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In this chapter, the author identifies Oakeshott's lifelong interest in the relationship of governmental authority to democratic regimes in "The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Skepticism." Oakeshott argued that civil society is never the ideal since liberty requires authority, creating space for modern governments to be analyzed on a continuum of faith or skepticism. The ambiguity of European politics identifies a serving of these two masters, & relates to Montesquieu's identification of the sovereign character attributed to government. Contending advocacies of modern European political life bring into question whether or not democratic institutions of governance can be prevented from selling themselves to the politics of faith (pursuit of the perfection of humankind) rather than maintaining a detached politics of skepticism focusing on peace & order. Modern government power is the result of an incorrect conflation of the interchangeability of ruling & political activity that is supported by the current democratic rhetoric & yearning for an ideal of democracy vulnerable to the promises of a final pristine liberal democracy emanating from a politics of faith. 23 References. J. Harwell

'IT LOOKS TO ME DISTINCTLY LIKE CANADIAN FEDERALISM'S referendum to lose', I wrote late last winter, anticipating the call from Jacques Parizeau's provincial Parti Québécois for the second referendum on Quebec 'sovereignty' in fifteen years, expected sometime in 1995. Thank goodness I took the precaution to add: 'bearing in mind, of course, that from the sovereignists' angle of vision, it appears to be their referendum to lose, too.' But I confess I meant the qualification to be taken as tongue-in-cheek rather than as a serious guess about what then seemed likely to lie ahead. Certainly the auguries, had the PQ decided to go ahead with its referendum in early 1995, suggested that the federalists in Quebec would probably have carried the day as decisively as they had in 1980, when almost 60 per cent of Quebeckers rejected René Lévesque's first PQ referendum on 'sovereignty-association'.

CANADIAN POLITICAL ARITHMETIC IS A TRICKY BUSINESS. IN Canadian politics, as in Alice's Wonderland, things become 'curiouser and curiouser'. In suggesting, on the eve of the October, 1993 Canadian federal election, that it looked like 'the Liberals' election to lose', I thought I had gone out on a limb. Brian Mulroney, who by the date of his departure was regarded throughout English Canada with almost universal antipathy, had retired. With their new leader, Prime Minister Kim Campbell, at the helm, polls published at the time the election was called indicated that the ruling Conservatives were favoured by 36 per cent of leaning and decided voters, as compare to 33 per cent for the Liberals. The Tories could win, or at least deny the liberals a clear majority.

'IF THE STATE DID NOT EXIST, WE WOULD HAVE TO INVENT IT. Comment.' Few of the responses to this examination question qualified its suggestion that the state might be amenable to instantaneous contrivance or conscious design. The oversight on the part of my undergraduate charges pointed to the still potent legacy of a generation of Canadian political artificers whose projects of inventing the Canadian state had abetted the rise of a species of 'constitutional politics' given to the ever more elaborate concoction of comprehensive solutions to Canada's vexing constitutional shortcomings. These projects tended to politicize historically embedded elements in the constitutional order, serviceable if imperfect, which had been conventionally regarded as resistant beyond redemption to improved reformulation. This new-style politics was at centre stage in the long and eventful prime ministerial years of the Liberal Party's Pierre Trudeau, the great Cartesian inventor par excellence of the contemporary Canadian state. It would remain a central feature of the nine-year incumbency of Trudeau's Conservative Party successor, Brian Mulroney. Trudeau's vision of a reinvented Canada had proceeded from his background preparation for public life as an academic constitutional lawyer. Mulroney, aiming to finesse what the more cerebral Trudeau could not, would bring to bear on the affairs of the Canadian state the skills of a labour lawyer with the know-how to get Canada's perennially fractious provinces and interest groups to the political bargaining table, there to resolve once and for all any constitutional differences still outstanding.

BRITISH READERS MAY RECOLLECT MARTIN'S POIGNANT expression of regret, in Voltaire's Candide, that the French and English had felt it necessary to go to war in North America over 'quelques arpents de neige vers le Canada'. Martin captures the sense of an enduring European perception of Canada — an indeterminate expanse of ice and snow held firmly in winter's Arctic grip throughout much of the year. His sardonic utterance reminds us of the overseas rivalries of Canada's European parents out of which were born its historic 'two solitudes', its distinct linguistic and cultural communities, one proudly French, the other British in descent, their entwined affairs remaining persistently refractory long after the eventual emergence from its colonial past of present-day Canada.

AbstractOne way of seeing Machiavelli is as a literary artist who appreciated, in his figurative portraiture of princes, that an effective likeness will always reveal to the attentive eye, something of the prince, of his audience, and of the portraitist himself. And since politics is an activity in which, on his understanding, there is no absolute truth, but only multifarious effectual truths; a comprehensive depiction of political life must embrace irreconcilable points of view as diverse as those of individual princes, the people, and "each man." The observer's task thus demanded perspectival powers that would test the fabled eyes of Argus. This article sets out the evidence supporting such an interpretation in individual texts of Machiavelli's works, while suggesting how each contributes to the completed literary artistry of his brilliantly evoked world of pictures in words of political aspiration, failure and achievement.