ONE of the curious side benefits of the brouhaha of recent years is a renewed attention to the way in which we categorise political opinions and parties. What the linear simplicity of the ubiquitous Left-Right measure gains in memorability, it more than loses in accuracy. Is right-wing being pro free markets or anti immigration? It depends on whom you are asking.

And so, we have seen alternative categorisations proliferate. There are Somewheres and Anywheres, Cosmopolitans and Communitarians, Globalists and Nationalists, Liberals and Authoritarians, and many other varieties. Into this fray, Colin Crouch, political scientist and a professor emeritus of Warwick University, has written a short book proposing exclusion and inclusion as fundamental categories.

The benefit of this approach, and of the separation of the world into “us” and “them” which underpins it, is not only that it is psychologically acute (this really is how humans, inherently social animals, think): it is also that it generates various “tropes” that allow us to map the political landscape with more nuance than is sometimes afforded by the kinds of dual category above.

Thus, inclusion can mean “us too”, as characterised labour or feminist movements in the past, or “them too”, as characterises pro-immigration and pro-asylum positions today. Exclusion can mean “only us”, which is recognisable in nationalism, or “us, not them”, which is more evident in harder and more aggressive “nativist” positions.

By means of these devices, Crouch assesses recent political history and current parties across North America and Europe (which he knows very well), arranging them from the hardest exclusionary “openly xenophobic” positions, through more inclusive ones (social democratic tradition), to environmentalism, whose cry of “us too . . . refers to the entire population, including in particular those yet unborn”.

It is a fresh and helpful approach, but, ultimately, as limited as the categorisations that it seeks to displace. Green parties’ apparent commitment to “those yet unborn” rarely extends to those who are actually unborn in the womb. Conservativism, which Crouch places firmly at the exclusionary end of the spectrum and clearly dislikes, can adopt an inclusive approach, at least when it takes seriously Burke’s vision of society as a partnership between the living, the dead, and future generations. “Inclusionary social movements” can prove to be highly exclusionary when faced with those who disagree with them, as the trans debate has shown.

Ultimately, the clarity offered by the inclusion/exclusion axis becomes as cloudy as the Left-Right one because, as the great economist Amartya Sen pointed out repeatedly, identity is plural. We can be — indeed, most of us are — simultaneously inclusive and exclusive, depending on which of our several identities we are favouring at that moment.

Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos.

Exclusion and the New Politics of Hatred
Colin Crouch
Polity £20
(978-1-5095-7322-6)
Church Times Bookshop £18