecht, in other words, presents herself as the better heir of ordoliberalism.
 
Wagenknecht’s turn to ordoliberalism has gained her some new—and quite unlikely—fans. After the publication of Prosperity Without Greed, the well-known conservative newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), published an article entitled: Über diesen Kommunismus könnte man reden (This is the kind of communism we could talk about).[8] Similarly, Peter Gauweiler, a prominent member of the arch-conservative CSU not exactly known for his leftist views, found much to like in Wagenknecht’s Freedom Instead of Capitalism (), welcomed her turn to ordoliberalism, and seems to have had to try hard to find anything to criticise in Prosperity without Greed.[9] To the collective astonishment of the German press, even the economist Hans-Werner Sinn, who is commonly seen as a die-hard neoliberal, found common ground with Wagenknecht’s new political vision and welcomed Prosperity without Greed as a “hymn to ordoliberalism”.[10]
 
But not everyone is equally delighted with Wagenknecht’s appropriations of Eucken and Rüstow. Some of her critics—mostly, but not exclusively from the right—have criticised Wagenknecht’s ordoliberal manoeuvres. Some have argued that Wagenknecht is an anti-capitalist wolf in ordoliberal clothing (“im Schafspelz des Ordoliberalismus”), and that her engagement with ordoliberalism is a marketing ploy at best and a transparent attempt at political deception at worst.[11]  A commentator in ORDO, the flagship ordoliberal publication, for example, warns Wagenknecht’s readers not to be “seduced” by the “intellectual charms” of the “Jeanne d’Arc of anticapitalism” and imagines the ordoliberals’ horror-stricken exclamation in the face of any ‘ordo-socialist’ appropriations: “What would Walter Eucken and Alfred Müller-Armack have said to [Wagenknecht’s] […] proposals? Probably: Divine Comedy, Inferno III: All abandon hope, ye who enter here.”.[12]
 
Some of these critiques are, no doubt, hyperbolic, but they do raise a set of tricky questions: Firstly, has Wagenknecht actually taken an ordoliberal turn? Or is she merely deploying ordoliberalism strategically, cherry-picking her way through a tradition so routinely invoked in German politics that some have compared it to liturgy?[13] Secondly, how expansive or flexible is the ordoliberal tradition? Can it be appropriated for Wagenknecht’s “creative socialism?” Or is any attempt to appropriate the ordoliberal tradition for a left project “perverse”?[14] What does it mean—and what does it do—to claim ordoliberalism for a left political project? In other words, Wagenknecht’s self-representation as the “better” ordoliberal raises some pressing questions about what ordoliberalism is, and, maybe more importantly, what it is good for.
 
One way of assessing the plausibility of Wagenknecht’s self-representation as the better, if unorthodox, heir of ordoliberalism—as an “ordo-socialist,” as Callison and Slobodian quip—is to define ordoliberalism in terms of its core policy positions, preoccupations, questions or “problematic”,[15] and then to show that Wagenknecht, in her recent political writings, has not merely claimed ordoliberal ideas strategically and superficially in support of positions that she already held, but has engaged seriously and substantively with ordoliberalism in a way that has influenced her political thinking.
                                                                                                        
So what is ordoliberalism? Many of the most recent attempts to define ordoliberalism have taken place in the context of trying to explain Germany’s “inflexibility on austerity measures” and its punitive stance during the Eurozone crisis.[16] In this context, ordoliberalism is commonly described as a German variant of neoliberalism that prescribes a strong regulatory state, strict anti-trust policies aimed at bolstering competition in the market, and a commitment to price stability that is guaranteed by an independent monetary authority.[17] In Austerity: The History of A Dangerous Idea, for example, Mark Blyth has claimed that ordoliberalism was the “instruction sheet” for “Germany’s response to the [Eurozone] crisis”.[18]
 
If one understands ordoliberalism primarily as an “instruction sheet” for austerity, Wagenknecht’s ordoliberal overtures appear deeply misguided. Wagenknecht, after all, was highly critical of the German government’s push for austerity politics during the Eurozone crisis and sharply criticised Schäuble’s punitive stance with regards to Greece. So why should she, of all people, turn to the authors of the “instruction sheet” for austerity for inspiration?
 
But we don’t have to understand ordoliberalism as a blueprint for austerity politics. As many scholars of ordoliberalism have argued, ordoliberalism is more than a set of principles for economic policy making, austerity politics or not, and can be best understood as a social and political theory. Walter Bonefeld, for example, has argued that ordoliberalism cannot be reduced to a set of policy prescriptions. While ordoliberalism does focus on the economic sphere, he claims, it does not “conceive of the free economy in narrow economic terms” but sees it as a “universal form of life,” a “definite moral order” that requires a political and social framework which has to be created and sustained by the state.[19]
 
So, if we understand ordoliberalism as a social and political theory does it become easier to spot the ideas that might have attracted a “Jeanne d’Arc of anti-capitalism”? At first glance, it doesn’t seem so. Ordoliberalism is most commonly seen as centrally concerned with limiting or constraining the power of mass democracy;[20] as having an elitist and technocratic view of political decision-making;[21] and a conception of the social order that is both “patriarchal” and has undertones of a “natural hierarchy” to boot.[22] Ordoliberalism—or rather the strand of neoliberal thought that would later be called ordoliberalism—emerged out of a deep sense of crisis in the 1920s.[23] Ordoliberals recognised that the Great Depression had made the weaknesses of a laissez-faire economy painfully obvious,[24] and sought to articulate a new liberalism that would no longer adhere to the fallacy that markets were quasi-natural phenomena that emerged as long as the state got out of the way.[25] They developed the idea of the market as a “political event” to be carefully staged by a strong state.[26] The state’s decision-making processes, the ordoliberals argued, had to be protected from the constant clamouring of special interests; a threat that had emerged full force with the development of pluralist mass democracy, according to the ordoliberals.[27] Economic freedom thus had to be protected by a strong state and an economic constitution that would insulate the market economy from excess demands of pluralist mass democracies.
 
This account of ordoliberalism as a political theory with strong anti-democratic and technocratic tendencies doesn’t seem very promising for a left reimagination of the present economic order. So far, it’s difficult to see how and why Wagenknecht would look to such a political program for inspiration, especially since Wagenknecht, on her own account, understands her own political project in opposition to the present subordination of democratic self-determination to the whims of the markets.[28] She opposes further European integration precisely for this reason—because she sees the EU as a political instrument that will dethrone democratic self-determination in favor of market rule.[29] Whatever one’s quarrels with Wagenknecht’s political program might be, it is difficult to see her agenda as animated by the ordo-/neo-liberal “problematic” of safeguarding the market from the greedy tentacles of a mass-democratic kraken.[30]
 
In order to understand why Wagenknecht chooses to venture into this seemingly hostile ideological territory, a closer look at her own reading of ordoliberalism is needed. In Freedom instead of Capitalism and Prosperity without Greed, Wagenknecht reads ordoliberalism as a political theory of a market economy with a human face. She draws on three aspects of ordoliberal thought for her own vision of creative socialism, namely on the ordoliberal theory of an active regulatory state, on ordoliberal critiques of the monopolistic and neo-feudal aspects of actually existing capitalist markets and the ordoliberals’ commitment to meritocracy, competition, and innovation; and, finally, on the ordoliberal concept of the social market economy, which Wagenknecht reads as entailing a commitment to a robust social welfare state and a mixed economy.[31]
 
Wagenknecht portrays the current economic order as a system, in which inherited wealth, concentrated private economic power, and limited liability have distorted a competitive order and have abolished any relationship between merit, effort and reward: a neo-feudal rather than neo-liberal order that no longer serves the common good.[32] She claims to derive this critique of actually existing capitalism from the ordoliberal critique of the monopolistic and neo-feudal elements of capitalist markets. For example, in support of her own critique of concentrated private economic power she draws on Eucken’s commitment to strong anti-trust policies and his insistence that the state has a primary responsibility to avert the very emergence of concentrated economic power in the form of monopolies, rather than merely seeking to control the abuse of monopolistic power.[33]
 
Wagenknecht takes this concern with private economic power to what she claims is its logical conclusion—she argues that in order to foreclose the kind of concentrated private economic power that Eucken was worried about, one has to strictly limit the size of firms and transform them into worker-owned coops. Similarly, Wagenknecht explicitly draws on Rüstow’s critique of the “feudal-plutocratic” inequality of opportunity that is brought about by inherited wealth. She approvingly cites his claim that “inherited [my emphasis] inequalities of opportunity are the most important institutional features through which feudalism continues to live on in the market economy. It transforms the market economy into a plutocracy, a system governed by private wealth.”[34]
 
Wagenknecht argues that Rüstow sought to limit inherited inequality of opportunity by radically curtailing cross-generational wealth transfers.[35] In fact, Wagenknecht derives her own proposals for changes to the German inheritance law—namely, her proposal to tax all inheritance above €1 million at 100%—from this claim. And she takes up Eucken’s call for unlimited personal liability as the final pillar in her effort to abolish “unearned income”—i.e., income that is not generated by work performed or risk taken.[36] Wagenknecht further argues that the ordoliberals were committed to robust social legislation, social welfare provisions, and a mixed economy that recognises the limits of markets instead of aiming at the marketization of everything.[37]
 
In Freedom instead of Capitalism, Wagenknecht approvingly notes that “the ordoliberals assumed that a social market economy that is governed by strict rules and robust social legislation is no longer opposed to the common good but can serve it. But they also understood that the state had a primary obligation to ensure a social equilibrium [sozialer Ausgleich], and that this couldn’t be left to the market.” She goes on to quote Müller-Armack’s definition of the social market economy as a “consciously steered, social economy” as opposed to a “laissez-faire, liberal economy”. “The proponents of ordoliberalism,” she maintains, lobbied for robust social legislation, including “a functioning pension system and health insurance system [and] robust unemployment provisions.”[38]
 
This reading of ordoliberalism does indeed seem much more promising for left appropriations than interpretations of ordoliberalism as an “instruction sheet” for austerity or an anti-democratic political theory.[39] But Wagenknecht’s reading simply ignores many aspects of ordoliberal thought that are incompatible with her own political agenda. For example, Wagenknecht, unsurprisingly, makes an argument in favour of strengthening organised labour but doesn’t discuss the fact that ordoliberals saw organised labour as a prime example of the special interests from which the state had to be insulated.[40] Similarly, she overestimates the extent to which the ordoliberals supported interventionist policies—or maybe misreads the nature of the interventions that ordoliberals supported. And she ignores the anti-democratic tendencies of one of some of the core ordoliberal commitments, namely that the ordoliberal insistence on an “economic constitution” was meant to serve as a bulwark against “excess” democratic demands.
 
Finally, while Wagenknecht is right that ordoliberals paid more attention to the “social question” than other variants of neoliberal thought, she nonetheless overestimates the concessions that ordoliberalism made.[41] It is misleading to present ordoliberals as proponents of robust social welfare provisions and a mixed economy given that ordoliberals were strictly opposed to a strong welfare state.[42] Wagenknecht’s reading of the ordoliberals as the “fathers of the social market economy” accepts a common but misleading narrative about the emergence of the social market economy that describes the social market economy as it actually existed as an ordoliberal achievement.[43]
 
While it is true that the concept of social market economy was first popularised by Müller-Armack, the social market economy that actually came to be had relatively little to do with the original ordoliberal vision. In fact, the concept of the social market economy had been conceived as a conceptual and political alternative to the social welfare state; a way to make a market economy more palatable to the German public at a time when its fate seemed highly uncertain. As Ludwig Erhard once put it to Friedrich Hayek: “‘I hope you don’t misunderstand me when I speak of a social market economy [soziale Marktwirtschaft]. I mean by that that the market economy as such is social not that it needs to be made social”.[44] Politically speaking, the concept of the social market economy proved a success, but it did so precisely because it did not stay ‘ideologically pure.’ Instead, it was subject to appropriations by the left, as social democrats, organised labour, and their political allies learned to appeal to the concept of the social market economy in order to do what the ordoliberals had sought to stave off—namely, to bring about a stronger welfare state.[45]
 
In reading the ordoliberals as the “fathers of the social market economy,” Wagenknecht thus reproduces a historical narrative that underplays the contribution of the political left to the emergence of the social market economy as an actual historical phenomenon (rather than an ordoliberal counter-idea to the social welfare state). Admittedly, reading ordoliberalism in this way—a reading that enables Wagenknecht to draw a direct line from Walter Eucken and Ludwig Erhard to her own political project—has some key political advantages: Wagenknecht mobilises a language and an image of the past—a nostalgic vision of postwar West Germany—that has resonated broadly with the German electorate. She presents her own ambitious vision of the transformation of the German economic order as the logical conclusion of an interrupted ordoliberal project and portrays Die Linke not as the party of GDR-apologism but as the only party committed to realising the FRG’s original promise.
 
Her success in the German feuilleton and on the political talk show circuit shows that this strategy has been partially successful—at the very least, it makes it harder for her political opponents to dismiss her, and her ideas, as permanently stuck in a romanticised socialist past. Similarly, Wagenknecht’s appropriation of the ordoliberal language and her newfound focus on competition, individual effort, and just reward, for example, has some major strengths. Her takedown of liberal appeals to meritocracy that somehow never get around to tackling the issue of inherited wealth or what Wagenknecht calls “leistungsloses Einkommen” (unearned income that cannot be justified in terms of work performed or risk taken), for example, is a critique worth making in today’s German political discourse.
 
But there are costs to this strategy, too: First, by moving to an (ordo-)liberal language of effort, merit, and individuality, solidarity as a political principle no longer seems to have much of a presence in Wagenknecht’s political imaginary. This is unfortunate, especially at a moment where new left imaginaries of practices of solidarity that can integrate and connect struggles against different kinds of dominations are urgently needed. Second, by replicating the conservative narrative of ordoliberalism as all that was good and just in post-war West Germany, and by representing the social market economy as it actually existed as an ordoliberal achievement instead of seeing it as the outcome of processes of contestation that required a strong political left, Wagenknecht obscures the contribution that the political left made to the very system she invokes as the better alternative to the current economic order. And finally, by adopting the ordoliberal vision of a strong regulatory state—a state that is strong because it is sufficiently insulated from the noxious influence of special interests—Wagenknecht is less likely to stress the necessity for the mobilisation of countervailing forces that could contest the power of capital; the very forces that could back Wagenknecht’s proposal for a fundamental reorganisation of the economy.
 
In conclusion: It’s clear that Wagenknecht’s engagement with ordoliberalism, whatever its weaknesses, cannot be dismissed as a mere “marketing ploy”, as some of her critics have alleged. Wagenknecht’s engagement with the ordoliberal tradition seems both genuine and serious, and appears to have transformed her political language to significant degree, introducing a stronger focus on competition and innovation, merit and individual effort, as well as a mode of anti-capitalist critique that focuses primarily on the critique of concentrated economic power and unearned income (“leistungsloses Einkommen”) and sees these as contingent rather than necessary features of a market economy. On the other hand, Wagenknecht’s readings of Eucken, Rüstow, and Müller-Armack ignores core aspects of ordoliberalism that are in conflict with Wagenknecht’s vision, rather than engaging them critically. This move risks acquiescing to a conservative narrative about the economic successes of post-war (West-)Germany and underplaying the importance of a broad-based left movement that can win significant concessions from the right. Whether the political advantages of appealing to ordoliberalism from the left are worth the risks is yet to be seen.



[1] William Callison and Quinn Slobodian, “A Tale of Two Ordos: German Nationalism in Brown and Red”, ROAR Magazine 10 (2020), 3.

[2] Gareth Dale, “Justificatory Fables of Ordoliberalism: Laissez-faire and the ‘Third Way’”, Critical Sociology 45(7–8) (2019), 1049; Werner Bonefeld, The Strong State and the Free Economy (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 5; William Callison (ed.), Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Rupture (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2019), 69.

[3] Sahra Wagenknecht, Reichtum ohne Gier: Wie wir uns vor dem Kapitalismus retten (Frankfurt: Campus, 2018), 15–17.

[4] Sahra Wagenknecht, Freiheit Statt Kapitalismus (Frankfurt: Campus, 2012), 62–8.

[5] Ibid., 70.

[6] Christian Schlesiger, “Wer Erhards Anspruch Ernst nimmt, müsste Die Linke wählen”, WirtschaftsWoche (22 June 2017).

[7] Deutscher Bundestag, “Stenografischer Bericht der 59. Sitzung, 16. September 2010”, Plenarprotokoll 17/59. Internetpräsenz des Deutschen Bundestages, 2010 (accessed online: http://dipbt.bundestag.de/dip21/btp/17/17059.pdf), 6161, as cited in Moritz-Peter Haarmann, Wirtschaft – Macht – Bürgerbewusstsein: Walter Euckens Beitrag Zur Sozioökonomischen Bildung (Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien, 2015), 85.

[8] Markus Günther, “Über diesen Kommunismus könnte man reden”, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (28 May 2016). All translations of the original German texts are mine, except where otherwise noted.

[9] Peter Gauweiler, “Die mit dem Wolf tanzt: Sahra Wagenknechts Plädoyer für Freiheit statt Kapitalismus stützt sich auf die marktwirtschaftlichen Theories der alten Bundesrepublik”, Süddeutsche Zeitung (11 June 2012); Peter Gauweiler, “Die Entfremdeten: Sahra Wagenknecht beschreibt die Welten der Real-und Finanzökonomie und entwickelt ihre Idee vom Kapitalismus. Die Analyse ist links—aber nicht nur. Der Politikerin geht es auch um die Marktwirtschaft und die Rettung der Demokratie”, Süddeutsche Zeitung (29 March 2016).
; Jörg Schindler, “Die Gewendete: Von der Kommunistischen Plattform in den Wohlstand für alle – Sahra Wagenknecht hat einen langen Weg hinter sich. Er könnte sie an die Spitze der Linkspartei führen”, Frankfurter Rundschau (30 May 2012).

[10] Pascal Beucker, “Vergiftetes Lob”, taz–die tageszeitung (14 April 2016).

[11] Norbert Häring, “Linkes Hohelied auf den Nationalstaat”, Handelsblatt (11 March 2016); Hauke Janssen, “Muenchhausen-Check: Was Sahra Wagenknecht bei Ludwig Erhard entdeckt”, Spiegel (30 January 2013) (accessed online: https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/fakten-check-sahra-wagenknecht-ludwig-erhard-und-die-linkspartei-a-880253.html); Philip Plickert, “Kreativer Sozialismus: Sahra Wagenknecht und die Erhard Masche”, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (19 December 2011); Ulrich van Suntum, “Für eine Absicherung der Sozialen Marktwirtschaft im Grundgesetz”, ORDO 70(1) (2019), 293.

[12] Wilhelm Meyer, “Marx Reloaded. Anmerkungen zu dem Buch von Sahra Wagenknecht: Freiheit statt Kapitalismus”, ORDO 63(1) (2012), 505, 508, 510. Meyer’s quote is in German and the translation is mine except for the Dante quote, which I borrowed from H.F. Cary’s English translation of the Divine Comedy. See Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy; Or Vision of Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, Henry F. Cary (tr.) (New York: Cassell, 1891), 10:9.

[13] Dale, “Justificatory Fables of Ordoliberalism”.

[14] Callison, Mutant Neoliberalism, 69.

[15] Thomas Biebricher, The Political Theory of Neoliberalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

[16] Sebastian Dullien and Ulrike Guérot, “The Long Shadow of Ordoliberalism: Germany’s Approach to the Euro Crisis”, Policy Brief: European Council on Foreign Affairs (February 2012), 1.

[17] cf. Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Dullien and Guérot, “The Long Shadow of Ordoliberalism”.

[18] Blyth, Austerity, 141.

[19] Werner Bonefeld, “Ordoliberalism and Political Theology: On the Government of Stateless Money”, in Josef Hien and Christian Joerges (eds.), Ordoliberalism, Law and the Rule of Economics (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2017), 280–1. For ordoliberalism as a political theory, see also Thomas Biebricher, “Ordoliberalism as a Variety of Neoliberalism”, in Hien and Joerges, Ordoliberalism, Law, and the Rule of Economics, 103–14; Biebricher, Political Theory of Neoliberalism.

[20] Bonefeld, “Ordoliberalism and Political Theology”; Biebricher, “Ordoliberalism as a Variety of Neoliberalism”; Biebricher, Political Theory of Neoliberalism; Ralf Ptak, “Neoliberalism in Germany: Revisiting the Ordoliberal Foundations of the Social Market Economy”, in Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 98–138; Ralf Ptak, “Der Staat im neoliberalen Denken”, in Thomas Biebricher (ed.), Der Staat des Neoliberalismus (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2016), 31–73.

[21] Biebricher, “Ordoliberalism as a Variety of Neoliberalism”; Ptak, “Neoliberalism in Germany”.

[22] Ptak, “Neoliberalism in Germany”, 100–6.

[23] Ibid., 108–9.

[24] Ordoliberalism, as a term, only emerged in the 1950s, but I’m here using it to refer to individuals and ideas that were later closely identified with ordoliberalism even when I’m referring to a period prior to the 1950s. It’s anachronistic but hopefully makes for easier reading. See Ptak, “Neoliberalism in Germany”, 108.

[25] Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, Graham Burchell (tr.) (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 75ff.

[26] Bonefeld, “Ordoliberalism and Political Theology”, 274.

[27] Ptak, “Neoliberalism in Germany”; Ptak, “Der Staat im neoliberalen Denken”; Biebricher, “Ordoliberalism as a Variety of Neoliberalism”; Bonefeld, “Ordoliberalism and Political Theology”.

[28] Wagenknecht, Reichtum ohne Gier, 31.

[29] ibid., 22–31.

[30] Biebricher, Political Theory of Neoliberalism.

[31] Wagenknecht, Freiheit Statt Kapitalismus, 56–7, 61.

[32] Wagenknecht, Reichtum ohne Gier, 71ff.

[33] Walter Eucken, Grundsätze der Wirtschaftspolitik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 360; Wagenknecht, Freiheit Statt Kapitalismus, 58.

[34] Alexander Rüstow, Die Religion der Marktwirtschaft (Münster: LIT, 2009), 96, as cited in Wagenknecht, Reichtum ohne Gier, 95.

[35] Wagenknecht, Freiheit Statt Kapitalismus, 95.

[36] Wagenknecht, Reichtum ohne Gier, 71ff, 281, 310.

[37] Wagenknecht, Freiheit Statt Kapitalismus, 52–70.

[38] Ibid.,, 56.

[39] Blyth, Austerity; Quinn Slobodian, The Globalists: The end of empire and the birth of neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

[40] Walter Eucken, “Staatliche Strukturwandlung und die Krisis des Kapitalismus”, Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv 36 (1932), 297–321; cf. Janssen, “Muenchhausen-Check”.

[41] Ptak, “Neoliberalism in Germany”.

[42] cf. Angela Wigger, “Debunking the Myth of the Ordoliberal Influence on Post-war European Integration”, in Hien and Joerges, Ordoliberalism, Law and the Rule of Economics, 161–178.

[43] Wagenknecht, Freiheit Statt Kapitalismus, 54.

[44] cited in Ptak, “Neoliberalism in Germany”, 107.

[45] Ibid.