The Nolan Chart is a political view assessment diagram created by David Nolan in 1969. The chart divides human political opinions 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.
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 traces 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.
Nolan is both a surname and a given name, of Irish origin from Ó Nualláin, with alternate spellings including Nolen, Noland, Nolin, and Nalon. Notable people with the name include:
Surname:
Nolan is a surname and a given name.
Nolan may also refer to: