This article seeks to contribute to the debate on the ethical and political meaning of the French Enlightenment, more specifically concerning the religious implications of the idea of popular sovereignty as it is put in place at the time of the French Revolution. The study of the social status of religion in two thoughts elaborated before and after the Revolution shows the clear opposition between Rousseau's “civil religion” with its perspective of a moral regeneration of man, and Tocqueville's “democratic religion” with its liberal perspective. But it also reveals the ambivalence they share in their attempt to think through the problem of the “common soul” of a society where legitimacy rests only on its self-institution.

The rash of conflict of interest incidents involving cabinet ministers in Canada in 1986, 1987 and early 1988 can in part be explained by the fact that no clear connection exists in most of the conflict of interest rules between the substance of the rules and basic constitutional principles. Unless ministers understand the reasons for the increasingly complex rules, a high degree of compliance with them is unrealistic. The article explores the connection between the rule of law, social equality, the principle of ministerial impartiality and conflict of interest legislation and guidelines. The conflict of interest rules have usually been drafted hastily in reaction to scandals, with little thought given to their constitutional basis. Thirty-five recent conflict of interest incidents are classified and analyzed. Many might have been avoided if the constitutional reasons for the rules had been better understood. Nevertheless, with regard to the overlap between conflicts of interest and political patronage, the Canadian political system has not developed a clear set of expectations for ministerial behaviour in all circumstances.

This article is a comparative case study of environmental regulation in Canada and the United States, focussing on one important area of environmental regulation, pesticides, and on the treatment of North America's most commercially important pesticide, alachlor. Alachlor is a clear case of policy divergence: Canadians have banned the substance while the US has decided to keep it on the market with minimal restrictions. Three major explanations for the divergence are explored: science, interest group politics, and legal and institutional arrangements. The article concludes that while different interpretations of the risks posed by alachlor contributed to the different decisions, they can only be explained with reference to the economic importance of alachlor and the need to maintain the legitimacy of current institutional arrangements. The concluding section outlines a framework for explaining similarities and differences in environmental, health and safety regulations across nations.

Studies of bloc voting in the United Nations have appeared periodically since the early 1960s. This article examines the evolution of UN voting in its first four decades using multidimensional scaling, which is compared to factor analysis and found to be superior for representation and interpretation. UN voting is important for showing how world politics is reflected in that body, hence the frequent use of UN votes as a dependent variable in the analysis of foreign policy behaviour.

The Nobel prizewinner F. A. Hayek has spent his long career defending classical liberalism and the free market from those wishing to introduce planning and greater “rationality” into social life. As this study tries to show, Hayek's defence of market liberalism is predicated on his theory of social knowledge and how liberal principles and processes are best suited to cope with our limited ability to utilize this knowledge. He argues that we can cope best with our ignorance by resisting the temptations to set up centralized decision-making mechanisms and by accepting the discovery procedure of the market mechanism. Unlike other attempts to defend classical liberalism, Hayek offers a radically new knowledge-based foundation. If Marx's work could be labelled an economically-based sociology, Hayek's work could be labelled an epistemologically-based politics. But is his epistemological defence simply an ideological move to defend against attacks levelled at capitalism, or has he provided an indisputable foundation to justify the maintenance of liberal orders?

This study examines perceptions of party competence in four issue areas: inflation, unemployment, international affairs and Canadian unity. Using Gallup poll data from a 35-year period, the study shows that in three of the four issue areas Canadians clearly distinguish between parties. These distinctions do not merely reflect party popularity and are durable rather than immutable; perceptions change slowly but do respond to government performance. Canadians see the greatest differences between parties with respect to international affairs and Canadian unity; the Liberals enjoy a substantial lead on these two questions. On inflation, perceived competence tends to reflect popularity while on unemployment, Canadians have greater confidence in the New Democratic party. On all issues, the Conservative party image has substantially improved under the Mulroney government.

In 1946, after visiting Russia, Harold Innis remarked that the time had come to broaden the range of political economy by studying, first, the struggle for social supremacy between states, churches and commerce; and, second, the related competition between languages, religions, cultures and communications media. This, I argue, is what Innis accomplished. His early studies of Canadian economic history transcended conventional economics and laid the groundwork for a later political theory of communications. It expressly took up the 1946 challenge to address competing monopolies of knowledge and power, hence manipulating the space and time-binding properties of communications media. Innis' work reflected a materialist model of communications, a social ecology, a soft determinism or philosophic naturalism and it linked knowledge, freedom and power. Finally, I conclude, these insights permitted Innis to transcend bias and to search for a balanced culture.