Abstract
In his long career, Herbert Spiegelberg has taught and published a great deal in the areas of social, political, and legal philosophy. Indeed, as he indicates in his “Apologia pro bibliographia mea”,1 for many years it was with this region of philosophical concerns, rather than with the comprehensive exposition of phenomenology for which he is now no doubt more widely known, that he was primarily identified. It occurred to me, when I was honored by being invited to contribute to this homage to him, that the exploration of a theme in this area would not be out of place.
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Notes
Phenomenological Perspectives: Historical and Systematic Essays in Honor of Herbert Spiegelberg,ed. Philip J. Bossert (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), pp. 267–70.
As Samuel Brittan points out — Left/or/Right: The Bogus Dilemma (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), p. 29 — the Oxford English Dictionary assigns the first political use of the two terms in Great Britain to Carlyle’s French Revolution (1837), but in fact even in his country, much less in the United States, this usage did not come into general currency until the 1920’s.
As Mannheim says in his essay, “On the Interpretation of Weltanschauung”: “It will be obvious to anyone familiar with Husserl’s work to what extent this phenomenological analysis is indebted to him, and in how far his procedure has been modified for our purposes”. Kurt H. Wolff, ed., From Karl Mannheim ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1971 ), p. 18.
The origin of the terms left and right goes back to the first meetings of the French States—General in 1789, when the nobility took the place of honour on the King’s right while the ordinary members — “the Third Estate” — sat on the King’s left“. —Brittan, p. 29.
Herbert Spiegelberg, Doing Phenomenology (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), p. xxii.
A good example of the opposite approach, what one might call cum maxima ira, reads as follows: “If we then identify, in a rough way, the right with freedom, personality, and variety, and the left with slavery, collectivism, and uniformity, we are employing semantics that make sense”. — Erik Maria, Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1974 ), p. 43.
Indeed, cut off from his transcendence, reduced to the facticity of his presence, and individual is nothing; it is by his project that he fulfills himself, by the end at which he aims that he justifies himself; thus, this justification is always to come. Only the future can take the present for its own and keep it alive by surpassing it“. — The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. B. Frechtman ( New York: Citadel Press, 1970 ), p. 115.
History and Class Consciousness,trans. R. Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968), pp. 83–222.
See Sergio Panunzio, Rivoluzione e Constituzione (Milano: Fratelli Treves, 1933), especially p. 280.
Friedrich Engels, Herr Eugen Duhring’s Revolution in Science, trans. E. Burns ( New York: International Publishers, 1939 ), p. 27.
John McMurtry, The Structure of Marx’s World-View ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978 ).
Celui qui ose entreprendre d’instituer un peuple doit se sentir en état de changer pour ainsi dire la nature humaine… “ — Du Contrat Social II,VII (Paris: Editions Gamier, 1955), p. 261.
See my discussion of this in The Philosophy of Marx (London: Hutchinson and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977), pp. 84–6. A consideration of the ways in which “Wesen” still plays an important conceptual role, though one that is very different from its uses in the thought of Hegel, much less of Aristotle, in Marx’s Capital is beyond the scope of this essay. It would no doubt shed light, however, on some of the limitations of Marx’s own Left orientation. Roughly speaking, Marx in his later years thought it meaningful to speak of an essence of capitalism,though not (I would contend) of an essence of “man”. Some later thinkers on the Left, influenced by Marx, have found this remaining “essentialism” of his unnecessarily Procrustean.
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 ( Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961 ), pp. 98–101.
Philosophical Review 53, 2 (March 1944), pp. 101–124. Reprinted in W. T. Blackstone, ed., The Concept of Equality (Minneapolis: Burgess, 1969), pp. 144–164.
Sartre’s short story, Childhood of a Leader, is a masterpiece of description of the Rightist attitude towards (privileged) “rights” that he finds so deplorable. Similarly, his account of Roquentin’s visit to the portrait gallery of local notables at the Bouville Museum, in Nausea, takes as its central theme the sarcastic observation, “Car ils avaient eu droit à tout: à la vie, au travail, à la richesse, au commandement, au respect, et pour finir, à l’immortalité”. La Nausée ( Paris: Gallimard, 1938 ), p. 109.
The identification of authoritarianism as a Rightist attitude received much support from the classical study by T.W. Adorno, E. Franke-Brunswik, D.J. Levinson, and R.N. Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950). For a discussion of the very close connection between authority and political power, see my Demokrati og autorite (with Robert A. Dahl), trans. S. Lordal ( Oslo: Dreyers, 1980 ), pp. 37–54.
Friedrich Engels, “On Authority”, in Robert C.Tucker, ed., The Marx—Engels Reader ( New York: W.W. Norton, 1978 ), pp. 730–733.
An historic moment in the identification of deep disagreements concerning the nature of modern American conservatism was Walter Lippmann’s denunciation of Senator Goldwater at the beginning of the 1964 Presidential campaign. The crucial paragraph reads in part as follows: “By all the historic and traditional considerations of the English-speaking world, by the precedents that come from Burke and Hamilton, from Disraeli and from Lincoln, Barry Goldwater is not a conservative at all… His political philosophy does not have its roots in the conservative tradition but in the crude and primitive capitalism of the Manchester school. It is the philosophy not of the conservators of the social order but of the newly rich on the make”. — from The New Haven (Conn.) Register, January 7, 1964, editorial page.
See the interview with Michel Contat, “Self-Portrait at Seventy”, in Life/Situations, trans. P. Auster and L. Davis ( New York: Pantheon, 1977 ), pp. 24–25.
For an excellent, very brief discussion of the two libertarianisms, see David A. Crocer, “Guest Editor’s Introduction”, The Occasional Review 8/9 (August 1978; special issue on Rawls and Nozick), pp. 8–12. His discussion, in turn, is indebted to the work of Lawrence Crocker, as he acknowledged.
See my chapter, “Socio-economic Bases of the Current Crisis in our Culture”, in Social Theory at a Crossroads ( Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1980 ), pp. 117–151.
I have in mind Rawls’ distinction between “liberty” and “the worth of liberty”, which he introduces in order to attempt to dissolve, with a haste that is excessive in a book otherwise as long as his, apparent difficulties with respect to equal freedom posed by the vastly unequal possession of resources and hence power in a country such as, presumably, the United States. Many commentators have remarked on the great weakness of this part of his theory. See A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 204.
See, e.g., Maurice Duverger, Introduction à la politique ( Paris: Gallimard, 1964 ), pp. 66–68.
This is the approach of David Caute, The Left in Europe Since 1789 ( New York & Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1966 ), pp. 26–44.
Caute (pp. 20–25) calls this approach “the sociological fallacy”; he attributes it to W.G. Runciman, S.M. Lipset, and “probably” R.M. Mac Iver.
Richard Zaner, The Way of Phenomenology: Criticism as a Philosophical Discipline ( New York: Pegasus, 1970 ).
See, e.g., The Phenomenological Movement,2nd ed. (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), II, 676ff.
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McBride, W. (1985). “Left” and “Right” as Socio-Political Stances. In: Hamrick, W.S. (eds) Phenomenology in Practice and Theory. Phaenomenologica, vol 92. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9612-6_6
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