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Left and Right: The Small World of Political Ideas, by Christopher Cochrane

Reviewed by : Dubi Kanengisser, University of Toronto"Left" and "right" as political labels are two of the most ubiquitous terms used by politicians, social scientists, and the general public, but they have proven remarkably resistant to definition. Although people generally "know them when they see them", attempts to give a comprehensive explanation of just what it means to be left or right usually fail. This has led some to abandon the terms altogether, declaring that they have no coherent, consistent meaning.In Left and Right , Christopher Cochrane, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, takes a new approach to defining these terms. Cochrane describes the political field as a network of ideas, where different actors (e.g. parties) can support, oppose, or be neutral toward each idea, and their support or opposition may vary in strength. Using graph theory and the impressive database of party platforms from the post-Second World War period created by the Comparative Manifesto,[1] Cochrane shows that far from being inconsistent, the network of connections can successfully distinguish between left- and right-wing parties even across vast expanses of time and space. Left and right do have meanings, but only when one considers ideas within a network; once an idea is viewed in isolation, the meaning of left and right collapses. In other words, the multilateral relationships between parties and their ideologies, not their position on a single dimension or even in a multi-dimensional space, create a sense of being "on the left" or "on the right".Cochrane uses the metaphor of a family resemblance to explain how right-wing parties are alike and left-wing parties are alike, without all sharing some unifying quality or, for that matter, each wing being the opposite of the other. A family resemblance is composed of a number of characteristics (ears, eyes, nose, hair), none of which must appear in each member of the family, and no member of the family must have all of them. Two family members may share no characteristics (for example, one may have the family hair and nose, and the other the family eyes and ears), but when viewed in the context of the family as a whole, they will both clearly belong within the family resemblance. Similarly, political family resemblance comprises a group of opinions, but no single opinion must appear in all parties in a certain political wing, and no party need espouse all these views at once. Nevertheless, when the parties are viewed as a group, the family resemblance is clear. Thus, parties on the left are generally characterized by ideas such as social justice, opposition to militarization, support of market regulation, and the welfare state, while parties on the right are generally characterized by support of free enterprise, militarization, traditional morality, and opposition to labour unions. However, no single issue unites all parties on either side of the political map, and two parties on the same side may not have a single issue on which they agree. Their family resemblance to the left or right is based on the network as a whole, not on the isolated comparison of individual issues.Cochrane's choice to describe the degree of having family features as moving a party "to the left" or "to the right" is, however, problematic. …