Back in the 1940s, the Canadian historian Frank Underhill lamented: “It is a remarkable fact that in the great debate of our generation about the fundamental values of liberalism and democracy we Canadians have taken very little part ... Our thinking is still derivative.” That would seem to be much less true today. The writings of Pierre Trudeau, Charles Taylor, Will Kymlicka, James Tully and others have helped to rectify this, and themes such as individual and collective rights, multiculturalism, multinational federalism and aboriginal identities are ones to which Canadian academics have made important international contributions.
What about the relationship between political philosophy in its broad historical sense—from the Greeks to modernity— and the study of Canada? How well has this fared? One could not expect too much in this vein when Canada was still a frontier society; nor would things change rapidly in the period between the wars. But over the past four...
Philip Resnick is a political scientist, long associated with the University of British Columbia. He has published widely on political topics, books such as Letters to a Québécois Friend (McGill Queen’s University Press, 1990), The Masks of Proteus: Canadian Reflections on the State (McGill Queen’s University Press, 1990), Twenty-First Century Democracy (McGill Queen’s University Press, 1997), The European Roots of Canadian Identity (Broadview Press, 2005) and The Labyrinth of North American Identities (University of Toronto Press, 2012). As a poet, he authored a number of collections in the 1970s and ’80s, primarily on Greek-rooted themes. His most recent collection of poems, Footsteps of the Past, was published in September 2015 by Ronsdale Press.
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