he fortunes of the gifted or lucky. The third, anti-rationalism, need not imply mulish hostility to reason (though it may); it may also refer to a thoughtful skepticism toward rationalist social programs, a suspicion that such programs do not take the complexity of human nature into account, and a corresponding suspicion that even outwardly pointless customs or practices may have been soundly derived from human experience. The statement of another American jurist, that not logic but experience is the heart of the law, could be taken as a summary of a Right perspective, reasonable but not rationalist.
To return to the first point, nationalism, the corollary of this view is that there are as many Rights as there are nations. The Left is universal, at least in potential and principle, since it is "about" class divisions believed to exist everywhere. In contrast, the American Right is "about" the United States, the French Right "about" France, the British Right "about" Britain, and so forth. This distinction is reinforced by the Left's and Right's views on rationalism. If a social system can be founded on rational principles it should be universally applicable, but if custom and tradition should be given weight, each nation has its own customs and traditions. History seems to bear out these distinctions; while Communism and socialism have been international movements, even the radical Right at its most doctrinaire, fascism, shared common sympathies and antipathies, but not a common program.
All this having been said, even the Left has in practice been rooted in the distinct experience of different countries. The French Left arose under different conditions and out of different experiences than the British Left; they had different courses of development and still today have different outlooks and agendas. But this is even more true of the French and British Right. Like their rival Lefts they developed out of different exp...