Three Telos Model

The Three Telos Model, "Political Trichotomy" , "Triangle Political Map" or "Ideological Triangle" is an explanatory model of political ideology. It's a way to describe political beliefs based on the core goal of the philosophy called a telos. The Three Telos Model is based on the concept of a ternary plot where the different underlying goals can be mixed but must sum up to the totality of the person's ideological position. This is a departure from the standard Cartesian spaces such as the two-dimensional political spectrum.

The core concept is that there are three teloi or axiomatic end goals which are fundamentally incompatible with each other. The three teloi are Freedom(Liberty / Autonomy), Equality(Equity / Social Justice) and Tradition(Stability / Order) though the exact words used vary. Favoring any one telos comes at the expense of another. In this way the model is an attempt to show how differing balances of core values result in different ideological positions.

Origins

It is well known that the standard "Left-Right" political spectrum traces its origins to the seating arrangement of the French National Assembly in 1789 where proponents of the Ancien Régime sat to the right and revolutionaries sat to the left. The Three Telos Model emerged from the same historical crucible. Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), identified a collision between three competing ends before they had even fully crystallized into modern ideologies. Burke essentially waged an intellectual two-front war, defending the inherited liberties of the British tradition against both the Monarchical Absolutism (Tradition) of the past and the Jacobin Absolutism (Equality) of the future.

This line of thought was further developed by Alexis de Tocqueville, who observed that modern democracy fosters an "ardent, insatiable, incessant, and invincible" passion for equality. Tocqueville warned that if a citizenry could not find equality in freedom, they would eventually seek it in slavery. He argued that neither Liberty nor Equality could sustain a healthy society in isolation; instead, they required "Mores" (the habits of the heart, religious convictions, and local associations) to act as "intermediary powers" that prevent the state from becoming omnipotent.

Following Tocqueville’s analysis of the democratic tension between liberty and equality (with traditional mores as a necessary stabilizer against tyranny), Lord Acton refined these insights amid the mid-to-late 19th-century rise of Nationalism. He recognized that “Tradition” or “National Identity” had become its own distinct power center alongside egalitarian drives. In his 1862 essay “Nationality,”. Acton explicitly identified “three principal theories” challenging the established order: equality (anti-aristocratic), communism (leveling of property and condition), and nationality. As a classical liberal who placed liberty as the highest political end, he viewed these forces in permanent collision and famously warned that “the passion for equality made it vain to hope for freedom,” while noting that absolutizing any one end inevitably paves the way for tyranny.

The transition from these literary observations to the final three teloi in a formal geometric model was completed by Friedrich A. Hayek. In his 1960 essay, "Why I Am Not a Conservative," Hayek argued that the linear Left-Right spectrum was fundamentally misleading for the modern world. As a self-professed "Old Whig," Hayek explicitly claimed the lineage of Burke, Tocqueville, and Acton, citing them extensively in The Constitution of Liberty. He positioned his classical liberal stance as a third, distinct corner of a triangle, separate from both the socialist Left and the traditionalist Right. The modern "Three Telos Model" is effectively Hayek’s systematic organization of these 19th-century insights, designed to map the ideological landscape of a post-socialist era where Liberty, Equality, and Tradition remain in constant, triangular tension.

"The picture generally given of the relative position of the three parties does more to obscure than to elucidate their true relations. They are usually represented as different positions on a line, with the socialists on the left, the conservatives on the right, and the liberals somewhere in the middle. Nothing could be more misleading. If we want a diagram, it would be more appropriate to arrange them in a triangle with the conservatives occupying one corner, with the socialists pulling toward the second and the liberals toward the third."

Hayek's insight that liberalism (liberty) differs “as much from true conservatism as from socialism”​ directly anticipates treating those three as independent axes. Hayek’s triangular diagram idea is frequently cited and it stands as a clear intellectual antecedent to today’s trichotomous political map.

Daniel Elazar’s political culture typology drew from Hayek to classify U.S. state cultures into individualistic, moralistic, and traditionalistic. He first introduced this classification in his book American Federalism: A View from the States, published in 1966. That work theorized that the United States could be understood as a mosaic of three distinct political cultures based on historical settlement patterns and regional values.

A later and likely independent development of this model is found in Rudolph Rummel's 1976 book Understanding Conflict and War, Vol. 2: The Conflict Helix. In Chapter 31, Rummel identifies three “pure” political types – Libertarian, Authoritarian and Totalitarian which map to the same three corners of the Three Telos Model.

Mary Douglas's Grid-Group Cultural Theory in her book Natural Symbols proposed another novel derivation of this model. Douglas's “Cultural Theory” identified three “active solidarities”: the Individualist, the Egalitarian, and the Hierarchist which correspond to the same three teloi. In addition to grounding this picture in a different field, Cultural Theory added a fourth category, the Fatalist (those disengaged from all three axes)​. The Fatalist would not be on the political landscape since cultural theory emphasized that active political cultures cluster around individualism, egalitarianism, or hierarchy.

Douglas’s Grid-Group Cultural Theory solidified empirically what Isaiah Berlin had already been arguing for theoretically in his work on value pluralism: that fundamental human values and forms of social organization are not merely different but in necessary conflict. This leads to the zero-sum representation of the model. Douglas argues that these rationalities are not just different; they are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (with the Fatalist as the passive reservoir).

• You cannot maximize Hierarchy (Tradition) and Equality simultaneously because Hierarchy requires rank and Equality requires leveling.
• You cannot maximize Equality and Individualism (Liberty) because Individualism requires the freedom to accumulate and exit, which destroys the solidarity of the Egalitarian group.
• You cannot maximize Individualism and Hierarchy because the Market disrupts Tradition (Schumpeter’s "creative destruction").

This establishes the mathematical validity of the ternary plot (A+B+C=Constant). Society is a zero-sum game of organizational principles. Moving toward one corner necessitates moving away from the others.

Contemporaneously in political science, Philippe Schmitter (1974) distinguished three systems of interest representation—pluralism (corresponding to individualism/liberty), corporatism (hierarchy/tradition), and syndicalism (egalitarianism/equality).

A decade later, Gøsta Esping-Andersen (1990) identified three welfare-capitalism regimes in The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism: liberal (individualism/liberty), corporatist-statist (hierarchy/tradition), and social-democratic (egalitarianism/equality).

These represent further independent rediscoveries of the same three-teloi structure in empirical studies of governance and political economy. Verweij et al. (2020) later demonstrated particularly strong conceptual overlap between these frameworks and Douglas’s grid-group typology through systematic interrater-agreement coding.

One popular version of the model was described in Arnold Kling's book "The Three Languages of Politics" with the name of the model given as the "Three-Axes Model". The book was first released in 2013 and there have been several versions. It is not clear if Kling took inspiration from any of the prior work since his model primarily deals with communication and linguistics. Kling's model is positioned more towards describing groups' rhetoric and punditry than a map of political ideology. However, he does state that it is unlikely anybody uses only one of the three languages which implies the existence of a space of communication like a ternary plot.

Since there are several distinct framings in different fields with subtle cross-talk, there is no canonical version of the model. The exact definition of each corner in each field does differ slightly. However, they are similar enough to each other and distinct enough from other models to be grouped. In 2019 there was a brief wave of interest among online political pundits who described a number of versions. Examples are given in the following videos:

• "ShortFatOtaku"
• "Academic Agent"
• "The Symposium"
• "Francis Chow"

Because of the rise in popularity, in 2021 Keith Edmonds started this page to consolidate all the disparate sources and framings of the same concept. He added the idea of representing it as a ternary plot and the label of "Three Telos Model".

In 2022, Eric Kaufmann released an influential report "The Politics of the Culture Wars in Contemporary America" via the Manhattan Institute which advocated for this model. This was later expanded in his book "The Third Awokening".

Semantics

There is a lot of debate about what the best term to use for each of the three teloi is. It is also possible that there is no perfect word in English to describe each concept due to the nuance. The goal is that each is an independent and incompatible principal component of the space of values. This directly implies the necessity for the tradeoffs described by the metric space of the ternary plot.

It is intended to apply any time a group of individuals come together and co-operate in a society. A trade-off should emerge naturally in all such situations between the freedom of the individual versus equity between individuals versus the strength of the group as a whole. Different people will weight these three attributes differently giving rise to a landscape of possibilities.

All three components have an inverse where the person does not subscribe to the Telos at all. This would correspond to a whole side of the triangle since there are more ways to not follow a telos than there are to follow one. It is possible to define the triad based on their opposites.

The concept of freedom is quite well defined in the liberal tradition which arose from the Enlightenment. Some academics prefer to define this component as individualism or autonomy. Other academics prefer to define it by its inverse of authoritarianism. Common policy themes for the telos of freedom are:

• Free speech, privacy rights, and civil liberties.
• Libertarian economics, property rights, deregulation.
• Emphasis on personal choice (e.g., in education, healthcare, lifestyle).

The more common term for Equality in modern times is Equity. This clarifies that the Equality Telos is the desire for equality of outcome between individuals and why Hayek originally associated it with socialism. The term for the group holding the ideal of Equity is often preferred to be labelled as Egalitarian instead of socialist or Leftist. However, the term Egalitarian has a wider and more conflicting set of use cases in literature than "Leftist". Common policy themes for the telos of Equality are:

• Redistribution of wealth or resources to create a more "level playing field".
• Anti-discrimination measures, civil rights, and equity efforts.
• Social safety nets (e.g., universal healthcare, basic income, minimum wages or wealth taxes).
• Movements for racial justice, gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights.

The Tradition axis is likely the most controversial in definition because it is the only one which implies a temporal nature to the model. This is not intended to be identified with status quo conservatives . It is intended to be aligned with the values of structure, order and stability. It is a desire to have traditions. While the desire to have traditions often implies the preservation of existing traditions it should be realized that people of this temperament are often easy to convince that a different tradition is better than an existing one as long as it leads to more structure, order and stability and will not cause turmoil in the transition. Many scholars would label the group who hold this telos as Hierarchists to prevent confusion with the multiple ideologies labelled as Conservatism which have significant overlap with Liberalism.

In this sense, the Tradition axis does not necessarily mandate a rigid adherence to past norms. As philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre point out, “tradition” can be understood as an evolving conversation—a historical community of practice that continually tests and refines its own standards and values. By this account, tradition is not reactionary so much as it is a careful, intergenerational search for stability and order in the face of uncertainty. Far from rejecting change outright, those on the Tradition axis may support new paradigms or practices if they can be integrated without destabilizing the shared frameworks that undergird society. In other words, their disposition favors gradual and orderly improvement, informed by past wisdom rather than governed by mere nostalgia.

Decomposition

Many familiar concepts can be expressed as a decomposed aspect of the three teloi. Each telos has a different meaning in different contexts and the theory holds that each context should be able to be decomposed into three differing stances which align with each telos.

	Equity/Equality of outcome	Freedom/Liberty	Tradition
Justification	It is fair and reduces harm	People have a need for self-determination	Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems (i.e. Chesterton's Fence)
Philosophical Foundation	Rousseau, Young Hegelians, Critical theory and Marxism	Liberalism and Enlightenment Humanism	Ancient philosophy and Right Hegelians
Prestige Identifier	Victim Culture	Dignity culture	Honour Culture
Economics	Marxism/Socialism	Free Market Capitalism	Mercantilism / Feudalism / Corporatism
Ideal Structure	Flat	Meritocratic / Network / Spontaneous order	Inherited Caste / Class Hierarchy
Power holder	The Collective / Managerial Elite	Meritocrats / Endorsed / Plutocrats	Aristocrats / Caste / Class
Basic unit	Group / Collective	individual	Family / Tribe
Truth source	Lived Experience / Standpoint / Social Construction	Empiricism, Scientific Method	Revelation / Inherited Wisdom
World view	Power Structures	Empirical Materialism	Idealism
Big Five personality traits	Agreeableness (Compassion)	Openness to Experience (Openness)	Conscientiousness (Orderliness)
Moral Foundation	Care	Liberty	Loyalty/Authority
Fairness view	Intergroup Equity	Individual Equality	Rules Enforced
Sacred Groups	Victim Groups	Experts	Authorities/Elders
Sacred Concepts	Social Justice	Civil Liberties/ Private Property	Tradition/ Structure
Phobia	Oikophobia	Tyrannophobia	Xenophobia
Vision of Nature	Unconstrained Constructivist	Constrained Spontaneous	Constrained Customary
Kling Language Axis	Oppressor-Oppressed	Liberty-Coercion	Civilization-Barbarism
Grid-Group Culture	Egalitarian	Individualist	Hierarchist
David Graeber's debt framework	Communism	Exchange	Hierarchy

Ideology Placement

As in the two-dimensional maps like the Political Compass, the differing ideologies can be put onto this map.

It should be noted that the placement of the different Teloi are intentional to reproduce the standard political spectrum. If the liberty telos is ignored and the ideologies are collapsed down to the authoritarian edge you recover the left/right political spectrum.

Non-Cartesian Spaces

The use of a Cartesian space has been the standard practice for mapping ideology but there is no clear reason why this topology is preferable.. The Three Telos Model is depicted as a 2-dimensional ternary plot where the three teloi Liberty, Equality, and Tradition must sum to a constant, K. Usually, this constant is represented as 1.0 or 100%. Because Liberty + Equality + Tradition = K for all people being graphed, any one variable is not independent of the others, so only two variables must be known to find a sample's point on the graph: for instance, Tradition must be equal to K − Liberty − Equality. Because the three numerical values cannot vary independently—there are only two degrees of freedom—it is possible to graph the combinations of all three variables in only two dimensions.

What is often called horseshoe theory claims that the extreme authoritarian economic left (Communism) is adjacent or close to extreme authoritarian economic right (neo-reactionism/fascism). This would imply a horse shaped political spectrum embedding in a 2D space. This concept has little to no academic traction but it does illustrate the problem which arises from a simple 1D political spectrum. National Socialism has had such an effect on modern politics that any explanatory model which fails to accommodate both the Nationalism and the Socialism is clearly lacking. The Three Telos Model does not encounter such an issue as there can be many types of authoritarianism (illiberalism) on the lower edge from Egalitarianism to Traditionalism.

Political philosophers have argued that a good political ideology must also incorporate constraints between different desires. For instance, from the liberal economic position, Milton Friedman advocated for the necessity of putting one of two desired values ahead of the other by stating "A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both". The implication of this being that both Equality and Freedom are desirable but they have fundamental incompatibilities. Constraints such as these can be expressed by changing the topology of the ideological space to make having full Equality and Freedom impossible in the model.

It may still be useful to represent political ideologies that violate the constraints and are practically untenable. Even if the ideology is in some way suboptimal or inherently self-contradictory, people may still hold it. It is unclear if the ultimate goal of such political maps is to chart the space of what people claim to believe or what is politically viable.

Historical Context

While this model is intended to be generic it does have different relevancy for different historical contexts. This is most relevant for the Telos of Tradition. To be tied to a particular tradition could imply that the type of tradition could be anything. In this context it does not mean that. The evolution of society came out of a specific developmental process. This model only makes sense in the political sphere from the 1700s onward and is particularly relevant to the West. To highlight this, it is not clear if a Maoist in China who did not want the move to a more free economy would be considered a traditionalist.

It is instructive to consider the interplay of the people in society over time. It can be somewhat simplified to think of the three extremes in terms of power groups; Liberal, Conservative and Leftist. Starting in the 1700s there were several emerging schools of thought which pushed for change against the Conservatives. The Liberal Tradition started with John Locke though liberty minded individuals clearly existed before this. The Leftist tradition started with Georg Hegel (or arguably Rousseau) and was particularly embraced by the Young Hegelians. Both traditions evolved, split and influenced each other all the time while the conservatives held back against this.

Typically the culture war is just between the two with the most power and the third is subordinate. In most electoral systems, Duverger's law helps to enforce this. In the West for most of the history the subordinate power was the Leftists and the cultural battle was between the Liberals and the Conservatives. The Liberals eventually won nearly all battles until the conservatives had ceded so much ground that the difference between a conservative and a classical liberal was virtually nothing. The last major battle between liberals and conservatives was that of the atheism movement in the 90s. This whole time it was the Liberals and the Leftists against the Conservatives. However, due to the close relationship Liberalism was influenced by Leftism giving rise to Social Liberalism. Hard Leftism was largely kept at bay in the West with the Cold War and McCarthyism but the ideological subversion of Liberalism was happening under the surface. In the 2000s with the Conservatives thoroughly beaten, the Leftists started to try to gain influence. With Liberalism as the dominant school of thought in the West and the Conservatives now working to support that status quo, the schism was now between liberalism and authoritarianism. There was a conservative push for change which led to Neoliberalism and a large rise in the power of the state. However by 2015 the Leftist ideology was the clear contender to liberalism and the conservatives were subordinate.

This narrative implies that the term "conservative" means something quite different in the modern context. Conservatives are people who are wary of change temperamentally so at all times they will resist the change. Given that the dominant culture in the West is currently Liberalism, a conservative could be somebody who wants to keep liberalism. While a progressive would be somebody who would want rapid change away from the status quo. All this implies that the terms of Tradition and conservative used for one of the Teloi may be better served by the term Hierarchist used in grid group cultural theory.

Furthermore to this, there is a large dependency on the dynamics. People with differing positions in the Three Telos Model will act differently depending on what the dominant ideology is, the rate of change and the direction of change relative to their position. For example the work of Karen Stenner has shown that Authoritarians (those low in the Telos of liberty) become much more authoritarian when there is social instability or their sacred values are threatened.

Balanced Approach

One interpretation of the model is that it is an argument for a balanced approach to politics where no single axiom is sufficient to derive a complete ideology. This implies that one can have too much and too little of any of the three.

Equity

Too Much Equity

• Khmer Rouge Regime (1975–1979): The Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, sought extreme social leveling in Cambodia. Intellectuals and perceived elites were targeted, contributing to the Cambodian genocide.
• Soviet Collectivization and Kulaks: During Soviet collectivization, land was forcibly seized from the kulaks, leading to famines such as the Holodomor. This was driven by an ideology aiming to eliminate class differences.

Too Little Equity

• Caste System in India: The caste system enforces strict social hierarchy, restricting equality in terms of education, economic opportunity, and social mobility
• Apartheid in South Africa (1948–1994): Under apartheid, rights and opportunities were systematically denied to the non-white population, creating stark racial inequities.

Freedom (Liberty)

Too Much Freedom

• The Wild West (19th century United States): In the American frontier, minimal government presence led to lawlessness and vigilantism, as formal institutions were slow to develop.
• Somali Civil War (from 1991): After the collapse of central authority, the Somali Civil War erupted, with rival factions operating largely unchecked, illustrating a near-complete absence of centralized governance

Too Little Freedom

• Oppression in Post-Revolution Iran (1979–present): Following the Iranian Revolution, strict social and political controls limited personal freedoms, with various groups experiencing heightened repression.
• Oppression under Communist Regimes (20th century): In many communist states, dissent was criminalized, and citizens faced severe curtailments of civil liberties, as seen with w:Gulag Soviet Gulags or censorship in Eastern Bloc nations.

Stability (Tradition)

Too Much Stability/Tradition

• Sakoku in Feudal Japan (1633–1853): The Sakoku isolation policy under the Tokugawa shogunate curtailed foreign influence. While preserving traditional social structures, it hindered modernization compared to Western nations.
• Qing Dynasty Isolationism (17th–19th centuries): The Qing Dynasty restricted foreign trade and contact, contributing to a delayed modernization process and vulnerability during the Opium Wars.

Too Little Stability/Tradition

• Residential Schools in Canada (19th–20th century): The Indian residential school system sought to forcibly assimilate Indigenous Peoples, disregarding their longstanding cultural traditions.
• Cultural Revolution in China (1966–1976): The Cultural Revolution targeted the “Four Olds” (old customs, culture, habits, and ideas), eroding social stability and disrupting centuries of tradition.
• Weimar Republic in Germany (1918–1933): Following the collapse of the German Empire, the swift transition to a republican system weakened traditional institutions. Weimar Germany experienced hyperinflation, political extremism, and social unrest—eventually paving the way for the rise of the Nazi regime.

Fourth Telos

Fatalism is frequently proposed as a natural fourth telos in extensions of the Three Telos Model, motivated by Grid-Group Cultural Theory (GGCT). However, it occupies a paradoxical position. While GGCT data are empirically robust, fatalism is not an affirmative, axiomatic telos like the original three.

The existing three teloi are positive ends toward which actors consciously direct effort, institutions, and rhetoric. Libertarians construct markets and exit options to maximize liberty; egalitarians dismantle hierarchies to maximize equity; traditionalists codify roles and rituals to maximize stability. Each produces affirmative myths and prescriptions about human nature and generates clear institutional signatures.

Fatalism, by contrast, holds that outcomes are fixed by forces beyond human control, rendering purposeful striving futile. The rational stance is therefore anti-teleological: resignation to inevitability, private defection, lowered expectations, and deliberate minimization of teleological investment. Its myth is negative, “nature is capricious; mastery rebounds”. Its prescriptions are likewise negative; do not organize, do not invest hope in reform, game the margins, endure the next arbitrary shock. Fatalism therefore functions as an anti-telos, the active prioritization of non-striving and the cessation of ends. It lacks an associated ideology or institutional platform but is instead a disengagement from ideology itself. Fatalists may still act politically through Machiavellian or realpolitik tactics, but they vote sporadically and organize never.

This framing preserves the model’s geometry for ideology since the original triangle remains the plane of active politics. Fatalism is the fourth vertex at which the coordinates of liberty, equality, and tradition all approach zero, collapsing the system into passive endurance. When fatalism rises, adherents do not simply redistribute among the three teloi. Instead they slide out of the plane, shrinking the active electorate. In crises this outward shift is especially visible.

Hybrids are naturally explained as attenuated rather than additive. A fatalism-inflected libertarianism is not “liberty plus fatalism” but a cynical, low-effort variant with a “markets are rigged so play the odds and skip utopia” mindset. The central region of the triangle is already assigned to populism which implies a populism and fatalism link. Marco Verweij links populist leadership directly to fatalism within the GGCT framework.

Political theory has not needed a fourth point because the model maps ideologies, which are inherently teleological. GGCT, however, reveals fatalism as the passive reservoir outside that plane, with ideological intensity remaining independent of any specific telos.

Tests

It is common to measure people's ideological placement in each type of model for the political landscape with a test. Here is an example for the Three Telos Model:

• Crystalvulpine's Implementation

See also

• https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%C3%B3jk%C4%85t_ideologiczny
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum#Three_Telos_Model
• https://grokipedia.com/page/Three_Telos_Model
• https://grokipedia.com/page/Political_trichotomy