Beyond Left and Right Ideologies

Nowadays the call to go 'beyond left and right' is rehearsed with tiring regularity. We are led to believe that the categories are nothing but hangovers from a lost world of class struggle and Cold War rivalry. The sooner they are dispensed with, the better for a politics able to grapple with the most important issues facing the world today. Yet more than two decades since the end of the Cold War the duality stubbornly persists. This book seeks to explain why. Offering an account of political ideology drawing inspiration from Michael Freeden and Louis Althusser, Nathan Coombs argues that left and right have their roots in the balance of economic distribution between rich and poor. This determination by the economic in the 'final instance' might not be directly perceptible, but the book argues that all attempts to transcend the categories result in ideological inconsistencies. To this end, the book provides a critique of John Gray's anti-globalism, the political theology of red Toryism, Frank Furedi's Marxist libertarianism, George Monbiot's liberalism, and Silicon Valley's techno-libertarianism.