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The Center That Needs Its Own Poles
Whenever a crowded political center or a transversal movement like the Greens gets cited as proof that left and right no longer matter, Bobbio turns the argument around. A centrist only makes sense as a position between two poles — remove them, and the identity vanishes. The Greens arrived claiming to cut across the old divide, yet Bobbio predicted they would soon grow their own internal left and right wings. They did.
Two Measuring Sticks: Values and Methods
Nietzsche, a right-wing thinker, gets embraced by radical leftists; Gramsci, a communist, gets quoted approvingly by the far right. Bobbio resolves the puzzle with a second axis: left and right measure values, while extremist and moderate measure methods. George Sorel inspired both revolutionary syndicalists and counter-revolutionaries not because he blurred the political divide, but because extremism, unlike ideology, travels freely across it.
Why Equality Is the Left's Pole Star
Bobbio argues the clearest proof of the left's identity is its long quarrel with private property, seen for two centuries as the great obstacle to equality. Rousseau treated inequality as a social construction that could be undone; Nietzsche saw it as natural and therefore untouchable. That fork explains everything else. Today, Bobbio notes, the same question has simply moved address — from factory wages to the gap between wealthy nations and the planet of castaways.