Madame de Staël tweets a Letter to the Globe and Mail

Bonaparte was very much aware that the Parisians made jokes about his new nobles, but he also knew that their opinions would be expressed only in the form of mockery and not in violence.  They did not venture beyond the ambiguity of puns; and just as in the Orient one is reduced to allegory, in France people sink even lower, limiting themselves to the rattling of syllables.

Source: Madame de Staël, Ten Years of Exile, tr. Doris Beik (Toronto: Doubleday, 1972), p. 90.

George Grant on Stephen Harper

Mr. Trudeau [Mr. Harper] has consistently used the politics of confrontation and contempt against anybody who opposed him and that has done great harm to this country in the last decade.  It has been repugnant to hear Mr. Trudeau [Mr. Harper] to treat such men as Mr. Douglas and Mr. Stanfield and Mr. Ryan with shallow contempt over the years.  One of the difficult truths about politics is that one cannot fight such means by employing the same means.  Mr. Clark was surely right not to respond when Mr. Trudeau [Mr. Harper] tried to talk him down contemptuously. …

Source:  George Grant to Richard Doyle, Editor of the Globe and Mail, 15 May 1979 in George Grant, Selected Letters, ed. William Christian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), pp.304,305.  Grant’s original comments pertain to the federal election of 22 May 1979.

China in the oil sands (and provincial Canadians)

Premier Alison Redford’s approval of the China National Offshore Oil Corp’s investment in Alberta is shameful.  This state-owned company has bid some $15.1 billion for Calgary-based Nexen Inc., a significant Canadian power in the energy industry.  How can Canadians speak of national self-determination and of control of oil sands development in the same breath when China is making its biggest overseas investment ever here in this country? 

Effectively, the Chinese government will have greater and greater authority over the oils sands, once considered a provincial resource, regardless of what Albertans or other Canadians say or do.  For good reason most of the people of China are not members of the Communist Party, singular in that nation, so why should Canada be subject to it? I am reminded of the beginning of WWII when American business leaders were reluctant to reduce car production because they did not want to make room for arms development.[1]  Where is the loyalty to national sovereignty, or sovereign interests, when provincial business figures gravitate only to money?

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[1] J.K. Galbraith, The Liberal Hour (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1961), p. 112.

Canada and John Locke's "Two Treatises"

The Cambridge political scientist John Dunn, who, in his classic work The Political Thought of John Locke (1969), sees his subject following his father’s footsteps as a Puritan, has written that throughout history John Locke has “worn many faces … so many masks.”[1]  So in order to investigate such a pivotal figure in the history of political thought let us be wary of too many intellectual digests (internet or otherwise) and text-book interpretations because an active imagination is best stimulated by direct contact with the original sources.[2]  The ultimate purpose here is to present a number of selected texts by Locke as they appeared in original form.  Our other purpose is to consider briefly how two different Canadians – C.B. Macpherson and Janet Ajzenstat – have interpreted Locke.

Perhaps one of the most striking examples of Locke’s misrepresentation is C.B. Macpherson’s, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to  Locke (1962), a very curious book, written by one who was trained as a (Marxist) economist; and it is a work that is overly-focussed on Locke’s notions of property.  Canadians seem fond of studying C.B. Macpherson, after all he is Canadian (and was a Canadian icon), and even Jack Layton studied under him on the recommendation of Charles Taylor.  Macpherson’s thinking on Hobbes is more interesting than he is on Locke, but Macpherson is totally devoid of historical sensibilities. In his effort to historicize Locke (and dismiss Macpherson), John Dunn succinctly explains that “either Macpherson or Locke must have been confused about seventeenth-century class structure.”[3]

 

In other words, the importance of property in Locke’s thought is linked to the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 (following the rule of Oliver Cromwell) and the problem of the Exclusion Crisis (1679-1681) which attempted to alter the succession to the throne.[4]  James II, the brother of Charles II, was a declared Catholic, and hence was in conflict with the Church of England.  James’ Catholicism was also believed to a threat because of the absolutism of Louis XIV, the dominant power on the continent. And the Sun King’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which famously expelled Protestants from France, beginning in 1685, the same year that James succeeded to the throne in England, was also considered a foreboding factor.  John Dunn puts it this way: “The spectre which haunted the English property-owner in 1680 or between 1685 and 1688 was the threat of non-parliamentary taxation and the confiscation of freeholds to consolidate executive authority.”[5]

Central to understanding Locke is that he began writing his Two Treatises of Government sometime around 1681, in other words prior to the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89, and it is an explicit rejection of Sir Robert Filmer’s divine-right paternalism in Patriarcha (1680) which finds hopeless intellectual support for kingship (and all hierarchy) in Genesis.[6]  Also of importance is that Locke’s (more interesting) Second Treatise was written before the First Treatise, and in the former Locke uses the term “state of nature” (which replaces the concept of Genesis), articulating a right of resistance in certain situations, hence harkening back to the Huguenot doctrines of resistance preceding him by about a century. [7] (See my blog)  Important in his thinking is the distinction he made between “law” and “force”, essentially antithetical terms, in his view, making clear what would be his dismay (to say the least) with police violence at Toronto’s G20 Summit (see below).  Locke was no armchair philosopher; he was a man of political commitment (and vision) who espoused a Newtonian equality (“For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”), but he was not overly swayed by democracy as we know it.

 

Locke sought limits to public power, which placed him in the same league as eighteenth-century classical liberals, and he also developed the notion of popular sovereignty (as a form of resistance to the abuse of power), which made him something of a radical, or even a revolutionary (certainly when we look to his American legacy).  Clearly aware of the tension between authority and revolution, Locke (perhaps inspired by patronage from the Earl of Shaftesbury on whom he was financially dependent) found solace in the idea of property, of man having “mixed his labour” with his property, landed or otherwise, thus creating a process of ‘self-annexation’ and thereby reducing Newtonian atomization and building an apparent mechanism between extremes.[8]

Locke’s imprint on the United States is deep, but in her effort to find him in Canada’s founding Janet Ajzenstat mimics J.G.A. Pocock’s magisterial The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975). Unfortunately, there was no “Lockean moment” in Canada.  To say that Canada was founded by “John Locke’s disciples” is a vast overstatement.[9]  Locke wrote in 1681, and this fact was not generally known until well after the Enlightenment – and quite possibly not until the definitive work of Cambridge political scientist and historian Peter Laslett (1915-2001).  Canada was founded almost two centuries after Locke wrote, and, again it is likely that any number of readers would have thought (mistakenly) that he wrote the Two Treatises after the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89, thereby diminishing his potential significance.  Locke’s trinity of “Peace, Safety, and publick good of the people” does come close to Canada’s “Peace, order and good government” but the textual resemblance here is not developed by Ajzenstat. [10]

Again, like C.B. Macpherson, Ajzensta’s work lacks some broad historical context, and we might benefit from looking at nineteenth century Britain and Europe. The British North America Act was established when Benjamin Disraeli was Tory Prime Minister of Britain. He was born a Jew but, once baptized while young, he came into the Church of England to become Britain’s first and only Prime Minister with a “Hebrew countenance. “ [11]  Under his rule, the working classes had only just received the right to vote; and, in a related development, the right to assemble and speak at Hyde Park was granted in 1866 as defended by John Stuart Mill.[12]  It is not inconceivable, then, that Canada was granted a parliament because it took little stretch of the imagination: the average British citizen, too, was granted voice at Hyde Park.

Idealistic and Romantic liberalism had very much faded by the second half of the nineteenth-century.  Byron had lost his life for the early cause of Greek independence, and after the failed liberal uprisings of 1848, which spread like wildfire across Europe, and even Britain, a new intellectual mood set in: conservatism combined with science and biological determinism and realism.  In fact, mid-nineteenth century Europe seems to prove that conservative movements were better at nation-building than liberal ones, certainly if we look to Bismarck in Germany and Garibaldi in Italy, developments contemporaneous with Canada’s founding.  Conservatism also helps to explain: peace, order and good government.  Why presume that Canada was immune to Europe’s new-found conservatism?

 

Instead of looking exclusively at Locke we should also consider the twin impact of two nineteenth-century figures:  Arthur de Gobineau, the father of racism, and Charles Darwin, who had many antecedents.  Gobineau’s work, An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-1855) held to an exclusive biological determinism, claiming that Aryan decadence followed from white miscegenation with other races.  Darwin’s Origin of the Species was published in 1859 (the same year as John Stuart Mill’s classic On Liberty), and it was Herbert Spencer who popularized the phrase “the survival of the fittest”, coining it in 1864. Neither Darwin nor Gobineau can be excluded from Canada’s nineteenth century matrix, or have we forgotten  the First Nations peoples, the Chinese “coolies”, and the Eugenics movement?

   

Moreover, the emphasis on so-called “science” leant itself to a form of determinism which made nation-building turn on notions of social discipline. If we borrow from France at the turn of the last century, we learn that Maurice Barrès articulated nationalism as “the acceptance of a determinism”, and this dutiful tone goes some way in explaining the mood of 1867, certainly the notion of “order” straddling our own trinitarian motto.[13]  Again, later in the century Kipling considered it “white man’s burden” for Britain to rule over India; similarly, it may have been the ‘responsibility’ of Canadians to join forces and partake in the British North America Act.  In other words, Canada’s founding may have been instigated by non-individualistic and non-thinking habits of mind, which helps to explain why Canadians have had, at least until recently, such difficulty explaining their country to themselves.

So there was competition for Locke’s “influence” on Canada’s founding.  Similarly, there were influences on Locke’s thinking that are not discussed by Ajzenstat.  Cicero and the New Testament were the two most important moral authorities for Locke, and Cicero’s influence can be found in Augustine, Dante, Montaigne, and the early Huguenot Resistance theories (again, see my blog).[14]  Significantly we find mention of Cicero in Canada in the Senate’s Speaking Chambers (reconstructed after the fire of 1916), where two Latin inscriptions (of six) bear reference to the Roman Senator.  The two inscriptions with Cicero’s authorship read: “It is the duty of the nobles to oppose the fickleness of the multitude” and “Let reason prevail with me [us] more than popular opinion.” [15] There is another inscription by Horace who is famous for his notion of “the golden mean”.   So the Latin inscriptions offer insight into the classical - or more particularly Ciceronian - tradition of the “middle” and “balance” which we find expressed in the role of the Canadian Senate, originally conceived.

Looking to Ajzenstat, she sees Canada’s founding as a watered-down expression of “popular sovereignty” supposedly derived from Locke.  But if we look to Locke, we see popular sovereignty more truly as a means of checking the abuse of power and as a right of resistance. And if we look to Cicero in Canada’s Senate, the idea of popular sovereignty is itself prone to tyranny, not unlike a dictatorship, and in Cicero’s case his opponent was Julius Caesar himself.  In other words, Canada’s founding was not primarily an act of “popular sovereignty” but an act that recreated the idea of the “middle” and of “mixed government”.   There was nothing truly “popular” about “peace, order and good government”, and this trinitarianism clearly belongs to a “middling” tradition begun by St. Augustine, aided by Cicero.  Locke’s influence, in other words, may not have been as strong as our religious traditions, and the nineteenth-century educational system was still dominated by the classics.  And we ought not to discount, as I have suggested, the contemporaneous nineteenth-century impact of Gobineau and Darwin.

So, likely, it is Canada that has failed Locke, and we have two instances of apparent mistaken identities in the examples of Macpherson and Ajzenstat.  If Canadians were true Lockeans, much more would have been said about the G20 police violence in Toronto, and we would not have been prone to two prorogation crises under the “Harper Government” whose predisposition for abuse of authority knows few parallels in Canada.

 

Here are some selected samples of Locke to peruse and consider:

On Police Violence at Toronto’s G20 Summit, etc.

… Force without Right, upon a Man’s Person, makes a State of War, both where there is, and is not, a common Judge.[16]

     But when the actual force is over, the State of War ceases between those that are in Society, and are equally on both sides Subjected to the fair determination of the Law; because then there lies open the remedy of appeal for past injury, and to prevent future harm: but where no such appeal is, as in the State of Nature, for want of positive Laws, and Judges with Authority to appeal to, the State of War once begun, continues, with a right to the innocent Party, to destroy the other whenever he can, until the aggressor offers Peace, and desires reconciliation on such Terms, as may repair any wrongs he has already done, and secure the innocent for the future: nay where an appeal to the Law, and constituted Judges lies open, but where the remedy is deny’d by a manifest perverting of Justice, and a barefaced wrestling of the Laws, to protect or indemnifie the violence or injuries of some Men, or Party of Men, there it is hard to imagine any thing but a State of War.  For wherever violence is used, and injury done, though by hands appointed to administer Justice, it is still violence and injury, however colour’d with the Name, Pretences, or Forms of Law, the end whereof being to protect and redress the innocent, by an unbiased application of it, to all who are under it; wherever that is not bona fide done, War is made upon the Sufferers, who having no appeal on Earth to right them, they are left to the only remedy in such Cases, an appeal to Heaven. [17]

     To avoid this State of War (wherein there is no appeal but to Heaven, and wherein every the least difference is apt to end, where there is no Authority to decide between the Contenders) is one great reason of Mens putting themselves into Society …[18]

   

… where there is no Law, there is no Freedom.  For Liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others which cannot be, where there is no Law: But Freedom is not, as we are told, A liberty for every Man to do what he lists: (For who could be free, when every other Man’s Humour might domineer over him?) But a Liberty to dispose, and order, as he lists, his Person, Actions, Possessions, and his whole Property, with the Allowance of those Laws under which he is; and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary Will of another, but freely follow his own.[19]

 

On Toronto’s “G20 Secret Law”

… whatever form the Common-wealth is under, the Ruling Power ought to govern by declared and received Laws, and not by extemporary Dictates and undetermined Resolutions. [20]

                                                                                      ~

… I say using Force upon a people without Authority, and contrary to the Trust put in him, that does so, is a state of War with the People, who have a right to reinstate their Legislative in the Exercise of their Power.  For having erected a Legislative, with an intent they should exercise the Power of making Laws, either at certain set times, or when there is need of it; when they are hindr’d by any force from, what is so necessary to the Society, and wherein the Safety and preservation of the People consists, the people have a right to remove it by force. In all States and Conditions the true remedy of Force without Authority, is to oppose Force to it.  The use of force without Authority, always puts him that uses it into a state of War, as the Aggressor, and renders him liable to be treated accordingly.[21]

On Prorogued Parliaments …

… When the Prince hinders the Legislative from assembling in its due time, or from acting freely, pursuant to those ends, for which it was Constituted, the Legislative is altered. For ‘tis not a certain number of men, no, nor their meeting, unless they have Freedom of debating, and Leisure of perfecting, what is for the good of the Society wherein the Legislative consists: when these are taken away or altered, so as to deprive the Society of the due exercise of their Power, the Legislative is truly altered.  For it is not Names, that Constitute Governments, but the use and exercise of those Powers that were intended to accompany them; so that he who takes away the Freedom, or hinders the acting of the Legislative in its due seasons, in effect takes away the Legislative, and puts an end to the Government.[22]

After “a long train of abuses” (see also the American Declaration of Independence) 

…  Revolutions happen not upon every little mismanagement in publick affairs.  Great mistakes in the ruling part, many wrong and inconvenient Laws, and all the slips of humane frailty will be borne by the People, without mutiny or murmur.  But if a long train of Abuses, Prevarications, and Artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the People, and they cannot but feel, what they lie under, and see, whither they are going; ‘tis not to be wonder’d, that they should then rouze themselves, and endeavour to put the rule into such hands, which may secure to them the ends for which Government was at first erected; and without which, ancient Names, and specious Forms, are so far from being better, that they are much worse, than the state of Nature, or pure Anarchy; the inconveniences being all as great and as near, but the remedy farther off and more difficult.[23]

“The People shall be Judge”

Here, ‘tis like, the common Question will be made, Who shall be Judge whether the Prince or Legislative act contrary to their Trust? This, perhaps, ill affected and factious Men may spread amongst the People, when the Prince only makes use of his due Prerogative.  To this I reply, The People shall be judge: for who shall be Judge whether his Trustee or Deputy acts well, and according to the Trust reposed in him, but he who deputes him, and must, by having deputed him have still a Power to discard him, when he fails in his Trust?  If this be reasonable in particular Cases of Private Men, why should it be otherwise in that of the greatest moment; where the Welfare of Millions is concerned, and also where the evil, if not prevented, is greater, and the Redress very difficult, dear and dangerous? [24]

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[1] John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000), p. 5.

[2] Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1961), pp. 62,63.

[3] Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, p. 235.

[4] For some good historical context see David Wootton, Modern Political Thought: Readings from Machiavelli to Nietzsche, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), pp. 303-309.

[5] Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, p. 216.

[6] Dunn, Ibid., p. 48, pp. 152,3.

[7] Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, p. 50.

[8] John Locke, Two Treatises of Government.  Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 288.

[9] Janet Ajzenstat, The Canadian Founding: John Locke and Parliament (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2007), p. xvi.

[10] Locke, Two Treatises, p. 353.  See also Locke’s “Peace, Quiet, and Property” in Two Treatises, p.  359.

[11] E. Royston Pike, Britain’s Prime Ministers: From Walpole to Wilson (Feltham, Middlesex: Odhams Books, 1968), p. 263.

[12] Raymond Williams, Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays (New York: Verso, 2005), p. 5.

[13] Maurice Barrès, Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme, Vol I, (Paris: Plon, 1902), p. 10.

[14] John Locke, Political Essays. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 351.

[15]“Words of Wisdom in the Senate Speaker’s Chambers,”  http://www.parl.gc.ca/About/Senate/WordsOfWisdom/WordsOfWisdom-e.htm

[16]Locke, Two Treatises of Government, p. 281. The Second Treatise, paragraph 19. Emphasis added.

[17] Ibid., pp. 281,282. Second Treatise, paragraph 20. Emphasis added.

[18]Ibid., p. 282. Second Treatise, paragraph 21.

[19]Ibid., p. 306. Second Treatise, paragraph 57.

[20]Ibid., p. 360. Second Treatise, paragraph 137.

[21] Ibid., pp. 370,371. Second Treatise, paragraph 155.

[22] Ibid., p. 409. Second Treatise, paragraph 215.

[23] Ibid., p., 415. Second Treatise, paragraph 225.

[24] Ibid., p. 426,427. Second Treatise, paragraph 240.

J.K. Galbraith meets Harper (and others)

One can only imagine how the distinguished Ontario-born economist John Kenneth Galbraith would rebut Stephen Harper and other free-market idealists of today.  Suffice it to say, Galbraith was a Keynesian, a prolific author and even Ambassador to India during the Kennedy administration.  As a public intellectual his recognition was enormous, well suited to his 6-foot, 8-inch frame.

 

He also had something to say about the penchant for public relations and controlled image-building in modern politics, which is clearly evident in the “Harper Government”.  Much of Harper’s image-making fell flat, recently, when in an effort to shore up both federal and Conservative support in Quebec, he secretly met with Brian Mulroney, last June, five years after excommunicating the former Prime Minister from the Conservative Party. Here is an excerpt from a chapter, “The Build-up and the Public Man”, in The Liberal Hour (1960):

As noted, the build-up consists in giving a public figure a character which, in fact, he doesn’t have.  It has two forms, and, since the political scientists to date have been cautious in dealing with the phenomenon, they are still without names.  There is first what may be called the contrived build-up.  Secondly, there is the autonomous build up.  The categories are not mutually exclusive ….

The contrived build-up is a notable phenomenon in our time and much attention is being given to its technique.  But it is also self-limiting in its effect.  The man who hires a public relations man to impress the public with his intelligence, the dynamic qualities of his personality, or the depths of his devotion to the public good is tolerably recognizable as a man who hires a public relations firm to do these things.[1] …

The autonomous build-up always strikes someone who is already in the public eye.  Perhaps he has earned a measure of public esteem for doing an important and difficult job in a restricted area of public endeavour.  Or he has made a promising start on such a job.  Or, in a common case, he has just assumed public office after a respectable private career.  Then comes the build-up.  He is a man transformed – indeed he is no longer a man but a superman.  His eccentricities become the mark of a unique personality.  His hobbies are the refreshment of an intense and active mind.  His wife becomes a gracious, untiring and selfless partner.  If he has several wives, he has been tried by sadness. If he is a teetotaller, this marks him as a stern, disciplined, and dedicated man.  If he is given to belting the bottle, it will be said that he is not lacking in warmth and human qualities.  But most remarkable of all are his qualifications for the job he has assumed.  Where others ponder, he has solutions.  That is because he is able to separate the essentials from the nonessentials and then find a painless course of action by shooting straight for the target.  It has been the fault of lesser men that they had left the impression that there was a choice only between equally grim alternatives.

In fact, the build-up is particularly likely to occur at a time when problems are numerous, vexatious, and incomprehensible. [2]  …

Although there is no clear remedy for the build-up, it might help were we to resolve to remember that in a democracy, leaders, at their best, are the first among near-equals.  So they will always share the bafflement of their followers ….[3]

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[1] J.K. Galbraith, The Liberal Hour (London: Hamish Hamilton,1961), p. 117. Emphasis added.

[2] Idid., pp. 118,119.

[3] Ibid., p. 125. Emphasis added.

Shakespeare tweets on the Alberta oil sands

Now o’er the one halfworld
Nature seems dead.[i]

~ Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 1

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[i] William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed., Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (New York:  The Modern Library, 2009), p. 27.

Canada and The Russian Disease: Omnibus Budget Bill C-38

The fact is that Harper’s  425-page omnibus Budget Bill C-38 takes apart the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act and makes questionable changes to the Fisheries Act.  Shouldn’t a Budget Bill be confined to finances?  Shouldn’t these be separate Bills before Parliament?  Did we not just have an omnibus Crime Bill? Harper’s “Budget,” which does everything it can to promote Alberta oil, and much more, raises better comparisons with Lenin’s N.E.P. (New Economic Policy) and Gosplan (The State Planning Commission). This, of course, helped pave the way for Stalin’s later Five-Year Plans.  Maybe Canadians need to budget for  more historians  - to better preserve the memory of our democracy.