Progress pill
Political families under the microscope

The centrists

What's your Political Leaning?

The centrists

  • Freedoms and cardinal values
  • Targeted social programs
  • Is Keynesianism an economic centrism?
  • John Rawls: the philosophical dimension
  • Centrist thought in quotations
Centrism is more than a simple median position equidistant from all others. It is a genuine political philosophy, a method of governance that claims to be adapted to contemporary pluralist societies. It is an approach that privileges efficiency, pragmatism, and tends toward a form of technocracy: power should be entrusted to experts who must steer the economy and pilot monetary policy.

Freedoms and cardinal values

The centrist approach is characterized by a constant search for balance between public authority and private autonomy:
  • Freedoms: moderate in both the societal and economic spheres. In the societal domain, centrists aspire to reconcile governmental control and individual choice, favoring measured state intervention while preserving fundamental liberties. In the economic domain, freedoms are guaranteed but always tempered by a concern for social justice. Centrists are highly critical of laissez-faire, yet they remain both pro-business and favorable to correcting inequalities. An important distinction must be made here: being pro-business (as centrists tend to be) means favoring a kind of alliance between large enterprises and the state, which differs from being pro-market.
  • Cardinal values: moderation, compromise, adaptation, public utility.
  • Philosophy: Pragmatism is a political philosophy that privileges adaptation to particular contexts rather than the rigid application of ideological principles. This pragmatic thinking is founded on the idea that only technocrats are capable of making the right decisions to achieve the best socioeconomic results. In a technocratic governance model, political decisions arise from rationality and expertise rather than ideology or partisan debate. To calculate the utility of a decision, one must be able to measure all its consequences, and this requires expertise: sophisticated calculations, statistics, surveys, probabilities. Yet there is a paradox here: this pragmatism itself rests on a form of dogmatism (namely, that only experts are competent to steer society), a conviction that remains invisible and unexpressed.
  • Politics: Centrists seek to transcend traditional divisions (left versus right) through coalition governance, uniting moderate parties from the conservative right to the social-democratic and ecological left into a central group that transcends the historical cleavages between left and right. This method suits modern societies characterized by diversity. Bill Clinton in the United States was recognized for his ability to pass laws by winning votes from both Republicans and Democrats; Emmanuel Macron in France was elected twice by forming a broad center composed of all the moderates.
  • Economy: Centrists accept market mechanisms while recognizing the need for appropriate expert control and regulation. They advocate a regulated market economy where competition takes place within a framework protecting the general interest. One might call this a "soft dirigisme," since it does not seek to plan the economy completely but rather to cap bonuses, regulate practices, and manage the market in the name of social peace.

Targeted social programs

Centrism recognizes the importance of targeted social programs to correct inequalities without creating excessive dependence on the state. This system of wealth redistribution aims less at dogmatic egalitarianism than at social peace and "living together."

Is Keynesianism an economic centrism?

John Maynard Keynes, the great English economist of the twentieth century who has dominated economic thought and practice in Western societies to this day, can indeed be seen as representing a form of centrism. His approach seeks a balance between classical liberalism (the free market) and dirigiste socialism (maximum planning).
Rather than letting markets regulate themselves, Keynes argued that the state should use fiscal and monetary policies (public spending, taxation, interest rates) to stimulate aggregate demand in times of recession or curb it during periods of economic overheating. He is the originator of the well-known idea that consumption is good for growth.
But for this mechanism to work, experts are needed to manipulate the right levers: monetary levers like interest rates and money creation. To finance social spending, the state must be able to borrow, and for borrowing to be feasible, money must be available and not too costly, hence the importance of central banks in maintaining a certain inflation rate.

John Rawls: the philosophical dimension

John Rawls, the eminent political philosopher and author of A Theory of Justice (1971), represents the theoretical dimension of centrism. His conception of social justice proposes a pragmatic balance between individual liberties and corrective interventions against inequalities.
Rawls proposes two principles of justice:
  1. Equal liberty for all: the foundation of democracy as Tocqueville had shown.
  2. The difference principle: allowing inequalities only if they benefit the most disadvantaged. In other words, one has the right to grow rich, provided that redistribution allows the least favored to benefit as well.
The concept of overlapping consensus is also central to Rawls's thought, notably in his book Political Liberalism (1993):
An overlapping consensus is reached when citizens, while adhering to different comprehensive, religious or philosophical doctrines, nevertheless converge on a set of political principles of justice that they can all endorse from their own perspectives.
This approach perfectly illustrates the centrist method: seeking rational, moderate agreements despite the diversity of opinions within a pluralist society, the very essence of centrist philosophy.

Centrist thought in quotations

The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all. John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire, 1926
What Keynes means here is that there are market failures (crises of overproduction, shortages, speculation), and when crises occur, only the state is in a position to intervene. The market is not capable of self-regulation, and so it must be protected, which falls to the state and therefore to experts and technocrats.
Quiz
Quiz1/5
What are John Rawls's two principles of justice?