In trying to come to terms with the nature of the modern state, we can gain much by going back to political theory. What images or paradigms of the state do we find in the works of the great theorists and philosophers? How might we classify them, the better to see the choices that we ourselves, in the late twentieth century, may face?

At the risk of over-simplification, I would like to suggest a five-fold typology of political theories of the state: (1) aristocratic, (2) republican, (3) the philosophy of order, (4) liberal, and (5) democratic. These do not necessarily...

In this chapter, I wish to examine ideological features of the state tradition in Canada. For many decades, Canadian social scientists and historians, in contrasting Canadian with American development, have emphasized the significantly stronger state tradition on this side of the border. A number, moreover, have associated this with the more conservative set of values that characterized Canada and with the organic Toryism that found its way into our political culture: “Man and his society are organic formations which have birth, growth and decay ... The good of the individual is not conceivable apart for the good of the whole,...

Concepts and terms are not the property solely of theorists and philosophers. As the currency of political debate, they enter into the direct practice of a society and shape the way in which both rulers and citizens see themselves. Thus, in Greece and Rome terms likepolis, res publica,andcivitashad a resonance that went well beyond the closed circles of political philosophy. They were, if writers as varied as Fustel de Coulanges, Victor Ehrenberg, and Claude Nicolet are to be believed, an intimate part of the daily lives of citizens: “Ce que les Latins appellentres publica, les...

Canadians are not in the habit of looking to Montesquieu for an understanding of their political institutions. They tend not to be theoretical in their approach to politics, which sets them off from the populations of Europe and even from the intellectual practice of various New World societies, including the United States and much of Latin America. Lacking a revolutionary tradition, and wedded for the larger part of their history to a neo-colonial outlook, which, on the English-Canadian side, made them tributaries, intellectually speaking, first of Great Britain, then of the United States, Canadians have given a much more modest...

In this chapter I set out to explore two widely diverging notions of sovereignty, one rooted in the power of King/Queen-in-Parliament, the other more directly in the people. The first, which derives from British constitutional practice, has tended to predominate in Canada and has looked to elected politicians and appointed ministries as the ultimate repositories of power and legitimacy. To be sure, the power, at least of elected politicians, is ultimately traced back to some version of popular sanction through periodic election. But once elected, members have a mandate that is beyond reproach and a power of decision-making, be it...

In the late 1960s, a British political scientist observed: “The concept of state is not much in vogue in the social sciences right now.”¹ This was less true for continental Europe, where concepts such as état and Staat have roots going back over centuries than for the Englishspeaking world, where the termstatehas seldom enjoyed a good press, but Nettl’s point was none the less well taken. The year 1968 - the high point of student protests and challenges to established state systems East and West - was not a propitious time for theorists of the state. Two decades...

Over the past decade there has been a remarkable increase in social science literature in the West dealing with the state. In part, this reflects one of those epochal shifts in conceptual priorities that seem to mark now a generation concerned with system equilibrium or behavioural constraints (the late 1940s and the 1950s), now another concerned with social justice or ethnic/national liberation (the 1960s), and now one concerned with economic retrenchment and crisis management (the 1970s and early 1980s). In part, the literature reflects a search for organizing tools in the social sciences, especially on the part of political scientists...

In Canada, as in other Western societies, there has been enormous expansion in the role of the state over the past century. How can we best interpret this, bearing in mind the pattern of state expansion observed elsewhere?

Various approaches and interpretations of the growth of the Canadian state have been put forward. These range from largely statistical accounts of the growth of state expenditure in relationship to gross national product (influenced by Adolf Wagner and his “law of increasing state expenditure”)¹ to more neo-conservative versions of the same, bemoaning the Leviathan-like character state activity has assumed.² They would include...

The question of Canada’s position within the capitalist world economy has been the subject of much discussion among political economists over the past two decades. There are some who have argued Canadian dependency vis-à-vis metropolitan powers like Great Britain and the United States, in the process suggesting significant parallels between Canada’s position, with a truncated industrial sector and significant foreign ownership, and that of the Latin American countries. ¹ Others have stressed the First-World character of Canada’s financial, manufacturing, and income structures, thereby playing down the role of outside capital and powers in Canadian development.² And there are many intermediate...

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the rather different roles played by state and nation in the development of English Canada and of Quebec. My argument, in a nutshell, is that on the English-Canadian side one began with a state structure, that of 1867, with which in turn the concept of nation would come to be intimately associated. On the French-Canadian side, however, the sense of nationhood preceded 1867, so that only with the greatest difficulty would it come to be associated with the institutions of a federal state within which French Canadians constituted a permanent minority.

My...

Socialists, historically, have not been supporters of federalism. As a modern political idea, federalism is linked closely to the bourgeois political institutions that developed in Holland, Switzerland, and the United States from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, spreading thereafter to the far-flung corners of the globe. True, nineteenthcentury anarchists like Proudhon and Bakunin were strong advocates of federalism, while even Marx had favourable things to say about it inThe Civil War in France. The tenor of socialist and Marxist thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, was strongly centralizing and ensured at best reluctant toleration...

Let me begin by outlining the dilemma facing the three principal variants of twentieth-century left-wing thought with regard to the concepts of democracy, socialism, and the state.

Social democracy, it can be argued, has a theory of democracy - liberal democracy - and a theory of the state - the interventionist welfare state - but can it really be said to have a theory of socialism? Surely not, unless one means by this term little more than the mixed economies, predominantly privately owned, though state-influenced, that characterize the OECD economies, i.e. the Western industrialized states.

Marxism-Leninism, in contrast, has a...