Norberto Bobbio’s thoughtful little book, Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction, centers on the question of equality in human relationships. The Left, in all its forms, tends to strive for equality and to seek egalitarian responses to social questions. The Right, by contrast, tends to see inequalities as a positive good and to resort to hierarchical and authoritarian responses to social questions. The left-right distinction first emerged at the time of the French Revolution and, according to the Italian political theorist has remained relevant.

Bobbio wrote Left and Right in the aftermath of the 1994 Italian elections and, at the time, Perry Anderson suggested that he had failed to register the historical moment. After all, in the centrist politics of the mid-1990s, left and right were less distinct. Tony Blair’s New Labor, Bill Clinton’s New Democrats, and social democrats across Europe and beyond had found consensus with their conservative, republican, and Christian democratic counterparts.

From the outset, however, this pact showed vulnerabilities. Even before the century ended, the Austrian Freedom Party, a nationalist party with fascist roots, won nearly 27 percent of the vote and a place in the ruling coalition. Since that election, nationalist parties have been knocking on the doors of power in a number of countries across Europe. And today, right-wing governments — under the traditional conservative mantras of god and country, and wielding the weapons of ethnocultural division, sexism, and political intolerance — have come to power in India, Brazil, Hungary, Israel, Poland, the United States, and elsewhere.