The traditional interpretation of Plato's Republic in the English-speaking world, expressed most sharply by Sir Karl Popper, was that it represented a serious proposal for political rule. However, Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom have argued that Plato's real concern was to protect the position of philosophy within the city. Influenced by Simone Weil, this article argues that even Strauss and Bloom do not express the extent of Plato's rejection of the political life. By examining Plato's handling of such themes as gold and nakedness, the article concludes that Plato's central concern in the Republic was to explore how a soul could strive for the Good, given that the human condition inescapably required social life.

Résumé. Cet article propose, grâce à la notion de culture stratégique, une articulation du lien entre identité et politique étrangère. Il met plus particulièrement l'accent sur les effets des identités ethnoculturelles (anglophone et francophone) sur la politique de sécurité internationale du Canada, et soutient l'hypothèse qu'il en résulte une culture stratégique atlantiste et biculturelle, laquelle accorde une importance particulière à la France (de même qu'à la Grande-Bretagne et aux États-Unis). Il ressort de l'analyse historique de celle-ci que la centralité des identités ethnoculturelles canadiennes permet de mieux comprendre l'importance particulière dont jouit la France sur les limites normatives du multilatéralisme et de la légitimité de recourir à la force militaire par le Canada.

Abstract. This article seeks to provide a constructivist account of Canadian foreign policy, linking identity and policy, through the concept of strategic culture. It focuses on Canada's dual ethnocultural identities (Anglophone and Francophone) and the bicultural and Atlanticist strategic culture that stems from it. It argues that this strategic culture helps explain France's significant importance (together with the United Kingdom and the United States) in defining the normative boundaries of Canada's multilateralism and legitimacy to use of military force abroad.

Résumé. À partir d'une recherche sur l'art engagé des artistes québécois en arts visuels, nous analysons ce que ce type particulier de contestation sociopolitique nous apprend sur les transformations qu'a subies l'engagement depuis la fin des années 1970. Nous explorons ainsi la représentation sociale de l'engagement dit passé ainsi que les caractéristiques actuelles des pratiques artisticopolitiques. Ce choix d'étudier l'engagement à partir d'une forme située hors du cadre strict de l'action usuelle, dans un espace ouvert (au sens où il ne correspond pas aux lieux, aux institutions et aux façons d'agir reconnus comme politiques), permet d'accéder à la diversité des configurations de l'engagement présent et aux déplacements et transgressions opérés quant à sa représentation plus classique.

Abstract. Based on research on the politically committed art of Québécois visual artists, we analyze what this particular form of socio-political contestation teaches us about the changes which political involvement has seen since the end of the 1970s. We explore the social representation of involvement said to be that of the past, as well as the characteristics of present day artistic-political practices. The choice made to study involvement from a perspective outside of the framework of usual political action, in an open space (open in the sense of lacking correspondence with the spaces, institutions and ways of acting usually recognized as political), opens on the diversity of current forms of involvement and on the changes and transgressions which have occurred with regard to the more classical social representation of involvement.

This article is about Indigenous territorial title and land rights, and specifically those of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Nation. In 1983, the Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn, residing in the province of Ontario, petitioned the Crown to recognize Algonquin territorial title and rights to 36,000 square kilometres of their natal homelands in the Ottawa River watershed. With negotiations beginning in the early 1990s, an Agreement-in-Principle was developed and ratified in 2016, the penultimate step to the largest modern treaty in Ontario's history. In this article, we examine the argument for moral rights to territory, not in terms of the Canadian or international legal order, nor even through examining the documents and voice of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg, but through the lens of an argument that has been advanced as the basis of the international territorial rights of states. We argue that the justifications for state rights territory—grounded in the considerations that ensue from an analysis of occupancy groups—provides a stronger claim to territorial jurisdiction and title in the case of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Nation than the competing claim by the Canadian state.

This paper critiques the deployment of the term “identity politics” in Canadian political science. Through a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of research articles in leading English language academic journals in the Canadian social sciences, we examine whose politics are labelled identity politics and what intellectual work transpires through this label. Identity politics tends to be applied to scholarship that foregrounds analyses of ethnicity, race and gender, but with a lack of analytical rigour, indicating a degree of conceptual looseness. Moreover, the designation identity politics is not neutral; it is often mobilized as a rhetorical device to distance authors from scholarship that foregrounds analyses of ethnicity, race and gender, and to inscribe a materialist/culturalist divide in claims-making. We argue that the effect of this demarcation of identity from politics is to control the boundaries of political discourse, limiting who and what gains entry into the political. This serves to reassert an exclusionary conception of Canadian identity.

The liberal justification for censorship equates the harm in hate speech with the sort of tangible injury that would justify state intervention under J.S. Mill's harm principle. Recently, Jeremy Waldron has suggested that the real harm perpetuated by hate speech is less tangible, taking it to be a variety of moral pollution which undermines both the public good of inclusiveness and the minority's assurance of personal dignity. This paper scrutinizes Waldron's conception of the harm in hate speech, arguing that it lacks the specificity and gravity Mill's principle requires in order to justify censorship. The paper also questions the categorical distinction between hate speech and speech that is “merely offensive,” arguing that Waldron's reasons for censoring the one also apply to the other. The result is a censorship regime that liberals ought not to accept.

Cabinet committees are important sites of executive politics in Canada. This article examines the extent to which two representational attributes—gender and region—determine influence, as a function of cabinet committee structure. Employing a dataset of ministers under the three most recent prime ministers, I find that female ministers are less likely than male ministers to be influential in terms of connections to other ministers, to belong to the core of most influential ministers and to be represented on the most powerful committees or chairing committees. However, there is evidence of improvement over time. While regional representation is an imperative in cabinet making for Canadian prime ministers, its role in determining ministerial influence within committees is not evident: ministers from less-represented regions are no more likely to be influential than other ministers. This analysis highlights a neglected but central arena for social representation in Canadian government.

This article analyzes the effect of procedural rule change on the dynamics of parliamentary speeches in the Canadian House of Commons between 1901 and 2015. During this period, several new rules were introduced to reduce the opportunities for private members to speak during the debates so that the government could get its business done within an acceptable amount of time. Our analysis looks at the impact of these rule changes on the content and orientation of all individual speeches made by members of Parliament. The results indicate that parliamentary rules had an important effect on the topic and duration of debates. Our findings also confirm that procedural changes contributed to a heightening of partisan polarization in the Canadian Parliament over time and disproportionately reduced the influence of government backbenchers in the legislative process.

In the 2014 reference, the Supreme Court sought to discover the Senate's “essential nature” in order to determine what reforms parliament could legislate unilaterally. Making use of a classification model found in comparative and historical studies, the Court concluded that the Senate was a “complementary legislative body of sober second thought.” This article re-examines the Court's narrow definition of the Senate's perceived role and presents evidence that its essential characteristics are direct continuations of various pre-Confederation design principles. Limiting a description of its architecture to a single model that eclipses all other roles the Senate may play shifts the debate on Senate reform, which in the recent past has laid emphasis on resolving the conflict among the models embedded in the upper chamber's essential characteristics. The article concludes by reviewing previous constitutional initiatives that aimed at bringing those models more in tune with modern Canada and by making suggestions about how reform proposals could better succeed.

Canada and/in the World is a broad topic that has produced a wide range of diverse publications in the twenty-first century, not only in political science but also in history and other neighbouring disciplines. What they all share is an interest in investigating how Canada, either as a state, a polity, a society, a culture or an idea, intersects with and is part of the international. Yet, along this spectrum we find literature spanning from problem-solving to critical—to use Robert Cox's distinction (1986)—as well as from heavily empirical and policy relevant to theoretically informed. Some works aim to explain, some to facilitate understanding and others to challenge and deconstruct. Thus, while there might be a traditional core of positivist writing centring on liberal internationalism and to a lesser extent (neo)realism, which some claim can be condensed into a list of “the ten most important books on Canadian foreign policy” (Kirton, 2009), there are also strong critical voices that challenge core assumptions about how we conceptualize and examine Canada and/in the world.

From an early date Canada has been on an export basis in respect of dairy products considered as a group. From Confederation until the early years of the present century, expansion of production was to a large extent dependent upon the expansion of export markets. The extent of this dependence is indicated by the figures showing the exports of cheese and butter which, in the period in question, were the only dairy products exported. In the case of cheese, exports mounted steadily from 6,141,570 pounds in 1868 to the high point of 233,980,716 pounds in 1904. As for butter the amount exported, while somewhat irregular, was on the whole very considerable and in the later years of the period became extremely large. In 1868 exports of butter amounted to 10,649,733 pounds, whereas in each of the two high years, 1903 and 1906, they exceeded 34 million pounds. Since the latest years mentioned above, however, exports of both cheese and butter have tended decidedly downward. From the high point reached in 1904, cheese exports have fallen until for the year ending March 31, 1935, they were only 60,213,000 pounds. The amount of butter exported has varied widely but in only three different years since 1906 have exports exceeded 20 million pounds and in most years they have been well under 10 million pounds. In several years they have been from one to two million pounds and in the year ended March 31 last they fell to the record low level of 446,600 pounds.

It is, perhaps, at least partly an unfortunate consequence of the pressure for brevity in the formulation of titles that Professor Knight begins his critical discussion of my article with the statement that though it “in terms of bulk consists of sound and valuable insights” it is “utterly misleading with respect to the main question at issue.” It may be permissible to suggest that for Professor Knight and myself the main questions at issue are not identical, as so often happens in intellectual discussion. To help clarify the question I shall attempt to state more explicitly than was done in the article itself what it was designed to accomplish.

The aim of this tentative outline was overwhelmingly positive rather than critical. It contained, in the introductory paragraphs, only sufficient statement of the historical and interdisciplinary aspects of the problem of “self-interest” to give a very broad orientation to the setting of the problem. The bulk of the article, which it may be hoped includes at least partly the “sound and valuable insights” of which Professor Kjiight speaks, was devoted to the outlining of what seems to the author, in the light of the present state of development both of economic and of sociological theory, to be the closest attainable approach, in such broad outline, to a satisfactorily usable account of the subject.

The time is, I think, opportune for introspection by Canadian social scientists. The present is a transitional period in the life of the nation. Five years of war have profoundly altered Canadian society: Canada has become a great industrial nation; the paternalistic state has arrived at least at adolescence under the stimulus of war; for the time being the Canadian people have become military-minded, a condition which may well continue into the peace in view of the shift of world power in favour of North America; everywhere social values hitherto accepted are under fire, and traditional folkways have been rudely disturbed; new social goals are being raised and new patterns of life are being established.

It is probable also that we are in a transitional stage in higher education. At any rate Canadian universities, like other social institutions, will be compelled to adjust themselves to the changed conditions of the post-war world. One condition likely to obtain is an increasing interest in the social sciences, if for no other reason than the increasing demand for social technicians to manage a paternalistic society. It is not improbable also that Canadian society faces a prolonged and acrimonious, if not violent, debate on social objectives. Under these conditions I suggest it is of first importance that social scientists should have firm opinions as to the nature of their calling, both with 'a view to guiding educational expansion, and assisting them in deciding their personal responsibilities in a distracted world.