Left - Government Controls People

Center - The Constitution Handbook Of Citizenship

Right - People Control Government

What is all of that?

Definitions that work.

Background and Development -

Prior to 1770 there was no left and right in politics only up and down.Typically phrased as God, King by Divine Right, Country, people. Sometimes the military and bureaucrats were included under King by Divine Right especially if the Kingdom was won by right of conquest.

A triumverate of King and Nobles, Church,and business especially bankers resulted but it was still a vertical decision with the serfs, cannon fodder and baby factories at the bottom.

Comes the Revolutionary War of the USA and two concepts never before uttered or thought of in world history. Government of, by, for the people and the people in charge and control of Government. God, Man, Country, Government as employees. In those days God always came first.The divine right now belongs to the citizen not just to a King and his lineage.

You secular types don't get all bent out of shape this was the 1770's your turn is coming.

Thus one of the two great philosophical ideas turned to pragmatic politics was born. Man over Government. Man as the source of power upon which government the employee depended. Man taking his guidance from his God and his mind with no intercessor.No King, no priest, no one to offer explanations except - himself. the very thought must have chilled the bones of the aristocracy and in the next paragraph a few heads - of State as well.

An alternative view is that the "consent of the governed" philosophy as delineated by Locke in Two Treatises of Government (1689) represented a paradigm shift from the old governance paradigm under feudalism known as the "divine right of kings".

At the same time that thought on the western shores of the Atlantic Ocean had turned into a revolution - a Confederacy and a Republic the French held their own revolution.
While much of the new USA political theory was developed from the Greeks who invented democracy and republic the terms left and right originated with the French.

"In the 1790s, King Louis XVI was fighting with the Legislative Assembly. Like our modern-day House of Representatives, seating in the French Legislative Assembly was arranged based on political affiliation. The King sat in front of the assembly. To his right sat the conservative Feuillants who backed the king and believed in a constitutional monarchy. To his left sat the liberal Girondists and radical Jacobins who wanted to install a completely democratic government. Oddly enough, in the U.S. House of Representatives the tables have turned: members of the Republican party sit to the left of the House Speaker and members of the Democratic party sit to his or her right.

It wasn’t until the early twentieth century that Left and Right denoted political affiliation in Britain and the US, and the more politically loaded terms “leftwing” and “rightwing” were not widely used until after 1960

Right for those with divine right as the source of power and left for the right of the people to be the source of power. That was soon to change.

The problem of the king was solved by a certain Madame Guillotine. For the moment the right the home of divine right was an empty space.

The problem of the left was the need for a class of leaders in a classless society which they solved and the replacement of the space vacated by the king since they had also assumed ownership and control of the new ource of political power (formerly divine right).

Solving that was put off as their ruling class a certain Citizen Bonaparte staged his own revolution providing his own source of power, the military and resumed the monarchy.