Left, Right & Essentialism

Start with the folk map. The left builds on social construction. The right builds on nature. On sex, race, crime, intelligence, the right reaches for biology and a fixed human nature while the left reaches for structure and environment. By that map the right looks more essentialist. A conservative who says the sexes differ by nature, or that human nature limits what social engineering can achieve, makes an essentialist claim. The hereditarian right makes the strongest version: group differences in traits trace to genetic essences. That strand sits at the core of several networks you have written about, and it essentializes by design. So at first glance the answer runs the other way from your hunch.
Now complicate it. Essentialism works as a habit, not a doctrine you can read off a party label. The habit treats a category as a deep kind with an inner nature that explains its surface traits. Both camps do this. They differ in which categories they treat as deep.
The classical liberal right resists essentializing social wholes. Hayek (1899-1992) spent a career attacking the reification of society, class, and the people as agents with minds and interests. Methodological individualism dissolves the group into the men who compose it. Public choice does the same to the state. Here the right plays the anti-essentialist, and the left, which talks about structural forces and class consciousness and group standpoint as real explanatory things, does the essentializing.
The identitarian left essentializes group identity hard. Standpoint epistemology treats membership in a group as conferring a shared way of knowing that outsiders cannot reach. That makes an essence claim about the group, relocated from biology to social position. Race as construct, yet race as a stable source of perspective no one can transcend. The metaphysics flips and the form survives.
So each camp essentializes its preferred categories and dissolves the rest. The right essentializes nature, sex, the traits of the man, sometimes civilization, and dissolves society and structure. The left essentializes identity, structure, and standpoint, and dissolves nature and sex.
A right-wing academic inside an elite institution survives under scrutiny. He cannot coast on the locally obvious the way a man stating the house consensus can. He has to defend claims the majority takes as self-evident, so he makes his premises explicit. That pressure can reduce lazy essentialism, the kind that hides inside an unexamined consensus. The dissenter watches the consensus from outside, so he notices its contingency. In published, scrutinized work you might therefore find the surviving right-wing academic less casually essentialist. His metaphysics still holds essence claims about nature. The caution comes from the scrutiny, not from the politics.
Strip the selection and the incentive away, and the ideology gives no clean edge. The right avows essence about nature and denies it about structure. The left runs the reverse, and often essentializes while insisting it never would.
I don’t think a right-wing academic could get away with the moves played by the philosopher of work Elizabeth S. Anderson.
Anderson (b. 1959) is anti-essentialist by avowal. The Imperative of Integration rejects genetic and cultural accounts of racial disadvantage. She holds a constructionist line on race. So in the sense she would defend, her hands stay clean.
Look at the operative moves. Her integration argument holds that racial groups carry distinct perspectives, and that a democracy needs those perspectives pooled through contact, so segregation starves deliberation of an epistemic resource. That assumes the groups differ in kind in a way that makes their combination necessary to good judgment. Move the source from biology to social position and you keep the form of an essence claim: membership reliably confers a standpoint outsiders cannot supply. A conservative who said the sexes bring distinct natures that institutions must combine draws the charge of essentialism inside a sentence. Anderson saying the races bring distinct standpoints that democracy must integrate reads as egalitarian theory.
Private Government runs the same operation on the firm. She casts the employer as a government and the employment relation as a species of dictatorship over the worker’s life. That reifies the firm into a unified dominating agent and treats domination as its character. A conservative who cast the family as a natural hierarchy with natural authority gets called a naturalizer of domination. Anderson naturalizes the firm as tyranny and it reads as critique.
The same move, essentializing a group or an institution into a kind with a built-in nature, passes for one side and sinks the other.
Someone replies that Anderson never essentializes, because a structural claim differs from an essence claim. The hereditarian puts the disadvantage inside the group’s nature. Anderson puts it in the arrangement around the group. The cause sits outside the group, in the conditions built around it. On that reading the asymmetry of permission tracks a real difference and not a bias.
The objection carries weight for the race-disadvantage claim. It carries less for the standpoint claim and almost none for the firm. When she says democracy needs the combined perspectives of the groups, she treats the perspective as something the group reliably carries, an essence under another label. When she says the firm dominates by its character, she assigns the firm an inner nature. Structure does not rescue those two.
Essentialism works as a charge against disfavored conclusions more than as a neutral name for a logical form. When the essence claim flatters the house view, that segregation produces disadvantage, that the firm oppresses the worker, the field files it under social science. When the essence claim cuts against the house view, that nature constrains outcomes, that groups differ by descent, that a hierarchy serves a function, the field files it under bigotry and sanctions the man who made it. The left’s essentialisms get renamed structural analysis and standpoint epistemology. The right’s keep the old name and the stigma. Anderson gets the rename. A right-winger gets the audit.