Instead of dividing political doctrines along a right/left axis, it would make more sense to look at things through the prism of freedom. We'd then have a freedom-power axis, so that classical liberal thought would finally find its place on the political chessboard.

The right way to look at things, then, would be to contrast the defenders of freedom with the defenders of the State—those who trust in individuals’ ability to organize themselves responsibly, and those who want a strong authority to reassure them and to control the lives of others.

David Nolan, founder of the Libertarian Party in 1971 and author of the now-famous Nolan Chart, understood this. An alumnus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he has designed a chart that is likely to better represent the complexity of the political spectrum.

His idea is to add to the left-right axis a second freedom/power axis running from statism at the bottom (point zero) to libertarianism at the top. The further away from point zero, the more libertarian the ideological positioning.

The diagram is a square divided into five sections, with a label assigned to each of the following sections:

This makes the Nolan diagram's two-dimensional approach a far more accurate representation of the political spectrum than the typical one-dimensional left-to-right line to which most political analysts refer.