This note examines the Canadian federal government's attempts to use communication programmes to influence public opinion toward the Goods and Services Tax (GST). Using internal government documents and polling data, the authors describe the scope and objectives of the GST campaign, and assess its effectiveness in shaping public opinion. They then describe some of the weaknesses in popular discourse about the propriety of communication programmes of this kind.

A general perception of crisis at the end of the postwar period of growth has spawned two types of theoretical response: while a conservative theory of overload focusses on ungovernability caused by postmaterialist value change, radical analysis points to the structural contradictions of the welfare and intervention state. This article suggests that the current crisis is characterized by postmaterialist persistence and structural contradictions under the conditions of economic constraint. It examines polarization and potential mobilization of fragmented postindustrial societies in the context of neo-conservative politics, and it suggests a regime of economic dualism and/or corporatism as the most likely outcome.

Arguments for tolerance, and criticisms of it, regularly produce paradoxes and other kinds of conceptual difficulty. We seek to show that these paradoxes are unnecessary, and that they arise from misconceptions of what a theory of tolerance is required to justify. Imagined as a “virtue,” tolerance is simply confused with other concepts; understood in the framework of a theory of “rights,” the element of choice essential to the concept is wholly neglected; explaining the concept in terms of some theory of fallibilism leads to a confusion of pragmatic with cognitive standards. Moreover, such mistaken approaches often arise from an equation of tolerance with liberalism or pluralism: the authors maintain, however, that justifications of tolerance do not rest on a commitment to any political theory or ideology, but imply only a recognition of the political situation itself.

In his study of the spatial symbolism of primitive societies, Robert Hertz noted that the left was the side associated with weakness and evil, the right being on the contrary linked to purity, strength, and religion. The works of I. Wile and V. Fritsch, among others, have confirmed this privileged – though not universal – association of right with the positive side of the dichotomies which together with left-right form symbolic constellations used to interpret the social as well as the physical environment.

These studies – based on the comparison of religious rituals, social customs, and languages – have not considered or considered only incidentally the use made of the left-right classification for the ordering of one's political landscape. This article is a partial attempt to do so from the answers of American, French, French-Canadian, and English-Canadian respondents to a questionnaire administered in 1967–8. The respondents were asked to locate selected religious and profane concepts in an extreme left to extreme right visual scale.

The hypothesis that the students interviewed, like the primitives studied by Hertz, would see religion on the right was verified for the concepts God, religion, and clergyman but not for Jesus Christ which tended to be located on the left. The deviance of Jesus Christ, rather than taken as ground for rejecting the hypothesis, is explained by the non-religious, the man-like rather than God-like qualities associated with that concept.

Theories of hegemonic leadership often begin with a constraining assumption: that international structure can explain both a state's capability to provide leadership and its interest in doing so. By conflating these explanations, traditional theories, even those from quite different approaches, share common problems. These problems are illustrated by examining three well-known models, and comparing their applications to the eighteenth century. This period provides difficult cases for all three, since countries with power did not provide political or economic leadership, and those which were attempting to provide leadership were not powerful. An alternative theory of leadership is then offered, using structural factors to explain capabilities, but domestic political economic factors to explain interests. The ability of this model to handle the historical cases with greater accuracy suggests that domestic factors could offer fresh insight into theories of leadership.

During the first decades of this century, British and United States census officials constructed social classifications based upon the opposition between intellectual and manual occupations, the former being ordered according to their more or less professional character and the latter according to skills. Logically, one would have expected Canadian statisticians to follow the same path: but the “professional” model never took root in Canada. When census officials here developed a classification of occupations, they did not attempt to create a unilinear scheme of large homogeneous classes using occupation as privileged criterion; following the definitions of classical political economy, they rather set upon themselves to measure the extent of the division of labour. This article seeks to explain the peculiarity of the Canadian case by relating it to three conjoined factors: first, the highly centralized character of Canada's statistical system; second, the important role played by nascent Canadian political economy as the intellectual milieu of statisticians; finally, the fact that the Canadian economy was characterized at that time by the persistence of an important correlation between industry and occupation.

Many political scientists are adding the role of expert to their role as university professors. They are consultants for various organizations, committees or commissions, and they express themselves through the media or they participate in meetings or conferences oriented toward problem-solving. There are some disconnected experts and some naive technocrats among them. There are also alleged experts who are openly partisan. Fortunately some political scientists while acting as experts remain true scholars. They limit themselves to highlight the choices to be made rather than trying to impose one of them. Their experiences as experts enrich their teaching, research and writing activities as well as the training of young researchers. Somewhat like the presidents of the Canadian Political Science Association they are not in place for too long. And it is a good thing, too.

Australia emerged from the war with low costs, a high level of London funds, favourable terms of trade, and improved efficiency stimulated by the war effort. All these were substantial assets in the immediate post-war period but there were also certain handicaps, themselves also the product of the war. For one thing the economy was greatly under-capitalized. This was due in part to a low rate of capital formation in the years immediately preceding the war, and secondly to a deliberate policy developed during the war of concentrating entirely upon capital formation that would have a direct bearing on the war effort. Apart from a serious shortage of capital equipment in industry and defects in the transport system, there was a great lag in housing construction. In addition, certain specialized industries had been developed during the war, and it was doubtful whether these could be continued in the post-war circumstances. Then finally there was the heavy task of making a swift and smooth transition from a war economy to a peace economy.

There has been a recent tendency, with deep historical roots in structural-functionalism and elite analyses, to insulate the state from class formations and struggles. Reacting against classical Marxist and neo-Marxist attempts to locate certain features of state policy in the class struggles of capitalist formations, there has been a reversion to “explaining” state policy solely by the “internal dynamics” of state administration and the motives and intentions of their incumbents. Leslie Pal's critique of my work in his article is yet another attempt in this tradition. After critiquing my “narrow” use of “relative autonomy” and “rigid” reliance on “class struggle” to account for the introduction of the Employment and Social Insurance Act of 1935 and the Unemployment Insurance Act of 1940, he offers an alternative classless “model” which relies heavily on actuarial ideology and federal-provincial relations in the dynamics of internal state administration. In light of his use of my work as a point of departure, I will make only a few salient points. My comments are divided into two parts: theoretical assumptions and the class nature of actuarial ideology.

Establishment of a uniform Dominion-wide vital statistical system in 1926 showed Canada to have gross and net reproduction rates above most of Northern and Western Europe and the Anglo-American world. What knowledge we have of trends indicates that fertility has been declining rapidly in Canada. In 1939 the Canadian net reproduction rate was well above unity and the war-time rise in marriages and births will have maintained it at that level. Probably, however, the rising birth-rate of the war years does not indicate any rise in the size of completed families. While the situation in Canada affords no grounds for complacency about that country's capacity to maintain its numbers in the future, there is no suggestion that declining fertility is an inevitable process. By analysing the trends now plainly visible, demographic research may provide a basis for policies aimed at their reversal. The prospect of a declining population may not cause much alarm in some countries. It can hardly be welcomed in Canada, with its empty spaces and undeveloped resources.

On October 1, 1950, Canadian authorities abandoned the policy of maintaining a fixed rate of exchange for the Canadian dollar for the first time since the beginning of the Second World War. Thereafter the dollar was allowed to fluctuate with little interference from official quarters. The significance of this event extends beyond the evolution of exchange policy in Canada, for it must have affected the attitudes of those countries that have been studying a more flexible exchange system than the one envisaged by the Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary Fund.

Canadian monetary authorities have been pursuing a policy designed to reduce changes in the value of the Canadian dollar. Official policy has been described as follows: “Transactions of the Exchange Fund Account in the market in United States dollars were directed to helping to maintain orderly conditions without preventing basic supply and demand factors from determining the level of the rate.” It is argued in this paper that a stabilizing agency that operates according to the commonly accepted principle of resisting all movements in the rate does not, in fact, contribute to that rate's stability. An examination of the operations of the Canadian Exchange Fund Account from September, 1950, to December, 1954, supports this argument. An analysis of the meaning of stabilizing policy will precede the discussion of Canadian experience.

This paper is an appraisal of the theory of crowds from the perspective of a study of how metropolitan police see and control them. Students of the behaviour of crowds have commented on the almost complete absence of empirical studies and of the consequent highly speculative nature of the major theories. To a great extent this state of affairs is a result of the difficulty of studying crowds, which are unpredictable in appearance, and formidable to study when identified. Furthermore, owing to the highly dramatic nature of the phenomenon, the usual secondary sources, both journalistic and historical, are quite unreliable.

A study of how the police see and control crowds obviates some of these difficulties. Individual policemen have recurrent experiences with most types of crowds. To control them they must make some appraisal of their origin, nature, and organization. The success or failure of the tactics they adopt functions as a test of their appraisal. The researcher, interviewing these policemen, is able to apply the test of consistency, and to check the most frequently recurrent statements against those of policemen with a great reputation for being able to control crowds. All the points presented in this paper have been validated in this way.

The general idea of my title was hatched some years ago for an after-dinner speech at the annual meeting of the Midwest Economic Association. It proved to have been hatched from a double-yoked egg. In the first place some of the younger members, nurtured in the New Deal and the labour developments of the late thirties, said there was a printer's error on the programme. My title should be, not CLIO, but CIO. In the second place, the toastmaster primed himself for introducing me by looking Clio up in the Encyclopædia. He was baffled to learn that it is “a shell-less pelagic mollusc in the class Pteropod. A small spindle-shanked animal with six tentacles on its head. It forms the principal part of the food of some species of whales.” Being brought up on short-run phenomena, he read no further. Had he persisted he would, of course, have discovered that another Clio was one of the nine Greek muses; that she got her Ph.D. for a thesis on epic verse, then settled down to that other branch of poetic licence, history; and that she was thus an eternally young lady who never forgot a date.

From the evidence of sculpture and pottery it seems clear that Clio, unlike Venus, always wore clothes, choosing her apparel to fit the story she was writing. When dealing with military history she dressed like an Amazon, spear and shield and all; for political and constitutional history she had a whole clothes-closet—a crown and a purple coronation robe, a black gown which made her look like Portia, a knee-length coat copied later by southern senators, also miscellaneous wigs, cloaks, and daggers; the history of art and literature called for a corduroy tunic and flat-heeled buskins; for religious history she was garbed like a priestess; and when psychiatry was invented she experimented at length to see what went best with a couch. When, having passed through the drum and trumpet stage of history writing, she got round to economic history, she donned overalls: blue jeans, with copper rivets, pockets everywhere, white stitching, and union-made label. The get-up did not look divine, or even muse-like, especially from the back. But for the job in hand it has proved functionally well suited, and Clio at work has chalked up a creditable record of achievement during three quarters of a century's full employment of all her resources. It is about that record that I want to talk this afternoon.

Judging the accomplishments of the past by the standards of the present, perhaps each generation must make its own attempt at understanding the great masters. It has been said that “Ricardo was the first to present a complete model—one which, for all its faults, was self-consistent and displayed the whole economy as a single interdependent system.” The present paper is an attempt to isolate that self-consistent model and to set it out rigorously. Anyone trying to isolate it must be painfully aware of the possibility that what he is removing may be more valuable than what he is preserving. However, the criterion of consistency leaves him little choice. Having isolated the self-consistent model, he must relate it to our own thinking. The latter emphasizes aggregation, occupies itself increasingly with the underdeveloped two-thirds of the world, and sees no “law” of diminishing returns outside agriculture. In these three senses it is becoming more Ricardian.

Consider three sectors, each producing a homogeneous product or service, that is, a consumers' goods industry, a producers' goods industry, and a labour household sector. The subscripts used to designate the three sectors are c, p, and l, respectively. The consumers' goods industry is facing a production function having one output and three inputs in it. The output consists of consumers' goods, the inputs consist of labour services, services rendered by durable man-made producers' goods, and services rendered by indestructible nature-given land.

“Political science,” as the term is understood in Canada and the United States, is still not recognized in the USSR as a distinct academic discipline. Although the phrase “Soviet political sciences(s)” has been occasionally used in Soviet literature of recent years, and though in 1960 a “Soviet Association of Political (State) Sciences” was formed, the Academy of Sciences and the institutions of higher learning in the USSR continue to view “political science” as a somewhat alien concept, ideologically ambiguous and academically suspect.

Three contrary theories of great power war are examined. The first is the common balance of power argument that parity preserves peace. The second is Organski's oft-cited alternative, “the power transition.” The third is a conflation of the first and second. Like the first, the inherent inability to measure power precisely is the basis of the conflated balance of power theory. Like the second, the conclusion is that parity encourages war. Unlike either the first or second theory, the third provides an explanation of the incidence and extent of warfare between great powers. The basic proposition tested is that nonseparated great powers fight as they approach parity in power capabilities. The evidence is from the relations between the European great powers during 1815–1939.

While certainly not the first to portray Asian civilizations as stagnant societies, John Stuart Mill was quite adept at using the concept of ''Oriental despotism'' to warn the West that it might suffer a similar fate if its distinguishing features of individuality and political pluralism fell into a state of neglect. Such a state was imminent, Mill believed, because the tyranny of majority opinion had already begun to hold sway in most Western cultures, and centralized bureaucratic socialism appeared ready to take root in some of them. Also problematic was the fact that the democratic franchise had spread too far and too fast in his lifetime, as had a single-minded focus on material gain. Taken together, Mill feared, these last two features threatened to trap the West in a leaderless age of transition for decades and, perhaps, generations. In retrospect, however, it appears that they helped inaugurate a new ''natural'' state, in Mill's parlance, organized around the needs of the industrial economy, that has captivated the liberal project of human improvement central to his social and political thought.

The Constitution Act, 1867, contained what were intended to be strong protections of property ownership. These protections gradually eroded, as property was subordinated to democratic will and legislation. The “property rights” debate took place in this context. Those provinces which opposed the property rights clause wanted to safeguard the supremacy of democratic institutions from the potential ramifications posed by such a clause. The federal government, the proponent of the clause, did not intend that such supremacy be usurped. However, the clause was never crucial to the Charter and the federal government abandoned the clause in order to achieve provincial agreement on patriation of the constitution.