ABSTRACT
Political debate too often polarizes around the terms Left and Right as if they are inscribed in stone. The fact is that Left and Right have had a changing content during the past two hundred years plus of their existence. In ordinary usage, however, they tend to be taken for granted as fixed entities. Raymond Williams’s Keywords was meant to provide us with the basic vocabulary of political and cultural discourse. Yet the words Left and Right are not to be found there. Could it be that they are so deeply embedded in our political discourse that Williams assumed that they have an unchanging presence that does not require the kind of genealogical explication that Williams provides for other words? Of course, he knew better, and his failure to provide an explanation is a regrettable omission. If he had done so, he would have noted that the division between Left and Right did not exist before the French Revolution and that in the modern period they have mainly reflected the politics of class, though in their evolution they have also been applied to the cultural battlefield. (Left and Right originally referred to the seating arrangements 12in the National Assembly after the French Revolution.) Williams would also have noted the twists and turns of their histories, in which positions have been reversed.
