The End of Political Parties

 

We say that someone is left-wing or right-wing almost as if we were describing a permanent characteristic of that person, something similar to their profession, nationality, or temperament. However, as society advances, this division makes less and less sense.

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If you have been following our ideas, you know that, within a Prospenomics dynamic of post-scarcity, the political left-right axis ceases to be the main decision-making reference.

Let us start from the beginning...

Political positions have a very specific and relatively recent historical origin. They were born in Paris during the French Revolution, at a time when France was undergoing such a profound transformation that the political, social, and economic structures of the Ancien Régime itself were being dismantled.

The distinction did not emerge from an abstract political theory according to which humanity was naturally divided into two great groups. It emerged from the physical arrangement of deputies inside a room.

To understand what was happening, we need to go back to Paris in 1789. France was still a monarchy ruled by Louis XVI, and society was organized according to structures inherited from the Ancien Régime. The Crown's financial crisis was profound, aggravated by decades of warfare and by the cost of French support for American independence. The state struggled to raise revenue, taxation was unequal, the legal privileges of the different estates generated resentment, and the population suffered from rising food prices, especially the price of bread.

At the same time, the ideas of the Enlightenment had created a new political language. Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and other thinkers had brought concepts such as liberty, sovereignty, representation, citizenship, and the rational organization of the state into circulation.

French society was therefore facing an explosive combination: fiscal crisis, institutional inequality, economic hardship, new political ideas, and a monarchy that was unable to reform itself easily. When Louis XVI summoned the Estates-General in 1789, he was not simply calling another administrative meeting. He was opening the door to a transformation that would quickly escape the control of the monarchy itself.

Paris was then a populous, noisy, politically charged city in which cafés, bookstores, printing houses, salons, clubs, and public spaces functioned as genuine means of political communication.

The circulation of ideas did not happen as it does today, through television, social media, or major digital outlets. Political information was transmitted through newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, letters, meetings, and, above all, conversation. The café was a kind of physical social network. Journalists, deputies, lawyers, merchants, intellectuals, aristocrats, and political agitators could be found discussing the day's events, reading newspapers, and exchanging opinions.

One of the most famous places in this universe was the Café Procope, on the Rive Gauche, near the intellectual heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Founded as early as the seventeenth century, the establishment had already been frequented by figures of the Enlightenment and, during the Revolution, became associated with the revolutionary milieu. The Café Procope hosted figures such as Danton, Marat, Camille Desmoulins, and Robespierre, and was connected to the social world of the Cordeliers and other revolutionaries.

Contrary to what many people believe, the left, the right, and the Marais cannot be reduced to a simple geographical formula applied to a map of Paris. The revolutionary left was not simply located on the Rive Gauche, nor was the right simply located on the Rive Droite. What existed was a much more complex network of meeting places.

The Jacobin Left

The Jacobins, for example, were established in the former Jacobin convent on Rue Saint-Honoré. The Cordeliers Club, associated with Danton, Marat, and Desmoulins, was based in the former Cordeliers convent on the Rive Gauche, while the Café Procope was close to this milieu. The Girondins, likewise, did not simply constitute a "Rive Gauche club" geographically opposed to the Jacobins; they were a parliamentary and political current whose influence developed primarily within the Assembly through networks of political sociability, the press, and salons. Geography helps tell the story, but it should not replace the history. The true map of the Revolution was a map of people, clubs, newspapers, cafés, assemblies, streets, and networks of influence.

The Girondin Right

On the other side of this revolutionary universe, there were also places where monarchists, constitutionalists, and more conservative sectors gathered. The Palais-Royal, on the Rive Droite, was one of the great centers of social interaction and the circulation of ideas in Paris. Cafés, restaurants, shops, bookstores, gambling houses, and other meeting places operated there, making it one of the busiest areas of the capital. The Café de Foy, located in the Palais-Royal, became particularly associated with the monarchist and constitutionalist milieu during certain moments of the Revolution.

Thus, it is possible to see how Paris possessed a genuine political geography. Certain places concentrated particular groups, conversations, and networks of influence. But this geography did not correspond exactly to the parliamentary division between left and right. It was the social infrastructure through which political positions were formed, debated, and eventually brought to the place where they would actually be transformed into votes.

That place was particularly important: the Salle du Manège, next to the Tuileries Garden. Originally built as a space for equestrian exercises, the enormous hall began housing the Assembly in November 1789. It successively accommodated the Assemblée Constituante, the Assemblée Législative, and, initially, the Convention Nationale. Between 1789 and 1793, that space became one of the great laboratories of modern politics.

The Marais Center

It was inside this hall that the famous spatial division emerged, giving rise to our political language. Deputies most closely identified with revolutionary and republican positions tended to occupy the seats to the left of the Assembly president; those more favorable to constitutional monarchy and to moderate or conservative positions sat to the right. Between them was the group known as the Marais or the Plain.

And here we encounter an extraordinarily modern characteristic of the French Revolution: these deputies were not merely debating ideas; they were creating an operating system for transforming a society in rupture into collective decisions. The Assembly had to vote on fundamental issues: the powers of the king, the structure of the state, the Church, property, citizens' rights, war, finances, and the very nature of sovereignty.

In this environment, large ideological groupings were extremely useful. If a deputy identified with a particular camp, this gave others a reasonably efficient indication of how he was likely to position himself on a range of other issues. The major political camps functioned as decision-making packages. Voters and deputies did not need to reconstruct an entire political theory for every vote.

This is precisely why we should not look down on those ideological packages from a historical distance. They were a rational solution to a real problem. Information was scarce, society was less specialized, communications were slow, and the number of technical issues that a citizen needed to follow was infinitely smaller than it is today. Democracy needed some mechanism for compressing information, and the major political camps provided that mechanism.

This is where the thinking of Daniel Innerarity helps broaden the problem. A Spanish political philosopher and one of the leading contemporary scholars of democratic governance, Innerarity argues that modern political parties emerged as large structures of social aggregation. They brought together relatively stable identities, relatively stable professions, and relatively stable interests. The party functioned as a large container capable of organizing enormous numbers of people within the same political narrative.

The problem is that society has changed. A contemporary citizen may support fiscal responsibility and public investment in science. They may support private property and at the same time consider it unacceptable for anyone to go hungry. They may be conservative on certain cultural issues and liberal on others. They may support free markets in some sectors and strong public intervention in others. The more complex society becomes, the more likely it is that individuals will agree with some positions within one camp while rejecting others from that same camp.

The question "Are you left-wing or right-wing?" therefore begins to lose its explanatory power.

This is precisely where Innerarity's reflection meets the Prospenomics proposal. If political parties emerged as large containers for organizing relatively stable identities, increasing social complexity reduces their ability to adequately represent increasingly diverse individuals. This does not mean that political parties will disappear tomorrow. It means that they were designed for a specific kind of society and may no longer be able to represent the emerging world with the same degree of precision.

Prospenomics takes this reasoning one step further. It proposes that a post-scarcity society does not need to continue organizing all of its decisions around ideological identities inherited from the eighteenth century. The goal is not to create a new left. It is not to create a new right. It is not to permanently occupy the Marais. The goal is to replace the logic of belonging with the logic of reality.

Much of modern politics still operates as if every issue must first be classified as "left" or "right." But reality does not work that way. When engineers design a Boeing 747, they do not ask whether the position of its engines is a left-wing or right-wing solution. They do not debate whether the thickness of the wings is progressive or conservative. They do not calculate aerodynamic lift based on ideological preferences.

The location where the engines are installed does not depend on which side of the wing they occupy. It depends on the need to properly respond to the laws of physics.

Weight distribution, lift, fuel consumption, and flight stability do not negotiate with ideologies. The aircraft flies because it respects reality.

The Prospenomics hypothesis is that an increasing share of public decisions will move in the same direction. Issues involving energy, food, science, infrastructure, automation, artificial intelligence, and economic organization have objective constraints that do not disappear because a political group prefers a different narrative. Just as physics determines where an engine should be placed, economic, technological, and material reality imposes limits and possibilities on collective decisions.

The central criterion therefore ceases to be the ideological origin of a proposal and becomes its ability to produce results compatible with available resources, accumulated knowledge, and human dignity.

Perhaps, therefore, the question of the future will not be whether the left is right or the right is right. Both were historically relevant responses to the problems of their time. The truly important question is another: are we still using the best possible system for understanding today's reality?

The deputies sitting on the left, the right, and in the Marais of the Salle du Manège created one of the most successful political technologies in history. For more than two centuries, it helped organize conflicts, elections, governments, and ideologies. But no intellectual technology is eternal.

Perhaps twenty-first-century politics requires less loyalty to the positions occupied in that Parisian room and greater attention to the laws that govern reality. After all, when it comes time to build a Boeing 747, ideology does not decide where the engines go.

Physics does.

And a mature society may need to begin treating an increasing number of its decisions in exactly the same way.

Bibliographical References

Doyle, William. The Oxford History of the French Revolution. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Furet, François. Pensando a Revolução Francesa. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1989.

Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848. New York: Vintage Books, 1996.

Hunt, Lynn. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Lefebvre, Georges. A Revolução Francesa. São Paulo: IBRASA, 1989.

McPhee, Peter. Liberty or Death: The French Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.

Palmer, R. R. The Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Schama, Simon. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

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Daniel Innerarity and Complex Democracy

Innerarity, Daniel. La transformación de la política. Barcelona: Península, 2002.

Innerarity, Daniel. La democracia del conocimiento: por una sociedad inteligente. Barcelona: Paidós, 2011.

Innerarity, Daniel. Política para perplejos. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2018.

Innerarity, Daniel. Una teoría de la democracia compleja. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2020.

Innerarity, Daniel. "¿El final de los partidos?". Various editions and essays published in periodicals and collections addressing democracy, representation, and the transformation of party systems.

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Institutions, Complexity, and Information

Hayek, Friedrich A. The Use of Knowledge in Society. American Economic Review, vol. 35, no. 4, 1945.

Simon, Herbert A. The Sciences of the Artificial. 3rd ed. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.

North, Douglass C. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

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Historical Reference Used in the Luca Pacioli Analogy

Pacioli, Luca. Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalità. Venice, 1494.

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Conceptual Reference for Prospenomics

Nunes, Marcelo. Prospenomics: Economia da Pós-Escassez, Abundância Tecnológica e Otimização Social. Manuscript in development.

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Essential Bibliography (Short Version for Publication)

If the article is published in a journal, website, or book and you want only the references that are truly central, I would use:

1. DOYLE, William. The Oxford History of the French Revolution.
2. MCPHEE, Peter. Liberty or Death: The French Revolution.
3. INNERARITY, Daniel. La democracia del conocimiento.
4. INNERARITY, Daniel. Una teoría de la democracia compleja.
5. NORTH, Douglass. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance.
6. PACIOLI, Luca. Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalità.