Abstract
In 1995, Alan Cairns wrote an essay describing Canada’s half-century political transformation.1 His transitional retrospective begins in the 1950s, a time when Canadians had envisioned their polity on a journey of political maturation. Dependent upon ‘Mother Britain’ for money, security and guidance, the country was ascending ‘from colony to a nation’, that is, from a political childhood towards independence.2 Mirroring its subordination to Britain, Canada’s domestic politics were similarly hierarchical. John Porter’s 1960’s snapshot of Canada’s ‘Vertical Mosaic’ describes a world in which ethnically British upper class males sat atop a set of interlocking hierarchies of class, ethnicity and gender.3 Canada contained two ‘Founding Races’. The federal government represented the senior Anglo Saxons while the junior French made do with a provincial premier. Excluded from the foundation myth, those who were neither British nor French suffered legal disabilities up to and including disenfranchisement. The economic and political realms were male preserves (women had only become legal persons in 1929), while the prevailing constitutional theory located sovereignty in the Queen and her Parliament, not the people.
The primogenitive and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy:
—William Shakespeare
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Alan Cairns, ‘The Constitutional World We Have Lost’, in Reconfigurations: Canadian Citizenship and Constitutional Change, ed. Douglas Williams (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995), 99.
John Porter, The Vertical Mosaic (Toronto and Buffalo: The University of Toronto Press, 1965).
Quoted in A. Davidison Dunton and André Laurendeau, The Report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1967), xvii.
Nigel Murphy, Guide to Laws and Policies Relating to the Chinese in New Zealand 1871–1997 (Wellington: New Zealand Chinese Association, 2008), 279. The changes did not make immigration policy non-discriminatory. The new policy judged immigrants on the basis of their ‘assimilability’ and the Minister thought ‘groups of people from Asian countries’ to be less assimilable than their European counterparts.
Although uncouth, my use of the term follows recent scholarship. James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1793–1939 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 5.
Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), 2
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981)
Peter Katzenstein, ed. Anglo America and Its Discontents: Civilizational Identities Beyond West and East (London and New York: Routledge, 2012); Kaufmann, Rise and Fall of Anglo-America.
For a fulsome discussion, see Duncan Bell, ‘The Project for a New Anglo Century’, in Anglo America and Its Discontents: Civilizational Identities Beyond West and East, ed. Peter Katzenstein (London and New York: Routledge, 2012).
Eric Kaufmann, ‘American Exceptionalism Reconsidered: Anglo-Saxon Ethnogenesis in the “Universal” Nation, 1776–1850’, Journal of American Studies 33, no. 3 (1999): 446.
Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britian: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), 24.
Gregory Claeys, Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Kaufmann, Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, 177f.
E.g. Sweat v. Painter 1950 and Brown v. Board of Education 1954/55. See the interesting discussion of ‘The Revolutionary Decade’ in Anthony Lewis, The Second American Revolution: A First-Hand Account of the Struggle for Civil Rights (London: Faber and Faber, 1966).
See also the discussion of revolution in Martin Luther King (Jr), The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Hachette Aduio, 1999). Kaufmann, Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, 177f.
Henry Stimson, quoted in Arthur Meier Schlesinger, The Crisis of the Old Order: The Age of Roosevelt Volume 1 1919–1933 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Books, 2003), 19.
Cf. Weber, ‘Bureaucracy’.213f; Jeffrey Isaac, The Poverty of Progressivism: The Future of American Democracy in a Time of Liberal Decline (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003), 84.
Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (London: Macmillan, 1967). Isaac, The Poverty of Progressivism, 54.
Allison C. Carey, On the Margins of Citizenship: Intellectual Disability and Civil Rights in Twentieth-Century America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), 54.
Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, ‘The Institutionalization of Cosmopolitan Morality: The Holocaust and Human Rights’, Journal of Human Rights 3, no. 2 (2004): 155.
Michael Ignatieff, The Rights Revolution (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2000), 6.
The attribution is disputed in William Safire, Safire’s Political Dictionary: An Enlarged, up-to-Date Edition of the New Language of Politics (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 799.
The critique does not target consequentialism per se. For more sophisticated discussion, see Samuel Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)
Brad Hooker, Ideal Code, Real World: A Rule-Consequentialist Theory of Morality (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)
Derek Parfit, On What Matters (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Second ed. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 184
Elizabth Anscombe, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, Philosophy 33, no. 124 (1958): 9.
But see Hugh LaFollette, ‘Pragmatic Ethics’, in Blackwell Guide of Ethical Theory, ed. Hugh LaFollette (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).
Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 27.
See also Nozick, Anarchy, State & Utopia, 333–334; Bernard Williams, ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’, in Utilitarianism: For & Against, ed. J.C.C. Smart and Bernard Williams (Cambridge, New York & Melbourne: 1973), 104.
John Stuart Mill, ‘Utilitariansim’, in John Stuart Mill, ed. Geraint Williams (London: Everyman, 1993 [1861]), 8; Ben Saunders, ‘J. S. Mill’s Conception of Utility’, Utilitas 22, no. 1 (2010).
Thomas C. Leonard, ‘Origins of the Myth of Social Darwinism: The Ambiguous Legacy of Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought’, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 71, no. 1 (2009): 43.
Jeremy Bentham, ‘Nature of Political Argument’, in Bentham’s Political Thought, ed. Bhikhu Parekh (London: Croom Helm, 1973), 291. Bentham would later repudiate that maxim as simplistic, preferring to treat pleasure and pain as distinct elements of utility.
—, ‘The Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number’, in Bentham’s Political Thought, ed. Bhikhu Parekh (London: Croom Helm, 1973), 309.
H L A Hart, ‘Natural Rights: Bentham and John Stuart Mill’, in Essays on Bentham (Oxford and New York: The Clarendon Press, 1982), 99.
Ibid., 14. See discussion in Michael Levin, J.S. Mill on Civilization and Barbarism (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 47f.
John Stuart Mill, ‘Civilization’, in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume Xviii — Essays on Politics and Society Part 1, ed. John Robson (Toronto: The Online Library of Liberty, 2005 [1836]).
Henry Steele Commager, ‘Introduction’, in Lester Ward and the Welfare State, ed. Henry Steele Commager (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), xxii.
Lester Ward, ‘Psychic Factors of Civilization’, in Lester Ward and the Welfare State, ed. Henry Steele Commager (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 145.
R. M. Hare, ‘What Is Wrong with Slavery’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 8, no. 2 (1979): 114.
Quoted in Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 80.
Cf. Herbert George Welles, ‘Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought’. (London: Chapman & Hall, LD. via Project Gutenberg, 1902).
C. A. Bayly, ‘The British and Indigenous Peoples, 1760–1860: Power, Perception and Identity’, in Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850, ed. Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 20
Thomas C. Leonard, ‘American Economic Reform in the Progressive Era: Its Foundational Beliefs and Their Relation to Eugenics’, History of Political Economy 41, no. 1 (2009): 110
Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), 15–17.
Claeys, Imperial Sceptics, 13. Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (Unabridged) (Tantor Audio, 2011).
Murray Goot, ‘The Aboriginal Franchise and Its Consequences’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 52, no. 4 (2006): 525.
Gabriel Chin, ‘Segregation’s Last Stronghold: Race Discrimination and the Constitutional Law of Immigration’, UCLA Law Review 46, no. 1 (1998): 19.
Booker T. Washington, ‘An Address on the Negro Race at the First National Conference on Race Betterment’, in The Booker T. Washington Papers, ed. Louis Harlan (Chicago, IL: The University of Illinois Press, 1982), 417.
Isaiah Berlin, ‘Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century’, in Four Essays on Liberty, ed. Isaiah Berlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 9. See also Claeys, Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850–1920, 285.
Eric Davis, ‘Representations of the Middle East at American World Fairs 1876–1904’, in The United States and the Middle East: Cultural Encounters, ed. Abbas Amanat and Magnus T. Bernhardsson (New Haven, CT: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 2002), 351. See also Kathy Smits and Alix Jansen, ‘Staging the Nation at Expos and World’s Fairs’, National Identities 14, no. 2 (2011).
Robert Young, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 24.
Helen Merrell Lynd, England in the Eighteen-Eighties: Towards a Social Basis for Freedom, 2nd ed. (London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1968), 71.
Classical writers make the point explicit. Sallust, ‘Cataline’s Conspiracy’, in Catiline’s Conspiracy, The Jugurthine War, Histories, ed. William Batstone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 13–14.
This paragraph and the next draw upon Michel Foucault. See in particular, Michel Foucault, ‘5 April 1978’, in Michel Foucault: Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College De France, 1977–78, ed. Michel Senellart (New York: Picador, 2009 [2004]), 291.
Lester Ward, ‘Utilitarian Economics’, in Lester Ward and the Welfare State, ed. Henry Steele Commager (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 269.
James Tully, ‘The Struggles of Indigenous Peoples for and of Freedom’, in Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, ed. Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton and Will Sanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 40.
Thomas Henry Kewley, Social Security in Australia, 1900–72 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1965), 104.
Henry Cabot Lodge, ‘The War with Spain’ (New York and London: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1899), http://www.archive.org/stream/warwithspain00lodggoog#page/n0/mode/2up.
V.G. Kiernan, The Lords of Humankind: European Attitudes Towards the Outside World in the Imperial Age (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), 264.
John Milloy, ‘A National Crime’: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986 (Winnipeg: The University of Manitoba Press, 1999), 22.
Peter Bryce, The Story of a National Crime: Being an Appeal for Justice to the Indians of Canada; the Wards of the Nation, Our Allies in the Revolutionary War, Our Brothers-in-Arms in the Great War (Ottawa: J. Hope, 1922), 4. The ‘Missing Children’ of Canada’s indigenous schools are the subject of a Canadian inquiry. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Interim Report’, (2012): 17.
Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences, Online ed. (London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1892), 342–343.
Edward Gibbon, ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’, ed. H.H. Milman (Peter Fellion Collier, 1899), http://www.archive.org/stream/declineandfallr00gibbgoog#page/n8/mode/2up. In this passage Gibbon is careful not to endorse this critique of Christianity. However, his larger critical theme was influential and unmistakeable.
Shelby Thomas McCloy, Gibbon’s Antagonism to Christianity (New York: Burt Franklin, 1933);
Stephen Paul Foster, Melancholy Duty: The Hume-Gibbon Attack on Christianity (Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1997).
Freidrich A Hayek, The Consitution of Liberty: The Definitive Edition, ed. Ronald Hamowy, The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 378.
Bernard Bosanquet, Social and International Ideals: Being Studies in Patriotism (Hallendale, FL: New World Book Manufacturing, 1967), 143–157.
The citation references a 1910 note by Canadian Governor-General Earl Grey. The quotation is taken from Robert Huttenback, Racism and Empire: White Settlers and Colored Immigrants in the British Settler Self-Governing Colonies 1830–1910 (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1976), 194.
The four provinces were British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario and Saskatchewan. The quotation comes from the 1911 Trades and Labour Congress. Quoted in James W. St. G. Walker, ‘Race’, Rights and the Law in the Supreme Court of Canada (Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1997), 85.
Ronald Dworkin, ‘Rights as Trumps’, in Theories of Rights, ed. J. Waldron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 153.
Elizabeth Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 267–268.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Stephen Winter
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Winter, S. (2014). The Old Order. In: Transitional Justice in Established Democracies. International Political Theory series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316196_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316196_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-33038-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-31619-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political Science CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)