“The right and the left are considered empty categories that no longer describe anything,” said Dr. Dino Cofrancesco, a leading figure in political philosophy in Italy, during the conference “The Right and the Left in the Twilight of Western Political Thought,” held at the Pocitos Campus of Universidad ORT Uruguay and organized by the Department of International Studies and the Italian Cultural Institute.
Cofrancesco is a professor at the universities of Genoa, Trieste, and Pisa, three of Italy’s leading institutions. He has combined his academic work with contributions to various magazines and newspapers. In 2002, he received the Torre di Castruccio Award from the Accademia di Carrara for his outstanding contributions to the field of culture.
During the event, which took place on Thursday, June 13, 2019, he analyzed the challenges facing Western democracies in recent decades.
Cofrancesco began the lecture by quoting the French philosopher Émile-Auguste Chartier (1868–1951). The philosopher believed that if someone said that the right and the left no longer made any sense, that person was surely on the right. Cofrancesco noted that today “no one would agree with this statement.”
There are those—such as the Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio—who see equality on the left and, on the right, a justification for all forms of abuse and discrimination. According to the professor, this viewpoint is an ideological definition and, therefore, obsolete today.
According to this view, “it is impossible to understand how people of such high culture and sensitivity could have embraced fascism.” For example, the playwright Luigi Pirandello or the philosopher Giovanni Gentile.
He referred to several philosophers in relation to the understanding of conflicts. Among them, he mentioned Hegel, who argued that human tragedy does not consist in the struggle between truth and error or between good and evil, but rather in the attempt to understand two points of view.
“The ones who will secure the votes for the left will no longer be the old working-class neighborhoods, but rather the thousands of migrants who want access to the same rights as everyone else, starting with political citizenship,” said the professor.
The speaker noted that equality, as discussed by the philosopher Bobbio, is no longer the exclusive domain of the left. Nor does it pertain to those whom Marx called “proletarians.” This explains why today “there is talk of a gentrification of the parties that traditionally made up the left.”
“Today, the state is like a colosseum, full of holes, where anyone can walk in. The decline of the state is the great trauma of the West, particularly in Italy, where the state was never very strong,” the professor said.
“We live in a culture that thrives on dichotomies. Ever since the French Revolution, there have been those who defend one side and those who defend the other. However, we must remember that, in every case, civil wars always involve bloodshed. Civil wars are won by refuting the arguments of those who bring barbarism into the social process, ”Cofrancesco concluded.