The history of the left-right divide: A centuries-old argument defines our politics, and offers a way forward - Salon.com

The history of the left-right divide: A centuries-old argument defines our politics, and offers a way forward - Salon.com: The tension between those two dispositions comes down to some very basic questions: Should our society be made to answer to the demands of stark and abstract commitments to ideals like social equality or to the patterns of its own concrete political traditions and foundations? Should the citizen’s relationship to his society be defined above all by the individual right of free choice or by a web of obligations and conventions not entirely of our own choosing? Are great public problems best addressed through institutions designed to apply the explicit technical knowledge of experts or by those designed to channel the implicit social knowledge of the community?