Left and Right: The Signifiance of a Political Distinction Book

Very good philosophical discussion concerning left-right dyad even though sometimes I felt like I was lost and had the difficulty to find an anchor point in the discussions. It was sometimes like a sophisticated stream of consciousness in which I also let myself flow. I like his discussion on included middle vs inclusive middle while he was showing how the middle between left and right acts like an inclusive middle whose purpose is nothing but eradicating the two poles and subsuming it within its own "middle" boundaries. I think this is the basic mindset of those which try to surpass the left-right duality and persuade people for the extinction of any such dual understanding of politics. Bobbio is right to insist that left-right distinction is still relevant because this distinction shows itself most powerfully in times of crisis where parties are tended to display themselves basically as Two and it seems that this is not something that politics can escape from at any time. I think today we can see the practical reflections of such a division much more obviously in contrast to the optimistic weather of the post-Soviet dissolution era which proves the necessity of this dyadic conceptual approach.

In additon, that Bobbio takes equality and inequality as the decisive factors of left and right is also a good point and seems that it is a valid one. I appreciate his endeavor to not to fall into the trap of "extremism" in the sense of "utopian equality". He uncomplicatedly argues that left tries to reduce the level of inequalities and works for more equality whereas right justifies its stance through natural inequalities. Fair and conceptually functional. Right is like Nietzsche who constructs equality as an artifical phenomenon, which aims to destroy the already existing inequality and left is like Rousseau who constructs equality as a natural phenomenon, which is distorted by artificial inequality. Good way of illustrating the fundamental distinction between the two.