Dr Gottfried on “Right and Left”

Dr Paul Gottfried clarifies two much overused and much undersignifying terms here.   Although we would rather altogether eschew these tags as inimical to a politics of prudence, Dr Gottfried’s historical and conceptual reflections are well worth pondering. One observation which will come as a surprise to many readers is how socially “conservative” the Old Left was, and how remarkably convergent in individualist libertinism New Left and Neo-conservativism are. And it is only fair to note that while he is correct that Marxism on the whole certainly attempted to disguise or disavow its religious inspiration, this was not true of Walter Benjamin or Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin’s disciple Giorgio Agamben is almost single-handedly responsible for reintroducing  themes of classical theology and ecclesiology to academic and radical circles in our time.