their symbolic associations and always it is right that is good and left
that is bad.”^21 Early Indo-Europeans and tribal societies all over the
world have tended to equate the right–left division with the male–
female distinction, and to associate the right with positive symbols
such as life, gods, cleanliness, and superiority, and the left with their
opposites: death, mortals, dirtiness, and inferiority. In classical Greece,
the same dichotomies held, the right being associated with symbols
for male, straight, light, and good, and the left with representations
for female, crooked, darkness, and evil. In the Christian, Jewish, and
Islamic traditions, the elect are on the right of God and the damned on
His left. Buddhists see the path to paradise as bifurcated, the right
branch leading to Nirvana.^22 Everywhere, noted sociologist Robert
Hertz in 1909, “the right hand is the symbol and model of all aris-
tocracy, the left hand of all common people.”^23 The languages of the
world convey the same message, the words for right generally being
associated with qualities and the words for left with defaults. In Latin,
for instance, the terms aredexterandsinister.^24 It is useful to keep in
mind these ancient roots. The idea of some sort of symbolic continuity
appears intriguing and plausible, although one should not lose sight of
the distinctive character of modern usage.
Political debates about social justice are also ancient, going much
further back in history than the contemporary debates between the
left and the right. “Right from the time of the ancient Greeks,” argues
D. D. Raphael, “there have been two, apparently inconsistent, ideas of
distributive justice,” one stressing merit and deservingness, the other
equal worth and needs.^25 This divergence, as Raphael points out, is
very close to the one defining the contemporary left–right cleavage.
The genealogy of the left–right debate as a social fact, then, is the
story of the gradual and eventually universal association between an
old, familiar spatial metaphor and a modern debate about justice. This
association was not necessary. Other metaphors, or a multitude of
(^21) Chris McManus,Right Hand, Left Hand: The Origins of Asymmetry in Brains,
Bodies, Atoms and Cultures, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press,
22 2002, p. 35.
24 Ibid., pp. 21–33.^23 Robert Hertz, quoted inibid., p. 20.
J. A. Laponce,Left and Right: The Topography of Political Perceptions,
University of Toronto Press, 1981, pp. 38–41; McManus,Right Hand, Left
Hand, pp. 60–65.
(^25) D. D. Raphael,Concepts of Justice, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 5.
A clash over equality 13