Etymological history of left & right

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12 Feb 2014, 5:47 am

Okay, so the origins of the terms "left" and "right" refer back to seating arrangements in the French National Assembly during the revolution (republicans to the left, royalists to the right). I just wonder if anyone knows of the history of how these terms, cosigned to the National Assembly, actually traversed the Atlantic and came to define the political spectrum in the entire Western (and even Eastern) world.

For the life of me, I can't seem to find a thorough etymological history of how this happened. Is it "lost to history", so to say?

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DentArthurDent
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12 Feb 2014, 9:11 pm

I suppose its like many memes, it just spread, got a life of its own. Perhaps if you look through archived newspapers you might find an early print reference.

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12 Feb 2014, 10:30 pm

Just google "right-left politics".

Youll find some good wiki articles that trace the linneage, and trace the spread of the terms from France to the rest of the world.

Basically the righ-leff thing as literal seating arrangements in the legislature kept reappearing in French politics throughout the nineteenth centurey. Gradually right and left became figuritive rather than literal labels. Slowly it spread to the rest of europe, and to the globe (including the USA).

Only with the rise of the Labor Party in 1906 in England did they start using the righ-leff label in British politics according to Wiki. The USA was even later in adopting the terms.

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13 Feb 2014, 1:08 am

naturalplastic wrote:

WIki has an article on the "American left", but doesn't describe the first use of the term "left" or "leftwing" in America.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_L ... .80.931919

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DentArthurDent
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13 Feb 2014, 5:56 am

MP ever considered you may have Aspergers?

Mate this is gonna drive you nuts. The only way you are going to find anything on this is if you trawl through thousands of newspapers from the time of the french revolution onwards. This is assuming they even still exist.

On a positive note, at the age of 49, I finally managed to type this without looking at the keyboard. A bloody great achievement even if I say so myself.

naturalplastic
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13 Feb 2014, 9:51 am

Master_Pedant wrote:

naturalplastic wrote:

WIki has an article on the "American left", but doesn't describe the first use of the term "left" or "leftwing" in America.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_L ... .80.931919

Its no big mystery.

Around 1970 Americans in the media just started to go by analogy to European politics, and started to label our own mainstream conservatives, and liberals, as being "right" and "left".

And like most analogies its not quite exact. European and British politics are very class-based in a way that American politics is not. For practical purposes in Europe/the UK 'right' means pro aristocracy, "middle" means pro middleclass, and "left" pro blue collar/poor folks. USA politics doesnt quite break down that way.

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15 Feb 2014, 12:58 pm

I am always getting my left and right mixed up. I always have to think about which is which before I can be confident in saying the correct one.

In the UK we use Left and Right and I think it relates more to socialism vs free market capitalism rather than republicans and royalists.

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15 Feb 2014, 6:50 pm

Robdemanc wrote:

Yes it does, but it originally comes from the french revolution, which of course was a mass popular uprising against the aristocracy and its oppression.

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16 Feb 2014, 5:14 pm

Robdemanc wrote:

Although, from what I understand, republicans in the UK are also more likely to come from those with leftist views on economic policy whereas the staunchest monarchists are rightwing Tories.

I utterly hate this guy's views overall, but I think the headline here describes a very succinct observation:

http://parliamentum.org/2011/12/30/righ ... publicans/

Right-Wing Monarchists and Left-Wing Republicans: The Inevitable Partisan Politicization of the Crown in Canada?

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16 Feb 2014, 6:07 pm

DentArthurDent wrote:

Mate this is gonna drive you nuts. The only way you are going to find anything on this is if you trawl through thousands of newspapers from the time of the french revolution onwards. This is assuming they even still exist.

You can't honestly tell me that there isn't some career academic who hasn't already done that work for me?!

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