Left and right: where the vocabulary comes from, what it still describes

In the French Constituent Assembly, in 1789, debates on the king's veto led the deputies to group themselves physically: supporters of the royal veto placed themselves to the right of the presiding officer, their opponents to his left. The vocabulary is therefore at the outset a description of seats, not a political theory.

This origin explains a lasting property of the pair: it has no fixed content. What stood on the right or on the left has changed substance several times according to period and country, because the dividing line follows whatever question divides most at a given moment. Free trade, secularism and European integration have each in turn changed sides.

To this must be added a phenomenon of pure convention. These words also serve as a way of recognising one another, independently of content: one may call oneself left-wing or right-wing by family inheritance, by milieu, by personal history, before even holding settled positions on the issues of the day.

Despite its imprecision, this axis remains one of the best simple predictors of voting in many countries, and it works as an instrument of coordination: it allows voters and parties to situate themselves in relation to one another without detailing every position.

It captures above all a recurrent disagreement about the role of the collectivity in the distribution of resources: how far to tax, how far to redistribute, how far to protect. That is where its capacity to summarise is strongest, and that is why it survives recompositions.

This economy of means has real value. Without a shared landmark, each voter would have to examine each position of each candidate, which nobody does. The label is a shortcut costly in precision, but one that makes comparison possible.

Several oppositions do not line up on this axis. The relation to authority, the place of supranational institutions, the trade-off between individual liberties and collective norms, the degree of trust granted to experts often divide electorates differently. Two people very close on the economic axis may find themselves poles apart on these questions.

Work that adds a second dimension, generally cultural or authoritarian, reveals configurations the single line made invisible: economically protective positions combined with a strong demand for order, or market-friendly positions combined with great tolerance about ways of life.

It is also what explains the feeling of not recognising oneself in the available offer. When a person stands on one side on one dimension and on the other on a second, no single label can suit them, and their vote becomes a compromise rather than an endorsement.

Its disappearance is regularly announced, and it comes back. The reason is functional: in a competition where one must get one's bearings quickly, a single axis remains the most economical tool, and political actors themselves use it to place their opponents.

It recomposes itself rather than fading away. Each time a new cleavage becomes central, it tends to fold back onto the existing axis: positions reorganise, the words remain. That is a reason to be wary of announcements that it has been superseded, which often describe a recomposition rather than a disappearance.

The correct use of these words is that of one coordinate among others. Saying that a position is left or right tells us about one axis and one only, and says nothing about the relation to authority, the preferred level of decision or the place given to individual liberties.

That is why serious typologies use several dimensions. Not to complicate things, but because a single line forces one to conflate positions that, in real political life, combine in several ways. A profile described on six dimensions does not abolish the left-right pair: it shows what the pair leaves in the shade.