F.M. Barnard goes beyond the seventeenth-century understanding of the social contract by making national self-enactment contingent on public reasons for individual liberty within civic mutuality. He examines the possibilities and limits for a self-enacting, principled politics, acknowledging reason and self-enactment as central concepts of historical and political thinking. He argues, however, that reason must be seen as practical reason, which only indirectly acts as a cause, while self-enactment must be understood as operating in relation to reciprocity with the other. Reason and...

Convinced that rights are inalienable and that legitimate government requires the consent of the governed, the Fathers of Confederation - whether liberal or conservative - looked to the European enlightenment and John Locke. Janet Ajzenstat analyzes the legislative debates in the colonial parliaments and the Constitution Act (1867) in a provocative reinterpretation of Canadian political history from 1864 to 1873.Ajzenstat contends that the debt to Locke is most evident in the debates on the making of Canada's Parliament: though the anti-confederates maintained that the existing provincial...

The Circle of Rights Expands explores ideas of limit on political authority through a fresh reading of the political philosophy of the fifteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, including the work of representative thinkers such as Locke, Rousseau, Athusius, Grotius, Hobbes, and Hume. Arthur Monahan examines problems of sovereignty, religious toleration, and individual rights, emphasizing the relationship between such individual rights and economic change. Monahan's reading of individual philosophers, including the work of Spinoza, sixteenth-century advocates of religious toleration,...

Convinced that rights are inalienable and that legitimate government requires the consent of the governed, the Fathers of Confederation - whether liberal or conservative - looked to the European enlightenment and John Locke. Janet Ajzenstat analyzes the legislative debates in the colonial parliaments and the Constitution Act (1867) in a provocative reinterpretation of Canadian political history from 1864 to 1873. Ajzenstat contends that the debt to Locke is most evident in the debates on the making of Canada's Parliament: though the anti-confederates maintained that the existing provincial...

G.W.F. Hegel is often vilified for his conservative reactionary philosophy, particularly with respect to the rights of women. Alternatively, tracing a path through G.W.F Hegel's political thought, MacDonald demonstrates that, in fact, the logic of Hegel's argument necessitates the recognition of equal political and civil rights for all human beings. Combining a thoughtful study of Hegel's political thought with close readings of two pivotal works of literature, MacDonald's book shows how the perennial tension between fulfilled, yet diverse, personal lives and stable political communities has...

In a careful re-evaluation of the works of Levy-Bruhl, Wiebe establishes the coherence of Levy-Bruhl's classic distinction between primitive, or mythopoeic, and scientific thought, maintaining that religious thinking is mythopoeic in nature while theology -- which thinks about religion -- is related to modern Western scientific thinking. The pre-Socratic philosophers, Wiebe shows, developed a form of rational thought radically different from the religious-mythopoeic thought that preceded it. Although Plato was concerned with recovery of the pre-philosophic wisdom of ancient Greece, he...

In The Weariness, the Fever, and the Fret Katherine McCuaig takes an in-depth look at the campaign against TB, from its beginnings as part of the turn-of-the-century urban social reform movement to the 1950s and the discovery of antibiotics that could cure it. Although the bacillus that causes it had been discovered in 1882, at the turn of the century TB was, as Osler observed, "a social disease with a medical aspect." With "fresh air, good food, good houses, and hope" as the only available treatment, fighting the disease meant not only eliminating the germ but attacking the underlying social...

Seeks to point out what needs to be rethought at fundamental levels of our understanding, and shows how contemporary social concerns can be illuminated by a new look at the history of philosophy. This work acknowledges the significant gains modernity and post-modernity offer Western civilization in the areas of liberty and knowledge.

An exploration of the enduring historical puzzle of the nature and scope of Irish Protestant migration.

An exploration of the enduring historical puzzle of the nature and scope of Irish Protestant migration.