Once and Future Canadian Democracy : An Essay in Political Thought

by Ajzenstat, Janet

• ISBN13: 9780773526594
• ISBN10: 0773526595
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-11-01
• Publisher: McGill Queens Univ Pr

Summary

In The Once and Future Canadian Democracy Janet Ajzenstat debunks conventional wisdom about Canadian political identity and history. She shows that linking Canadian identity to an ideology that favours the common good over individual interests and counts on big government to achieve it is strangling Canadian democracy by placing fundamental questions beyond debate.To revitalize politics we need to abandon the idea that ideologies evolve from "right" to "left," from conservatism to socialism, and look at our political differences in terms of the distinction, more familiar in the arts, between classicism and romanticism. She argues that by abandoning our current modes of debate and rediscovering the Enlightenment liberalism that is an enduring part of our political tradition we will help to recreate Canada as a place of debate on fundamentals, not one in which a monolithic definition of identity answers all questions in advance.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
PART ONE LIBERALS AND ROMANTICS
1 Prenez Garde!	3	(7)
2 Beyond Right-Centre-Left	10	(10)
3 The Evil Futures	20	(13)
PART TWO GETTING TO DEMOCRACY
4 What Romantics say	33	(7)
5 Are We There Yet? Liberal Arguments	40	(8)
6 Why Historians Can't Put a Date to Democracy	48	(12)
7 What Did the Fathers say?	60	(10)
8 The Monarchical Element	70	(11)
9 Parliament: The Talking Shop	81
PART THREE BRINGING IN THE FUTURE
10 Last Train from Right-Centre-Left	93	(9)
11 Romantic Ideas: George Grant	102	(14)
12 Romance in a Democratic Clime	116	(11)
13 The Romantic Artist in Her Lonely Garret	127	(10)
14 The Three Deaths of the Canadian Constitution	137	(12)
Sources	149	(40)
Index	189