Suchergebnisse

"Liberty of contract" is an honorable phrase. It is not too much to say that contractual freedom is generally regarded as the crowning glory of Anglo-American law in general and of the American constitutional system in particular. Belief in a pre-civil state of nature may have been cast into the discard, but not so the belief in natural law in the sense of ideal law, in natural rights as rights superior—if not anterior—to civil rights, and in freedom of contract as one of the greatest of the natural rights secured by natural law. There is well-nigh universal approbation of the philosophy implicit in Sir Henry Maine's famous conclusion that "the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract," and there is general satisfaction that certain American constitutional provisions preclude any retrograde movement in the future. In particular, there is rejoicing that the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments insure to the American workman his natural freedom of contract against any insidious attempt to relegate him to a servile status. In spite of an occasional voice crying in the wilderness, it is still heretical to suggest that constitutional contractual liberty amounts to a guarantee that economic pressure may be exerted by the rich upon the poor, by the employer upon the employee. The hypothesis deserves further examination. It will be profitable to ascertain how far the use of economic pressure has been deemed natural in English law and philosophy, and then to observe the extent to which it is recognized in American constitutional law as a natural right superior to any legislative enactment.

Pierre Prévost lived from 1751 to 1839. In 1780 he was invited by Frederick the Great to go to Berlin as a professor of young boys at the Academy of Nobles. He became a member of the Academy of Sciences at Berlin, and his entry dissertation dealt with political economy. In 1784 Prévost returned to Geneva, where he became professor of literature at the university of that city. In 1793 he was a member of the National Assembly at Geneva, but retired after four months. In 1794 he was imprisoned for twenty days by a revolutionary tribunal. Immediately upon his release he became professor of physics and philosophy at the University of Geneva, a chair which he exchanged in 1810 for that of general physics. With Marc-Auguste Pictet, Prévost was the codiscoverer of the moving equilibrium of temperature.

While Roman Catholic commentary on specific phases of American life and politics fills many volumes, particularly in the form of periodical literature, systematic analyses of American government in terms of the philosophy of-the Church Fathers and the great scholastics are rarely encountered. Certainly, such an examination addressed to the general reading public is exceptional. Even more unusual is it to find a work from this viewpoint accepted as an influential element in our intellectual development and heritage. Such, however, has been the happy fate of Orestes A. Brownson's The American Republic, which has found its way even into text book discussions of American political ideas. Yet, while the reasons for its notice are, in historical retrospect, understandable, the resultant analysis has done the work somewhat less than justice. It has been treated almost exclusively as part of the literature which marked the triumph of Republicanism and nationalism against the Confederacy and the states' rights doctrine. Now, while Brownson, who entered his spiritual and intellectual resting place after finding Presbyterianism, Universalism, and Unitarianism successively inadequate to his needs, undoubtedly desired to justify the triumphant federal union against its opponents, his fundamental objective, in which he revealed the ardor not unusual in converts, was to show the nature of American political institutions in the light of the tradition of Roman Catholic moral and political philosophy. Indeed, while he deplored the extreme states' rights idea as manifested in Secession, he was even more concerned with the problem of excessive centralization, which he saw as the great potential danger for the future.

"Law in general," says Montesquieu, "is human reason so far as it controls all the people of the earth, and the political and civil laws of each nation can only be considered as individual cases in which this human reason is applied." Reason was held by the Romans to constitute one of the fundamental elements of law. Cicero announced the existence of "a veritable law, true reason (recta ratio), in conformity with nature, universal, immutable and eternal, the commands of which constitute a call to duty and the prohibitions of which avert evil."It is at present unnecessary to consider what influence the Stoic, Academic and Epicurean doctrines had on Roman jurisprudence, and it would be risky to support as absolutely final any view which might be expressed on the subject. During the last phases of the Republic there had already come to exist in the world's capital a fusion of the different schools of philosophy; and traces of the Platonic teachings constantly appear in the expression of the great orator's lofty thought.

No serious consideration of the theory of democracy needs explanation or apology today. The scope and limitations of the present treatment of the subject, however, should be made clear at the outset. The object of this article is to deal with the political philosophy of democracy, or, more precisely, with attempts to ground democratic doctrine on first principles of right. Clearly this does not constitute a complete treatment of democratic theory. Such a treatment would have to deal, inter alia, with the practical operation of democratic processes under varying conditions. Probably the bulk of any full-length discussion of the theory of democracy should be devoted to such matters. Yet, essential though these considerations are, the problem with which this paper deals is of fundamental importance. For, in general, it may be said of all the "practical" arguments about democracy that whatever validity they have must depend upon some theory of ethics, upon some assumption as to the things that are valuable in this world. In other words, I shall not here concern myself with arguments that in practice democracy is less objectionable than other forms of government, because I feel the inadequacy of such arguments considered by themselves.

Protection as an economic creed has been largely an expression of industrial capitalism in Canada. It is true that Ministers of Finance have endorsed the tariff as a means of providing revenue independently of the interests of manufacturers, that such groups as farmers at various times have favoured the imposition of duties on particular commodities, and that certain newspapers, political parties, and organizations of a reform or patriotic character have advanced the general philosophy of protection. But in none of these cases has the support of tariff increases grown out of any broad economic movement. The tariff system developed with the growth of manufacturing industries, and it was pressed upon the Government as a necessary policy by organizations formed to advance the interests of manufacturers.The first organized attempt of Canadian manufacturers to secure protection of which we have knowledge was made at a meeting in Toronto, April 14, 1858, called "for the purpose of recommending such a readjustment of the tariff as would place the manufacturers of Canada on a footing of greater equality with those of the United States." Previous to the meeting, consultations had taken place between a committee in Toronto, the Tariff Reform Association of Montreal, and manufacturers scattered throughout the country, and, as a result of these deliberations, a detailed draft of the necessary tariff changes was drawn up.

Political science is not a sociological science of everything, a psychological study of all human behavior in all aspects, an anthropological inquiry into miscellaneous human customs, or a philosophy of history. Still less is it a study only of the state, which is a form of social organization resulting from one species of political action, or a study only of governments and the stage properties of law and administration.Politics is concerned with a field of human behavior characterized by the recurrence of specific behavior patterns. These peculiarly political patterns, however, must not be treated simply as a series of incidents in mere temporal juxtaposition. Human history must be studied as natural history and physical phenomena have been studied, that is to say, with a view to the detection of a recurrence in these patterns, and, hence, of a process in accordance with which, in given total situations, given detailed behavior patterns recur. These patterns are "lines of conduct" of an individual or group character, pursued in relation to other individuals or groups, as a matter of human method in dealing with such situations, which situations arise partly from the nature of the non-human environment, partly from the historical combination of human factors. The resultant specific action or behavior recurs with the recurrence of the stimuli of the approximately recurrent situation; for example, a certain general situation known as "the outbreak of hostilities" has certain specific consequences in changes of individual conduct toward members of a given nation, and the need of putting through a domestic policy against opposition brings into play the ever similar methods of party organization.

In the introduction to his readings in political philosophy, Professor Coker says, "since the time of Plato there has been, in every philosophic age, some inquiry as to the justification of political organization in general, as to the relative merits of different political forms, and as to the appropriate position and privileges of the individual as master, member, or subject of the political order of society. Why do we have political organization? What in our present condition do we owe to it? What future benefits may we properly expect to derive from it? Are its purposes characteristically manifold and changing, or are they ultimately reducible to a few limited objects or to some single end? What is its best form? Who should control it? What is its proper relation to the ideas and sentiments of the community at its basis? What spheres of individual and social life is it incompetent to enter? Philosophers and publicists of various types have sought to answer these questions in abstract terms."If an analysis be made of the questions with which political thought has been concerned, it is found that emphasis was placed at various periods upon widely different types of problems. In the medieval period political controversy centered in the contest for supremacy between spiritual and temporal authorities; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the dominant interest was in the contest between monarchic and democratic theories of political organization; at present, the extent of state activities has come into prominence, and the connection between political and economic interests is especially close. Besides, political conditions have changed so greatly from age to age that the same problem had quite different meanings at different periods.

Political science has dealt too long, on the one hand, with the ideal, and, on the other hand, with the abnormal and perverted features of political society, rather than with the normal and the eventual. Our theory of ideal democracy is perhaps more suited to the Greek and Roman city-state, with participation as the test of the good citizen. Representation has been heralded as the device which makes the ancient ideal possible on a large scale. But in practice it has been found that the enormous expansion of the public, i.e., the body of persons who have the right of participation, has made the problem far more complex than was at first thought possible. Greek ideals of education and coercion of the citizen body toward general improvement have been carried out with greater success, and our statute books reflect a Hobbesian attitude toward human nature which is true only in part. The political philosophy of democracy must be built on the facts of political life.Shall we break with the Greek and Roman ideal of the participation of the citizen group in the affairs of the state? It is true that the present attitude is a revised form of the democratic ideal of antiquity, but with a different interpretation of the meaning of citizenship. All democratic governments must finally rest on some theory of the suffrage; any study of the fact of non-voting must be based on a theory of the suffrage likewise. With the expansion of the theory of citizenship to include all subjects, a corresponding theory of limited participation was developed—no doubt a product of the Middle Ages. The totality of citizens was distrusted, and some test of participation had to be devised. Such was the origin of religious tests for political participation; such was the origin of the distinction between the right to vote and the fact of citizenship.

Social security is a rather new concept on which ideas have not yet really crystallized anywhere. And this is, of course, true of French Canada as well as of English Canada, or England, or the United States. For the present, the initiators of social-security plans have had the best of it, because their proposals have awakened sympathies everywhere in the people in general. As to the élites, they have not yet had much time to turn around, analyse the idea in depth, and pronounce a definitive judgment, the less so because it is considered good propaganda for the time being not to cool the hopes which it may have raised among the common people.Social security, then, is a new idea in its presentation, which has just been launched and is still taking profit of the smooth seas on which one can almost always count when one is still manoeuvring along the drydocks. Later it will have to meet rough seas, it will have to meet the inquisitive eye of scholars, dissecting it in the light of their philosophy of life, of society, it will have to meet the acid test of experience. When this time comes, and it is coming rapidly, what opinion will definitively take shape in French Canada? French Canadians being what they are, i.e. Gallic-minded and imbued with a Catholic conception of life, what can one expect to meet on that subject in Quebec, if not as a unanimous opinion, at all events as a current of thought more pronounced there than anywhere else? What course can one expect French Canada to take if it is to remain faithful to the essentials of its culture? That is what I shall try to explain, putting before you, first, the essentials which have a direct bearing on the concept of social security. Then I shall proceed, in the second' place, to draw your attention to certain practical points which will show that the views coming out of that process are not at all devoid of factual value.