Nolan Chart

The Nolan Chart is a political spectrum diagram created by David Nolan in 1969. The chart divides human political views into two vectors – economic opinion and personal opinion – to produce a type of Cartesian chart. It expands political view analysis beyond the traditional "left–right" line, which measures politics along a one-dimensional line, into a graph with two dimensions: degrees of economic and personal freedom.

The claim that political positions can be located on a chart with two axes: left-right (economics) and tough-tender (authoritarian-libertarian) was put forward by the British psychologist Hans Eysenck in his 1954 book The Psychology of Politics with statistical evidence based on survey data. This leads to a loose classification of political positions into four quadrants, with further detail based on exact position within the quadrant.

A similar two-dimensional chart, with eight points instead of four, appeared in 1970 in the publication The Floodgates of Anarchy by Stuart Christie and Albert Meltzer. In Radicals for Capitalism (p. 321), Brian Doherty attributes the idea for the chart to an article by Maurice Bryson and William McDill in The Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought (Summer 1968) entitled "The Political Spectrum: A Bi-Dimensional Approach".

David Nolan first published the current version of the chart in an article named "Classifying and Analyzing Politico-Economic Systems" in the January 1971 issue of The Individualist, the monthly magazine of the Society for Individual Liberty (SIL). In December 1971, he helped to start the group that would become the Libertarian Party.

Frustrated by the "left-right" line analysis that leaves no room for other ideologies, Nolan devised a chart with two axes which would come to be known as the Nolan Chart. The Nolan Chart is the centerpiece of the World's Smallest Political Quiz. Nolan's insight was that the major difference between various political philosophies, the real defining element in what a person believes politically, is the amount of government control over human action that is advocated. Nolan further reasoned that virtually all human political action can be divided into two broad categories: economic and personal. The "economic" category includes what people do as producers and consumers – what they can buy, sell, and produce, where they work, who they hire, and what they do with their money. Examples of economic activity include starting or operating a business, buying a home, constructing a building, and working in an office. The "personal" category includes what people do in relationships, in self-expression, and what they do with their own bodies and minds. Examples of personal activities include whom they marry; choosing what books they read and movies they watch; what foods, medicines, and drugs they choose to consume; recreational activities; religious choices; organizations they join; and with whom they choose to associate.

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