In 1945 Professor K. R. Popper published a work on political theory called The Open Society and Its Enemies. It extols the “open” as against the “closed” society and criticizes those thinkers who have supposedly advocated the closed society. The first volume is concerned with criticizing Plato, whom Popper believes to be the chief totalitarian theorist of the ancient world; the second volume with the criticism of Hegel and Marx as the chief totalitarian theorists of modern Europe. This article sets out to refute what Popper says about Plato. Space forbids a defence of Hegel, although such a defence would be valuable these days when some men choose a few political sentences from Hegel, detach them from his central philosophic position, and put him in the same category as Marx. Nevertheless, Plato is a greater genius even than Hegel, so that the refutation of Popper's position can rest on what he says about the greatest of philosophers.

Such a defence is incumbent on a philosopher in these days, when no adequate understanding of Plato can be assumed. Indeed in North America, where the fides implictta of the social scientists has been empirical and pragmatic, Popper's thesis is liable to convince; for it is in essence a justification of that pragmatic tradition against the rationalism of Plato. Men who want to believe that there is such a thing as an independent “social science” can find in Popper reasons for doing so.

I have interpreted the rather facetious title given me by the programme committee as permission to speak rather light-heartedly, even irresponsibly, about a few of the changes in the formal methods of analysis in the field of economic theory; to speak of fashions in tools, fashions in gadgets, fashions, if you will forgive me, in models.

In the 1920's Professor J. M. Clark supported the thesis that economic theory has developed by replacing worn and outgrown half-truths by new half-truths, that correspond more closely with increased knowledge, changing points of view, and different circumstances. Sir Dennis Robertson reviewed the first volume of the Survey of Contemporary Economics, called his review “A Revolutionist's Handbook,” and enumerated seven revolutions; but his phrasing is ironical. In his posthumous work on the History of Economic Analysis Professor Schumpeter has contended, with some success I think, that advances in economic analysis have been more consistent and less fluctuating than changes in the field of economic doctrine, economic systems, or economic thought. Fashions change, then, even in the methods of economic theory, but there is a good deal of continuity too. Many of the most widely useful tools of economic theory have changed very little in the last generation, or even in the last century; some have been in use for many centuries. Nevertheless, there have been many important changes too. Periodically, as attention comes to be focussed on a particular sort of problem, old tools are repaired, polished up, and put in the shop window; or new ones are invented.

The present Italian Constitution may be said to have its origin in the adoption of the republican form of government by the referendum held in June, 1946. Its basic features are embodied in the Charter constructed by the Constitutional Assembly then elected and are designed to establish a firm foundation for the organization and life of the Italian state as well as of its citizens. The Constitution is the true expression of the popular will since exponents of the various political creeds co-operated in framing the fundamental laws and practices that are to govern the operation of the Italian state, independently of political fluctuations. Its preservation is entrusted not to the citizens or to their representatives but to the Constitutional Court which it provides for.

In the new Constitution, Italy remains a unitary state. However, the structure of the state has undergone a change since the nineteen regions, which under the monarchy were only geographical divisions, have now been given constitutional autonomy in local matters. Thus within the state we now find the following territorial subdivisions: the regions, the provinces, and the communes.

The autonomy of the regions is local in the sense that their jurisdiction does not extend beyond their respective boundaries and is confined to the promotion of local interests. Their legislative function is restricted by the Constitution (article 117) to matters such as the boundaries of the communes, local urban and rural police, public fairs and markets, public welfare agencies, medical aid and hospitalization, trade schools and other special schools, provisions for school aid, local museums and libraries, tourist trade, public means of transportation such as street cars and bus lines, public works of regional interest such as the improvement of lake ports, highways, roads, and aqueducts. The regions are required to make provisions for securing obedience to state laws. The Italian state can assign other administrative functions to the regions. All matters of general interest, such as those which relate to the administration of justice, to the relations of citizens to the Italian state, and to administrative functions of a general character, fall within the province of the Italian state legislature.

The proportion of an industry's output concentrated in a few large firms is recognized by economists as an important characteristic of industrial structure. Economic analysis agrees with the layman's judgment that high concentration is a major factor making for monopolistic practices, and there is ample confirmation in the record of antitrust investigations.

The degree of concentration is of course not by any means the only determinant of market behaviour. In the absence of collusion or government regulation, however, high concentration is a necessary condition for monopolistic practices, while low concentration is a necessary condition for the type of competition that tends to equate price and marginal costs. Moreover, with low concentration informal collusion is unlikely and the organization of formal collusion (for example, through a trade association) becomes difficult. Government regulation is frequently the result of political pressures the strength of which reflects either high concentration or close association of the business interests involved.

It is therefore important to investigate the degree of concentration and its causes. This paper presents a comparison of concentration in the manufacturing industries of Canada and the United States. We find, first, that most industries are more concentrated in Canada than in the United States. This can be ascribed to the fact that industries are typically much smaller in Canada, while firms are of about the same size as in the United States. Secondly, we find that industries with relatively high concentration in one country also tend to have relatively high concentration in the other, though the correlation coefficient is only about 0.7. It appears that cultural and technical similarities make for similar industry-size patterns in the two countries, while the technical similarities mean, further, that industries with a relatively large average size of firm in one country also have relatively large firms in the other.

The purpose of this article is neither to consider the formal provisions of the Monopolies and Restrictive Practices Acts, 1948 and 1953, nor to outline the findings of the Commission set up under the 1948 Act. These have been dealt with elsewhere. Our more limited purpose is to examine the operation of the 1948 Act and the efficiency of the machinery set up in the light of a recent report of the Select Committee on the Estimates. The function of this Committee is to investigate items in the Government estimates for expenditure to see whether public funds are being properly and economically applied to the purposes for which they are voted. The Committee therefore does not question the policy laid down by Parliament. On the other hand, in questioning whether the Commission and the Government departments concerned are making the best use of the funds available in accordance with the provisions and intentions of the Act, the report and the minutes of evidence allow us to judge whether the Act, as it stands, provides an adequate basis for inquiry into and the control of monopolistic practices.

At the outset it should be borne in mind that there are important differences between the British legislation and that of the United States and Canada. Both North American countries have legislation which forbids specific practices and creates offences under the criminal law. The British legislation does neither. There is a commission which investigates industries referred to it by the President of the Board of Trade and makes its report upon these industries to him. Following a report by the Monopolies Commission that certain practices are contrary to the public interest the President of the Board of Trade or the minister in charge of certain other Government departments may make an order forbidding the practices in that industry only.

Nowadays we are often and quite rightly reminded of the price of liberty. But eternal vigilance is the price paid for maintaining liberty, not the cost of production. To build up and establish a tradition of political freedom demands more heroic qualities: inner conviction, selfless devotion, and a willingness to risk everything for the worth and dignity of the individual. The histories of Switzerland, Holland, Britain, and the United States record the cost of our inherited privileges.

Germany has no tradition of political freedom. It is not that Germans have lacked heroism. They have played a great part in the struggle for religious liberty. They have been only too willing to die for their country's greatness. But the facts of geography and the course steered by their leading statesmen have diverted their attention from the advantages of political liberty.

German liberals missed their last great chance as far back as 1848. The most remarkable and sinister of all Bismarck's feats was the way in which, by sheer force of achievement, he won over many of the leading German intellects to unrestrained nationalism. Readers of Treitschke's Deutsche Geschichte often find it difficult to believe that the historian was ever an ardent liberal. After the foundation of the German Empire of 1871, as Dr. Adenauer put it recently, “a nationalism founded upon might gradually replaced the ethical idea of national freedom.” The Imperial Constitution provided for a bicameral parliament and introduced manhood suffrage. But the Chancellor was nominated by the Emperor and was not responsible to parliament. Furthermore the Constitution was so devised that no laws could in practice be passed without the Chancellor's approval. In the words of Liebknecht, the German Socialist, the Reichstag turned out to be little more than a “fig-leaf’ to cover the nakedness of autocracy.

Until recently, except in the relatively limited field of industrial production, no measure, in volume terms, of the over-all output of the Canadian economy was available. The estimates of Gross National Product had been published only in current dollars. The release, since 1950, of Gross National Expenditure in constant dollars, and especially the historical series from 1926 to 1950 published early last year, provided economists, statisticians, and the business community in general with an analytical tool of unusual relevance and value.

In recent years, because of violent changes in prices, unadjusted value series, used in isolation, have become increasingly inadequate as indicators of economic trends. Of necessity, interest has shifted to measures of volume. For some purposes, as in studies of productivity and real growth of the economy, constant dollar series provide at least an over-all framework and some generalized magnitudes. I will attempt to describe in this paper the work now being done at the Dominion Bureau of Statistics in the field of real output. The discussion of scope, principles, methods, and problems of the projects involved is preceded by a short summary of the history and background of the work.

Lottery tickets have been bought and sold in many countries for several centuries. There are many discussions of the historical social customs attending lotteries; the psychological, gambling, and fraudulent aspects of lotteries; the moral issues involved in the state licensing of lotteries; the lottery as a source of government revenue; and the mechanics of drawing. Economists have generally neglected to study the historical significance of lotteries. Friedman and Savage have suggested that the lottery may be a fruitful source of historical economic data; more recently, Aitken examined in some detail a large lottery firm which operated in the United States between 1821 and 1834. The purpose of this paper is to set down systematically quantitative measures of two essential lottery features: the inequality of the prize distribution and the actuarial value of the gamble. Some interesting historical comparisons can be made, and some hypotheses are suggested by the data which might be the subject of further research.

The lotteries of this study are restricted to those with cash prizes to lend some uniformity to the lottery terms and, from the consumer's point of view, to make all alternatives money incomes. The selection of the sample can best be described by giving a short history of English and United States lotteries.

The political and administrative Control of the Canadian military forces by the Government of Canada during the First World War, 1914–19, presented several novel problems to the Canadian system of cabinet government. A detailed examination of the relations between the Government of the Dominion (a clean word in 1916), as represented by the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, and the military organization overseas, as represented by its chief staff officers, is useful to students of both cabinet government and public administration. This paper seeks to throw light on two facets of these political-military relations: first, the problem of making cabinet control effective over an army physically separated from Canada by geographical distance and relatively primitive communications; second, that of the extent to which effective political control over an army establishment beyond her borders enhanced the de facto meaning of dominion status.

In 1919 dominion status did not mean quite what it had come to mean in 1931. On the whole the control over high matters of war and peace lay beyond the powers of the Government of Canada. The British North America Act, 1867, had not foreseen the possibility that the advisors of the Governor General should assume control over the conduct of a great war. Even if it had been appropriate for Sir Robert Borden or his colleagues to direct policy in war, Parliament appeared to lack the power to legislate beyond the shores of Canada. When, after two years of war, Canada had placed a substantial army overseas, it became necessary to alter constitutional practice to fit the new facts produced by the war. This effort was considerably to modify the meaning of dominion status.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse and evaluate Canadian post-war monetary policy, in the light of the recurring inflationary pressures to which the economy was subjected. In the evaluation of past events, even the least perceptive critic possesses two great advantages, that is, published statistical data and the revelations of hindsight. When rightly used, hindsight is a valuable guide, but the critic must be careful to distinguish two significant questions: (1) In the light of the relevant contemporary circumstances, what alternatives were available to policy-makers at the time decisions were made? (2) What were the merits or demerits of the policies adopted, when viewed in the light of subsequent events, that is, given the same problem again, would different policies be adopted?

Any analysis, to be useful, must guard against oversimplification and unrealistic abstraction, and it is therefore impossible to evaluate Canadian postwar monetary experience fairly unless the analysis moves beyond the consideration of primarily domestic influences to an adequate recognition of the economic difficulties posed by violent shifts in our balance of payments. The following criticism of specific aspects of Canadian policy does not imply any over-all condemnation, for although we may deplore the damage which inflation has wrought, it must be admitted that its post-war development in this country has been relatively moderate, despite the substantial limitations imposed upon Canadian monetary policy by our open economy.

Conservation is a word which occurs more and more frequently in politics. The “conservation of natural resources” appears both in the government accounts and in election speeches as a phrase which covers public spending on forests, waters, minerals, and fisheries, regardless of the ultimate purpose of that expenditure. Payments to American farmers, which enable them to achieve higher output and receive larger incomes, are blithely described as “conservation” without reference to whether or not the transaction has increased the nation's stock of natural resources.

Conservation is a field of study for many of the sciences. Originally, I think I may say, the child of the forestry profession (indeed in the United States the profession of forestry might almost be described as the child of the conservation movement), it has received increasing attention from many other fields. In the 1920's, conservation of oil resources became the slogan of the petroleum companies, swamped by new discoveries. They lost interest when demand increased relative to the newly controlled supply. In the 1930's, low demand for farm output, grave drought conditions, and allegedly increasing soil erosion made “conservation” a good cry for those who would give aid to agriculture. During the last war, farm specialists pushing soil conservation continued to hold the stage, but since then the public has heard increasingly from scientists and business men connected with fisheries, petroleum, water power, forestry, and even minerals. The current approach is to discuss the interrelation of the use of all the natural resources and to stress the necessity of conserving such resources simultaneously.

The Nova Scotian party system was both a product of the struggle for responsible government and a major instrument in determining its outcome. While issues of some magnitude occasionally agitated the House of Assembly prior to 1835, none possessed such a character as to permit a clear-cut and continuing division of its members. In fact, whether the differences of those days were between Loyalist and pre-Loyalist, or between country and town, they usually sprang from no more than the struggle for personal advantage, and great public questions were lost sight of or did not arise. Up to the end of the Napoleonic wars Halifax had lived largely off the expenditures made by the British government. Hence before this flow of easy money dried up there was in Nova Scotia poor ground for the growth of a party in opposition to the oligarchy in which ecclesiastical, commercial, and political power was concentrated. Even when the first attacks upon this clique commenced in the 1820's, they were led for the most part by men of Tory sympathies who, while they felt free to make an occasional display of independence on specific constitutional issues, never carried it to the point where they might be labelled as confirmed critics of government.

Varied programmes of research are now commonplace in, or in connection with, the military establishments of most of the larger countries of the world. In the United States, and to some extent in Canada, this is true also of the social sciences. The institutional setting of research is of peculiar interest to sociologists, particularly since rapid and extensive changes have recently been characteristic of military organizations. The main concern of this paper is, therefore, to describe and interpret some of the processes of change observed in the course of the work of the Defence Scientific Service with the Canadian Army during the past five years. A brief introduction notes the recent growth of the Army, the involvement in military affairs of large numbers of scientists, including some social scientists, and suggests the importance of the military as an area for the sociological study of work.