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Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1 Introduction -- 2 The "Meaning" of Left and Right -- 3 Ideology, Dimensionality, and Asymmetry -- 4 The Structure and Content of Left / Right Differences -- 5 Left / Right Positions and Polarization -- 6 Left / Right Persistence and Evolution -- 7 Citizens' Left / Right Orientations -- 8 The Rise of Left / Right in Canadian Politics -- 9 Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

This book brings together for the first time an updated, revised collection of influential essays and articles that capture some of the most exciting scientific and scholarly contributions to the topic of political ideology. John Jost tackles fundamental questions about how psychology, neuroscience, and societal factors impact political attitudes and group divisions.

"This book is an augmented adaptation of the author's 2018 book Understanding Left and Right (Nova). It further reinforces the message that sustained truth-seeking leads people toward the political center. Each chapter offers divide-bridging discussions of issues such as regulation, taxation, corporate-strategy and personal identity, along with the very ideas of knowledge, truth and goodness. Selected chapters from either work would fit easily into just about every college level course across the spectrum of business studies, social sciences and humanities, almost certainly provoking lively comments. This might seem like an exaggerated marketing claim for any serious book, but readers are strongly urged to try it ... and see what happens!"--

"The words "left" and "right" often signal a political divide in debates about abortion, homosexuality, capital punishment, gun control, law and order, social welfare, public transportation, taxation, immigration, and the environment, among other issues. Despite claims that this phenomenon is in decline, its persistence suggests that it is inherent to our society. At the same time, variations in the understanding of each side indicate that these labels do not fully capture the reality of ideological disagreement. In Left and Right Christopher Cochrane traces the origins of this political language to the very nature of ideology. What is ideology, what does it look like, and how does it manifest itself in patterns of political disagreement in Western democracies? Drawing on five decades of evidence from political scientists, including public opinion surveys, elite surveys, and content analysis of political party election platforms, Cochrane employs a new method to analyze the structure and evolution of the left/right divide in twenty-one Western countries since 1945. He then delves into the central argument of the book--that the language of left and right describes a meaningful, perceptible, and quantifiable pattern of political disagreement that has persisted over time and around the world. Calling for an adjustment to the way we view Canadian politics, Left and Right opens a window into the world of political ideologies--a world we see every day, but rarely analyze, define, or agree on."--

Two Italian writers, Gaetano Mosca and Antonio Gramsci, have been very influential in twentieth-century political thought, the first cast as a thoroughgoing conservative, the second as the model of a humanistic Marxist. The author of this provocative book—the first systematic study of the connection between the two men—maintains that they are closer to each other than is commonly supposed—that they in fact belong to the same political tradition of democratic elitism.Maurice A. Finocchiaro argues that Gramsci's political theory is a constructive critique of Mosca's and that the key common element is the attempt to combine democracy and elitism in a theoretical system that defines them not as opposite but as compatible and interdependent. Finocchiaro finds that a critical examination of the major works of the two men demonstrates their shared belief in the viability of democratic elitism and undermines the importance of the distinction between right and left