20 traditions

Individuals are the authors of their own ends, and a government's only warrant is to protect that authorship — chiefly through property, contract and equality before the law.

1776–1870 · E 0.72 · A -0.62 · I 0.05

The state is justified only for the functions that cannot be provided without coercion — courts, police, defence — and every function beyond those is an unjustified transfer.

1971– · E 0.88 · A -0.85 · I 0.00

Formal liberty is worth little without the capability to use it, so the state should actively remove the material and social barriers — poverty, discrimination, ill health, ignorance — that make rights nominal.

1900–1920; 1960– · E -0.30 · A 0.15 · I -0.80

The ownership argument is settled in the market's favour, so the useful remaining questions are about opportunity, human capital and competent management of a globalised economy.

1992–2008 · E 0.40 · A 0.15 · I -0.35

Capitalism produces more than any alternative and distributes worse than is tolerable, so the market should be kept and its output heavily taxed, insured and redistributed by democratic consent.

1945–1980 · E -0.45 · A 0.05 · I -0.40

Ownership of productive assets should pass to the public or to workers, and this can and must be achieved through elections rather than through a vanguard seizure of the state.

1900–1930; revived 2015– · E -0.75 · A -0.05 · I -0.50

History moves by class struggle, the working class cannot reach revolutionary consciousness unaided, and so a disciplined vanguard party must take and hold state power on its behalf.

1917–1989 · E -0.92 · A 0.85 · I -0.10

In agrarian societies the peasantry, not the industrial proletariat, is the revolutionary class — and class struggle continues after the revolution, inside the party itself, or the revolution is lost.

1949–1976 · E -0.90 · A 0.85 · I -0.15

The central political division is between a broad people and a narrow elite that has captured the state, and politics is the work of building the people into a majority that can take it back.

1999– · E -0.60 · A 0.20 · I -0.35

Institutions that have survived carry accumulated knowledge no designer possesses, so reform should be incremental, reversible and respectful of what it cannot fully explain.

1790– · E 0.35 · A 0.25 · I 0.70

The nation is the largest unit within which solidarity is actually felt, and a governing class that treats it as replaceable has forfeited its mandate.

2016– · E 0.15 · A 0.50 · I 0.75

Human dignity is prior to both the market and the state, and society is properly organised through families, parishes, unions and firms — with government acting only where those cannot.

1945–1990 · E -0.05 · A 0.15 · I 0.50

Hierarchy is the thing to be abolished, and a state that owns the economy is still a state — so production should be run by federated workplace and community assemblies with no coercive apex.

1870–1939 · E -0.90 · A -0.95 · I -0.70

Every service a state provides, including law, adjudication and defence, can be produced contractually on a market — and the state's tax base makes it a monopolist that no market would tolerate elsewhere.

1970– · E 0.98 · A -0.95 · I 0.10

The nation is a living organism whose decadence can be reversed by a unifying leader, and liberal proceduralism and class politics are the diseases that produced the decadence.

1922–1945 · E 0.10 · A 0.95 · I 0.80

A native majority has been governed against its expressed wishes on migration, culture and sovereignty by a bureaucratic and media class that no election reaches, and majority rule should be restored over that class.

2014– · E 0.35 · A 0.55 · I 0.70

Order, church and nation are the permanent goods, and a strong executive should hold them against liberalism, separatism and revolution — restoring an older settlement rather than building a new one.

1939–1975 · E 0.35 · A 0.90 · I 0.90

Political authority is answerable to revealed truth, so the state's job is to order society toward that truth rather than to remain neutral between the ends its citizens happen to choose.

recurrent · E 0.00 · A 0.85 · I 0.95

Physical limits bind before economic ones do, so climate and biodiversity budgets should be set first and the economy planned to fit inside them — democratically, and with the transition's costs socialised.

1998– · E -0.50 · A 0.10 · I -0.70

Most governing questions are technical rather than moral, and they are answered better by trained specialists insulated from electoral pressure than by contest between parties.

1945– · E 0.10 · A 0.45 · I -0.25