Frank Furedi argues that the traditional terms "left" and "right" as applied to politics, have been both distorted and proved inadequate by a number of developments, notably the Cold War, the Culture Wars and the prevalence of risk-adverse managerialism.

The result is a politics that fails to take humans seriously as humans and which, necessarily, evades discussion of right and wrong. Furedi shows that the single most important political need is for an adequate conception of humanity (and, in the process, the public) and that it is this that will produce a new and more imaginative alignment in politics.