Being Interested: Amateur Reports on Books and Ideas

Everyone has their favourite explanation for the left/right divide. Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio had an especially pithy summary by invoking the difference between Rousseau and Nietzsche: the former believes people are born equal and made unequal by society, the latter believes people are born unequal and artificially forced into equality by society. My own favourite summary was provided by Dwight Macdonald at the beginning of his essay The Root is Man (1946). Macdonald assumes the years between 1789 and 1928 as the time when everyone knew what the terms left and right meant. Casual readers can grasp why the story starts in 1789 (French Revolution, separation of the Jacobins and the Girondins). But why end in 1928? Because this was the year Stalin formally expelled Trotsky from the Soviet Union. You can tell immediately that Macdonald’s take bears the imprint of its time. Trotsky’s expulsion, according to Macdonald, triggered the era of ‘Bureaucratic Collectivism’, an amorp