Conservatives on the ‘right’ will say “Statecraft as soulcraft,” by which they mean that a function of government is to shape or instill moral virtue in its citizens so that they will live according to the government’s laws.[1] Note the parallel with the ‘left.’ Here is one of the original ‘left’ activists, St-Just:
“The legislator commands the future. It is his role to desire good and to perpetuate it; it is his role to make men what he wishes them to be.”[2]
Louis Antoine St-Just was a disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and a leading member of the Jacobins, i.e., those who carried out the Reign of Terror during the third phase of the French Revolution.
These versions of ‘left’ and ‘right’ both deny the individual’s responsibility for making one’s own character and deciding one’s own actions. Both want to control not only an individual’s bodily actions but to get ‘inside’ to the individual’s thoughts and feelings and to mold and control those too.
Sources: [1] E.g., the early George Will used that phrase in his Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does, Simon & Schuster, 1983. Will later left conservatism and became more libertarian. [2] Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, “Discours sur l’acte constitutionnel” (April 24, 1793), in Chef d’oeuvres de l’eloquence parlementaire, ed. Camille Lacroix, Paris, 1893, 2:160).
Related: This overview excerpt on Rousseau’s philosophy, from Chapter 4 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.