Herbert Marcuse owes his notoriety primarily to the loud echoes evoked by his words among American and European student militants; he is in danger of becoming their first victim as is the wont of fashionable men and ideas.

But the real interest of his intellectual approach lies elsewhere, in his unceasing and relentless efforts to criticize advanced industrial societies which he judges to be repressive; to explain the mechanisms through which this repression is internalized, thus blocking any perspective allowing for radical change; and to found a new type of industrial society, compatible with, and favourable to, the “liberation” of man.

This paper retraces the main lines of this intellectual development, stressing particularly its philosophical foundations and its innovations with respect to the sources from which it is derived.

After specifying the meanings to be attributed to the analysis of government policies, the author examines in this article the relationships which must exist between the analysis of policies and the analysis of values. Inspired by the works of Rein and Vickers, he concludes that the analysis of policies and of government programmes must necessarily take into account the relationship between the values which underly the collective choices, the instruments reserved for insuring the implementation of these and, finally, the results of applying these instruments. Discussing the particular combination of the decision theories, the author concludes that the policy analyst must consider the rationality of the actor or of the decision-maker within the framework of the steps that the latter takes in order to make choices or reach decisions.

The import of social choice theory lies in its examination of the various choice rules available for the recording and weighing of preferences in an election and the consequences of those rules for democratic political life. A choice rule is a method for aggregating individual preferences into a collective determination. Choice rules vary in their capacities to maximize (and minimize) various values desired in a system of decision-making. They also vary in their capacities to reveal information about preferences.

The political use of political science

Political scientists claim for science and for themselves, as scholars, a maximum of independence in their dealings with government and Parliament. At the same time, science finds itself so inextricably bound up with the actual political process that it has become an “establishment” as strong and formidable as religion was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Liberal political scientists put themselves into a contradictory position when they demand for themselves, in the pursuit of their task as scholars, a political status which would protect them from the scrutiny of the elected representatives of the people, a condition which, they would refuse to grant to any other social group, and yet simultaneously in their teaching and writing set themselves up as the ardent defenders of representative and responsible democracy. What must one sacrifice, science or democratic responsibility? Is it necessary to aim at excluding science from the democratic process, at the risk of seeing our society regress towards a pre-industrial age, or should one regard representative and responsible democracy as relevant to questions of minor importance while significant issues which concern the present and future of society are to be dealt with by other political methods?

“Group Government” was the principle of political organization put forward by Henry Wise Wood, president of the United Farmers of Alberta, 1915-31, at the time that body entered politics in 1919. By the phrase, Mr. Wood meant that political organization should be on an occupational, or functional, basis and that political action by economic groups should replace political parties. As such, the idea had affinities with the doctrines of pluralism and even corporativism. When applied to representative and parliamentary institutions, however, it raised those constitutional issues which are common to multi-party and coalition government. Fundamentally, that is, it came into collision with the principle of cabinet unity. Group government, however, encountered an immediate constitutional problem in the prevalent form of the domination of the legislature by the cabinet, and to this aspect of the matter, the present paper is addressed.

The farmer's movement which followed the slackening of the wheat boom of the first decade of this century was, in its political aspect, a revolt against the party system. The ground for this revolt was that the parties were controlled, it was alleged, not by the rank and file of the voters, but by the party organization, the professional politicians. This small group was in turn said to be controlled by the “interests,” upon whom the parties were dependent for funds. It followed that the parties existed to serve, not the people, but the “interests”; it also followed that there was no difference between the two traditional parties. Hence the need for a people's nonpartisan organization, which would sweep away the old parties, curb the “interests,” and make the will of the people effective. The validity of this analysis need not be examined here; the effect of these beliefs is what concerns us.

The mishandled problem of reparations and inter-Allied war debts looms large in customary analyses of the wreckage of the European peace settlement after World War I. The seminal source of trouble then was the insatiable appetite of the Versailles victors for “spoils,” joined by the Shylock American insistence on repayment of war debts.

After World War II the war debt problem was gently erased, but reparations proved even more troublesome. Although those powers which a generation before had moulded the Versailles Treaty were, under American leadership, comparatively tame in their reparations demands, the Soviets were not. This is readily understandable, since the German armies spent their destructive fury on Eastern and not on Western lands. The Soviet loss of life and resources in repelling German armies from the heart of Russia was truly colossal. The war wiped out hard-won advances (factories, inventories, power plants, residences, tractors) achieved since 1917 under lash and by dint of incredible austerity.1 The Soviet economy was planned and, with its insistent commodity needs, could absorb immense quantities of manufactured goods. Despite bomb-smashed German city centres and residences, German manpower remained, as well as powerful industrial facilities which operated up to the closing months of the war. Any trained observer would expect the Soviets to demand maximum one-time drainage and continuing arrangements whereby some German industrial facilities would be worked by some German labour to produce goods and services for Eastern benefit. This was precisely the policy later carried out within the Soviet Zone of Germany which, if it was not “milked dry,” was converted into a massive pumping station for current product reparations.2 A less self-regarding Soviet policy toward the leading “ex-enemy” country would have been astonishing in view of the substantive drainage from “liberated” satellite areas.

The year 1948 goes down in the history of Canadian politics as the year of national party conventions. Meeting at Ottawa, both the Liberals and the Conservatives used national party conventions to select new national leaders, to revitalize their national party organizations, and to revamp their party platforms. The C.C.F., meeting in Winnipeg, although not in the throes of change of party leadership, likewise used a national convention as a vehicle for discussion of organization and platform problems. That the questions of leadership, organization, and platform are properly subjects for deliberation by representative assemblies of party stalwarts is today unquestioned in Canada.

Yet, so far as the Liberal and Conservative parties are concerned, acceptance of the convention procedure for consideration of important party matters is based upon limited experience. While national party conclaves have not been uncommon, national party “conventions” especially designed to include delegates selected by and representing the individual federal ridings have been infrequent. Actually, the first truly representative national convention after confederation was that of the Liberal party in 1893.1 In 1919, Mackenzie King was selected as leader of the party at another great convention2 and it was not until 1948 that the Liberals met again. As a party in opposition, whose path back into office has been far from smooth, the Conservatives have in recent years had more occasion to use national party conventions. They assembled in 1927, 1938, 1942,3 and again in 1948.

The national party convention appears to have challenged the role of the party’s elected members of parliament as the dominating ruler of the party in selecting the party leader and formulating the party platform and organization. Of course the parliamentary party group plays a prominent part in convention proceedings, but the significant thing is that the parliamentary group now must, in some instances, exercise its influence through the medium of a representative convention in which the members of parliament can be outvoted by the local delegates.

In analysing the American and Canadian federal systems it is possible to stress the trends common to both systems or, alternately, to emphasize the differences that distinguish the Canadian from the American experience with federal institutions. Both political systems have persisted with recognizable federal features even while substantial nationalizing developments have occurred in the economies and cultures of the two nations. One leading authority characterizes the kind of federalism that results as “co-operative” in contrast to the older “classical” variety. Others, while noting common trends, stress the greater degree of resistance to centralization found in Canada by use of such labels as “pluralistic federalism,” “double-image federalism,” and “peri-pheralized federalism.” While briefs can be made for affixing one or another label to a system, it seems more useful at this stage to study some of the array of differences between the Canadian and American federal systems. One way to get a rough measure of differences and similarities is to pose a set of questions on federalism to comparable groups of Canadians and Americans. These questions can be designed to determine the respective orientations to their federal systems and their opinions on various provincial (state)-federal problems. In this study the questions were put to members of the Ontario Legislative Assembly and the Michigan Senate.