PFP361 | Andreas Tögel, The Meaning of Left and Right in Modern Times (PFS 2026)

Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 361.

This talk is from the recently-concluded PFS 2026 Twentieth Annual Meeting (Sep. 17–22, 2026, Bodrum, Turkey).

Andreas Tögel (Austria), The Meaning of Left and Right in Modern Times.

Why do the far left and the far right keep turning up in “unnatural alliances,” from Greece’s left–right coalition government to joint votes in the European Parliament? Tögel traces the confusion to the flat, one-dimensional left–right spectrum and its “horseshoe” variant. Drawing on Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s catalog of leftist thinking and on Gramsci’s strategy of cultural hegemony, he argues that a two-dimensional scheme shows communism and National Socialism to be siblings in the same totalitarian quadrant, with today’s woke, degrowth left as their heirs. Or, as Kuehnelt-Leddihn put it: “Right is right and left is wrong.”

An edited transcript is appended below.

Other talks will appear on the Property and Freedom Podcast weekly, on Mondays, in upcoming weeks. Other videos may also be found at the PFS 2026 Youtube Playlist.

Related

• PFP205 | Andreas Tögel, The First Republic: The Rest is Austria – Between Inferiority Complex and Arrogance (PFS 2019)
• PFP237 | Andreas Tögel, God Created Men and Samuel Colt Made Them Equal: Why Guns in Private Hands Increase Freedom and Security (PFS 2022)
• PFP240 | Tögel, French, Groezinger, Model, Gabb: Discussion, Q&A (PFS 2022)
• Andreas Tögel, “Some (rare) good news from beautiful Austria: Property, Right to Self-Defense, and Perpetrator Protection,” Property and Freedom Journal (June 18, 2026)
• Andreas Tögel, “One Thousand Liechtensteins,” in Jörg Guido Hülsmann & Stephan Kinsella, eds., A Life in Liberty: Liber Amicorum in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Houston: Papinian Press, 2024), ch. 36
• PFP183 | Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Libertarianism and the “Alt-Right” (PFS 2017)
• Murray N. Rothbard, “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty,” Left and Right (Spring 1965)
• Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1974)
• Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of Our Time (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1952)

Edited transcript below.

The Meaning of Left and Right in Modern Times

Based on the transcript of the talk presented at the PFS 2026 Twentieth Annual Meeting • Sep. 18, 2026 • Bodrum, Turkey

by Andreas Tögel

Dear Gülçin, dear Hans, ladies and gentlemen: it’s always a pleasure for me to be here in this beautiful place, and today it is a special honor for me to have been invited to speak about the meaning of left and right in modern times.

Some people believe to this day that leftist thinking emerged with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. This is wrong. As early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were relevant socialist experiments, such as those initiated by Robert Owen in Scotland and later in Indiana in the USA. Charles Fourier designed large communal living and working communities; he is considered one of the most significant utopian socialists. Henri de Saint-Simon was one of the first systematic theorists of industrial socialism. And Étienne Cabet, who is also counted among the utopian socialists, founded several communist settlements in the United States, the so-called Icarian communities.

Earlier phenomena, such as the distribution of grain by Gaius Gracchus in ancient Rome, or medieval communal estates, lacked any theoretical foundation or comprehensive claim to universality that would allow them to be classified as socialist in the modern sense of the word. Even utopian visions such as that of Thomas More (1478–1535), who published his Utopia in 1516, can at best be regarded as theoretical precursors of modern socialism.

Since this is quite a serious topic, I thought it might be a good idea to start with a less serious introduction. The Austrian poet Ernst Jandl once wrote a short poem called “lichtung,” a humorous wordplay. In German it goes: “manche meinen, lechts und rinks kann man nicht velwechsern. werch ein illtum!” Fortunately, this also works in English: “Some people think that reft and light cannot be confused. What a mistake!”

And indeed, there has been some confusion regarding the terminology and its meaning. Jandl was right: it is a mistake to believe that right and left cannot be confused, because this mistake happens time and time again. But how can such unnatural alliances of the far left and the far right come about? The goal of this lecture is to find an answer to this question.

Let’s begin with the general confusion. What do the terms stand for today? If you remember, in Greece, from 2015 to 2019, there were left-wing extremists in a coalition with right-wing extremists. In Austria, the right-wing populist and leader of the FPÖ—the Freedom Party of Austria—Heinz-Christian Strache expressed his utmost sympathy for the post-communist leader of Syriza, Alexis Tsipras. The far-right Marine Le Pen in France wept with joy at the victory of the left in Greece. And parties of the far left and far right in the European Parliament recently voted together against a free trade agreement with the Mercosur countries of South America.

Originally, the terms basically stood for agents of change versus conservatives. As you probably know, on the eve of the French Revolution, the revolutionaries—later the killers of the king and the queen—sat on the left in the National Assembly of 1789, while the conservatives and defenders of the monarchy sat on the right. Since then, a dramatic change has taken place. The left, following Antonio Gramsci’s master plan, has successfully completed its march through the institutions, and it now holds all the key positions of power within the state.

For those of you who are not familiar with the name: Antonio Gramsci lived from 1891 to 1937. He was one of the co-founders of the Communist Party of Italy in 1921, and he was a Marxist philosopher and political thinker best known for his theory of cultural hegemony. His thinking went far beyond that of Marx, who focused on economically determined class antagonisms. Gramsci’s political program focused on how the ruling class maintains its power not only through economic and political force but, above all, through control of culture and ideology.

Gramsci argued that the ruling class secures its dominance by controlling society’s values, norms, and ideas—not only through direct violence or coercion, but also through the consent of the ruled, who adopt the worldview of the rulers. He emphasized the role of organized intellectuals, and how counter-hegemony can be built by creating alternative cultural and ideological narratives. Gramsci distinguished between political society—the state, the police, and the military—and civil society, including education, the media, and the churches. He viewed the struggle for power as a political and cultural process in both spheres. For him, the socialist revolution was not merely a military coup, but a long process of cultural and ideological mobilization.

To summarize: Gramsci’s political program focused on cultural hegemony and on exerting influence within civil society to bring about social change. He was a Marxist thinker who viewed culture and ideology as decisive forces.

So where do the defenders of the political status quo now stand? On the left, of course. None of the parties represented in parliament today seriously questions the overbearing role of the state, which is reflected in a public spending ratio of 50% and above. They all oscillate between socialist and social democratic positions. True conservatives or libertarians—that is, opponents of the totalitarian state and uncompromising advocates of private law and the market economy—are hard to find in the parliaments of Europe today. Successful libertarians are only to be found overseas, if at all.

Today, left and right are not fixed categories but rather broad political orientations. Their meaning varies depending on the country, the political party, and the issue. The most important distinction continues to revolve around the question of which inequalities should be addressed politically and which are considered legitimate or inevitable.

People can hold different positions on economic and on social issues. For example, a person might be on the left economically but conservative on issues of immigration and social norms. Conversely, there are people who are economically liberal but hold very progressive social views.

The relationship with the state is also more complicated than the simplistic notion that the left wants more state and the right wants less. Right-wing positions often advocate a strong state when it comes to the police, the military, and border security, while left-wing positions tend to favor a strong state in the areas of welfare, education, and regulation. Libertarians, on the other hand, want to limit the state’s role in both areas.

Social democracy, liberalism, conservatism, and Christian democracy all fundamentally accept elections, the rule of law, and pluralistic competition. At the extremes, other characteristics come into play. Left-wing extremism fundamentally rejects private property, capitalism, and the liberal democratic state. Right-wing extremism often combines ethnic nationalism with notions of inequality and authoritarian policies. Populism can manifest on both the left and the right: it pits a supposedly unified people against a corrupt elite, and often views institutions, compromise, and social diversity with suspicion.

As a rough rule of thumb, therefore, the left tends to prioritize equality and emancipation, while the right tends to prioritize order, continuity, and established ties of belonging. For a precise classification, however, one must always consider multiple axes—at a minimum, the economy, social values, and the relationship to liberal democracy.

Leaning more to the left means greater social and material equality, redistribution, workers’ rights, a strong public sector, and openness to cultural change and diverse lifestyles. The state should protect against social risks and correct imbalances of power. On migration, leaning left often means a more humanitarian, integration-oriented stance; it tends to be internationalist and multilateral. On climate and energy, it favors rapid, government-led restructuring and social safety nets.

Leaning more to the right means accepting differences and emphasizing equal opportunity, markets, private property, lower taxes, and personal responsibility, as well as tradition, continuity, family, and social order. The state should ensure security and enforce rules, but often takes a more restrained approach to economic matters. On migration, the right is often more focused on limits, control, and conformity, and tends to be oriented toward the nation-state, with an emphasis on sovereignty and identity. On climate and energy, it favors market-based or slower solutions, and places greater emphasis on costs and security of supply.

Here are two interesting quotes on the confusion surrounding the classic left–center–right classification:

“[The center?] What is that supposed to be—the middle ground between Stalin’s Gulag and Hitler’s concentration camps?”

“How can National Socialism be right-wing when it already has socialism in its name?”

The two quotes stem from a fellow countryman of mine, the Austrian Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. He lived a long life, from 1909 to 1999. By his own assessment, he was a Catholic, right-wing, radical liberal. Kuehnelt-Leddihn was an Austrian writer, political scientist, cultural historian, and journalist. He is considered one of the best-known conservative intellectuals of the twentieth century in the German-speaking world, and he was recognized internationally, particularly in the United States. Guided by monarchist and conservative ideals, he was a critic of totalitarianism—of Nazism and communism—and even of modern mass democracy. He strongly advocated individualism, cultural diversity, and federal structures.

He wrote a lot of interesting books, and I have selected two of them for my speech. The first is his political-philosophical magnum opus from 1953, Freiheit oder Gleichheit? Die Schicksalsfrage des Abendlandes [Freedom or Equality? The Fateful Question Facing the Western World; published in English as Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of Our Time]. The second, which defines political right and left positions, was written in 1989: Die recht gestellten Weichen: Irrwege, Abwege, Auswege [The Right Track: Wrong Turns, Detours, and Ways Out].

In this second book, on which my speech is mostly based, he wrote a catalog of leftist thinking, and I’ll present an excerpt from this long and comprehensive catalog. What does “left” mean? According to Kuehnelt-Leddihn, it means materialism, whether economic, biological, or sociological in nature. It means complete state control of education and teaching. It means the welfare state from cradle to grave. Anti-liberalism: hatred of freedom. Anti-traditionalism: the fight against “reaction.” It means the standardization of the mass media, the abolition or relativization of private property, and the glorification of the majority and the average.

And he goes on with the hunt for traitors, especially in wartime. It is important for the ruling class to go after those who do not worship its policies; they are called traitors, and they have to be fought.

Left means populism and uniformity: the Volksempfänger (the “people’s receiver”), the Volkswagen, people’s democracies, people’s courts, and so on. It means a strong appeal to the democratic principle. One should not forget that the German Marxist activist Rosa Luxemburg once said, “No democracy without socialism, and no socialism without democracy.” The Austrian chancellor of the 1970s and early 1980s, the social democrat Bruno Kreisky, once said, “We have to flood all areas of life with democracy.” And the German chancellor of about the same time, Willy Brandt, said, “We must dare more democracy.” So it seems there is a strong relationship between socialist and democratic principles.

The ideological roots of leftist thinking lie in the French Revolution, with the establishment of secular rites as a substitute for religion. The more the classical transcendent religions wither away, the bigger the vacuum they leave—and a vacuum, as we know from physics, is always filled. It is now filled with ideas like Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ issues, the fight against climate change, and other silly things. Freedom, for the left, means freedom from the waist down, not up. Left means the politicization of all aspects of life, and the total mobilization of envy in the interests of the party and the state. It’s not nice to talk about one’s own envy. No, it’s much better to talk about “social justice.” And envy became social justice under the rule of the socialists.

And what, according to Kuehnelt-Leddihn, does “right” mean? Well, that’s easy. Right means the absence or the opposite of these principles.

Let’s not forget that extremes never meet. Here we are faced with a very popular and therefore extremely idiotic cliché—as if the extremely large and the extremely small, or the extremely hot and the extremely cold, or life in Romania and in Liechtenstein, were similar. Let’s also bear in mind that political parties are rarely clearly on the right or on the left. They are mixed, and often merely lean more in one direction or the other.

This is what a traditional one-dimensional classification scheme looks like: a flat line going from left via center to right. According to the theory of extremism, the far left and the far right meet at the opposite ends of the political spectrum, which sounds strange. To support this strange thesis that extreme viewpoints converge, a trick is employed: the so-called horseshoe concept. This is intended to provide an answer to the question of the convergence of far-right and far-left positions.

I prefer neither the flat line nor the horseshoe, but rather a two-dimensional classification scheme, of which there are many. Let me present a few of them.

This one is a triangle marked by liberty, security, and equality. Inside it you see the positions of the political parties represented in the German parliament at the time. The CDU, the Christian Democratic Union, was in former times a conservative and Christian party, which it no longer is; it leans more toward the security side. The PDS, the successor of the SED, the former Communist Party of the GDR, leans more toward equality.

Another possibility is this one. Marshall Fritz was a well-known figure in the American libertarian movement. He advocated individual freedom, free markets, and a drastic reduction in government intervention, and he was closely associated with libertarian networks and think tanks. When he was asked where libertarians fit on the left–right spectrum, he said: “I say we don’t. We are above the line”—as you can see in this diagram.

Another way to create a two-dimensional classification scheme is this one. You have two axes: on the x-axis, the scale of economic freedom, and on the y-axis, personal freedom. In the lower part of this square you see the totalitarian or populist left, and in the upper part the libertarians or liberals.

Yet another two-dimensional classification scheme produces quadrants. Here, too, you have a left–right axis, along with a libertarian–authoritarian axis. On the upper side of the square you have the authoritarian left and the authoritarian right, and on the lower side the libertarian left and the libertarian right.

The scheme I personally prefer is this one, and it shows where the root of the confusion lies, the idea that left and right could touch at the ends of the line. What I show you here are the faces of representatives of each quadrant. In the egalitarian quadrant, you see the face of Karl Marx. In the authoritarian one, you see Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler—Stalin leaning more toward the collective, and Hitler more toward the other side. In the conservative quadrant, you see the face of Edmund Burke, who is regarded as the father of modern conservatism. And in the libertarian-liberal quadrant, you see Friedrich August von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Murray Rothbard.

And this, I think, makes clear why the confusion occurs. In fact, socialism—or let’s say communism—and National Socialism are siblings, or, if you like, two sides of the same coin.

It should be noted, however, that while classical Marxism explains social conflicts primarily in terms of class, property, and relations of production, current progressive movements, by contrast, often focus on racism, gender, sexuality, disability, language, and recognition.

“Degrowth”—shrinking—is a popular buzzword in this milieu. The goal is to save the planet from overheating by forcibly reducing energy consumption. In the end, this will amount to a radical decimation of the world’s population and a return to unheated Stone Age caves: cargo bikes and muscle power instead of maglev trains. If you don’t believe it, read the writings or listen to the sermons of people like Ulrike Herrmann, a very popular leftist intellectual who goes from one talk show to the next.

The unifying element of all left-wing movements today is an abysmal hatred of their own culture and the idolization of everything foreign—the more backward, the better. The socialists and communists of the past must be criticized for attempting to implement the erratic theory of a charlatan through violent means. But at least they felt a connection to industrialization and technological progress, which they relentlessly drove forward by force. In sharp contrast, leftists these days want to return to nature, which in reality can only be achieved at the cost of drastic impoverishment. The envy-driven leftists of today must be criticized for their cultural relativism, their nihilism, and their attempt to destroy a civilization that has developed over millennia.

The great British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton aptly described the leftist thinkers of the twentieth century—Adorno, Habermas, and Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School, as well as Sartre, Foucault, and Lukács—as Fools, Frauds and Firebrands. The mathematician and Soviet dissident Igor Shafarevich described the various manifestations of socialism as a death drive in history.

Let me now briefly repeat the positions of left and right according to Kuehnelt-Leddihn. Left, as I told you, means materialism, the welfare state, anti-liberalism, anti-traditionalism, the standardization of the mass media, and so on and so on. Right, on the other side, means the absence or the opposite of these principles. And now I integrate this catalog into the quadrant system I showed you before.

You see that all the ideas of the far right and the far left belong to the same quadrant. The National Socialists, too, propagated a welfare state from cradle to grave, and the politicization of all aspects of life. As for the abolition or relativization of private property: the National Socialists did not go as far as the communists, because they formally left private property untouched. But in fact it was not untouched, because they told the capitalists what they had to do with their capital.

Then there are political correctness and wokeness. These two had not yet been invented when these books were written, but they are nevertheless children of cultural Marxism and must be treated accordingly. So political correctness, wokeness, LGBTQ, and all the other things also belong to this totalitarian quadrant.

So, to avoid such errors of classification, you have to move away from the flat-line, one-dimensional scheme to a two-dimensional one. Then it becomes clear where the misunderstanding that left and right positions merge comes from.

Let me close with another quote from my countryman Kuehnelt-Leddihn: “Right is right and left is wrong.”

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your attention.