The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month

There's commemorative cannon-fire outside my office right now, and I'm more disgusted than moved. Yet more artillery fire seems to me to miss what should be the point.

A Veteran's/ Armistice/ Remembrance Day observed on November 11 in particular shouldn't just mean a gauzy and somber honoring of live veterans and fallen soldiers. It should be in part a day of anger and horror about the particular war that ended on this day, the stupid brutality of it, and the evil that followed in its wake. Of course, no continuously-existing government (US, UK, Canada) is likely to create a day officially dedicated to pointing out that its predecessor contributed to the deaths of millions for no good cause. But we have the capacity to remember lessons other than the official ones.

John Quiggin strikes the right note here.

No great surprise, but noteworthy:

Senate defeats Coburn amendment on NSF funding of political science.

Remember, remember...

one of the most-read posts ever on this blog: Guy Fawkes Day, V for Vendetta, and American politics.

This week

Tuesday, November 3: Deadline for proposals for the Canadian Political Science Association, June 1-3 in Montreal. Proposals in all areas of political theory welcome; and there's a thematic workshop on "non-ideal and institutional theory."

Wednesday, October 4, 6 pm: Thomas Pogge (Philosophy, Yale) will deliver the Osler Lecture at McGill: "The Health Impact Fund: Pharmaceutical Innovation Also For the Poor?", Palmer Howard Amphitheater, McIntyre Medical Sciences Building

Thursday, October 5 12 pm: Dwight Newman, "Untangling Equality-Based Arguments for Indigenous Rights," CREUM room 309.

Friday, October 6, 2 pm: Andrew March (Political Science, Yale), GRIPP/ Montreal Political Theory Workshop, "Islamic Legal Theory, Secularism and Religious Freedom : Is Modern Religious Freedom Sufficient for the Shari’a ’Purpose’ [Maqsid] of ’Preserving Religion’ ?" UQAM room W 5215

GRIPP Manuscript Workshop Award

THE ANNUAL MONTREAL POLITICAL THEORY MANUSCRIPT WORKSHOP AWARD

Call for applications: The Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique de Montréal (GRIPP), spanning the departments of political science and philosophy at McGill University, l'Université de Montréal, Concordia University, and l'Université du Québec à Montréal, invites applications for its 2010 manuscript workshop award. The recipient of the award will be invited to Montreal for a day-long workshop in March/April 2010 dedicated to his or her book manuscript. This "author meets critics" workshop will comprise four to five sessions dedicated to critical discussion of the manuscript; each session will begin with a critical commentary on a section of the manuscript by a political theorist or philosopher who is part of Montreal's GRIPP community. The format is designed to maximize feedback for a book-in-progress. The award covers the costs of travel, accommodation, and meals.

Eligibility:

A. Topic: The manuscript topic is open within political theory and political philosophy, but we are especially interested in manuscripts related to at least one of these GRIPP research themes: 1) the history of liberal and democratic thought, especially early modern thought; 2) moral psychology and political agency, or politics and affect or emotions or rhetoric; 3) democracy, diversity, and pluralism. 4) democracy, justice, and transnational institutions.

B. Manuscript: Unpublished book manuscripts in English or French, by applicants with PhD in hand by 1 September 2009, are eligible. Applicants must have a complete or nearly complete draft (at least 4/5 of final draft) ready to present at the workshop. In the case of co-authored manuscripts, only one of the co-authors is eligible to apply.

C. Application: Please submit the following materials: 1) a curriculum vitae; 2) a table of contents; 3) a short abstract of the book project, up to 200 words; 4) a longer book abstract up to 2500 words; and, in the case of applicants with previous book publication(s), (5) three reviews, from established journals in the field, of the applicant's most recently published monograph. Candidates are not required to, but may if they wish, submit two letters of recommendation speaking to the merits of the book project. Please do not send writing samples. Send materials to GRIPP Manuscript Workshop Award, Department of Political Science, McGill University, 855 Sherbrooke St W, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H3A 2T7. Review of applications begins 10 January 2010. Contact Arash Abizadeh with questions.

Previous GRIPP Manuscript Workshops:
Kinch Hoekstra (UC Berkeley), Thomas Hobbes and the Creation of Order, March 2009
Alan Patten (Princeton), Equal Recognition: The Moral Foundations of Minority Cultural Rights, April 2009

------------------------------------------------

LE PRIX ANNUEL DE L’ATELIER DE MANUSCRIT DE PHILOSOPHIE POLITIQUE DE MONTRÉAL

Appel à candidature: Le groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique de Montréal (GRIPP), qui réunit des chercheurs des départements de science politique et de philosophie de l’Université McGill, de l’Université de Montréal, de l’Université Concordia et de l’Université du Québec à Montréal, fait un appel à candidature pour son prix 2010 de l’atelier de manuscrit. Le lauréat sera invité à Montréal en mars/avril 2010 pour un atelier d’une journée complète consacré au manuscrit de son livre. Cet atelier du type « l’auteur rencontre ses critiques » comprendra quatre ou cinq séances de discussions critiques sur le manuscrit ; pour chacune d’entre elles, un spécialiste de théorie politique ou un philosophe membre de la communauté montréalaise du GRIPP lancera la discussion par un commentaire critique d’une des sections du manuscrit. Ceci a pour but de faciliter les échanges sur un livre en chantier. Le prix couvre les dépenses de voyage, d’hébergement et de repas.

Éligibilité :

A- Sujet : De façon générale, le manuscrit doit traiter de théorie politique ou de philosophie politique, mais nous sommes tout particulièrement intéressés aux manuscrits qui correspondent à l’une des thématiques de recherche du GRIPP : 1) l’histoire de la pensée libérale et démocratique, et notamment du début de la pensée moderne; 2) la psychologie morale du sujet (ou encore de l’agent) politique, ainsi que la politique et les affects, les émotions ou la rhétorique; 3) la démocratie, la diversité et le pluralisme; 4) la démocratie, la justice et les institutions transnationales.

B- Manuscrit : Sont éligibles tous les manuscrits de livres en français ou en anglais, non encore publiés, et dont l’auteur a reçu un doctorat avant le 1er septembre 2009. Les candidats devront avoir une version complète, ou presque (au moins 4/5e de la version finale), à présenter à l’atelier. Pour ce qui concerne les manuscrits coécrits, seul l’un des coauteurs est éligible.

C- Soumission : Vous voudrez bien fournir les documents suivants : 1) un curriculum vitae; 2) une table des matières; 3) un court résumé du projet du livre de moins de 200 mots; 4) un résumé plus long, de moins de 2 500 mots; et, dans le cas de candidats ayant déjà publié, 5) trois recensions parues dans des revues spécialisées et reconnues dans le domaine de la plus récente monographie publiée. Les candidats peuvent, s’ils le souhaitent, joindre deux lettres de recommandation présentant l’intérêt de leur projet de livre. Nous vous prions de ne pas envoyer d’extraits de manuscrit. Envoyez ces documents à : GRIPP Manuscript Workshop Award, Département de science politique, Université de McGill, 855, rue Sherbrooke ouest, Montréal, Québec, Canada, H3A 2T7. L’examen des candidatures commencera le 10 janvier 2010. Pour toute information supplémentaire, veuillez contacter Dominique Leydet

Les précédents lauréats des ateliers de manuscrit du GRIPP furent :

Kinch Hoekstra (UC Berkeley), Thomas Hobbes and the Creation of Order, mars 2009

Alan Patten (Princeton), Equal Recognition: The Moral Foundations of Minority Cultural Rights, avril 2009

Hither and Yon

Thursday, October 29: "Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom," at the Program in Ethics and Public Affairs, Princeton.

Friday, November 13: "Contra Politanism," at Osgoode Hall Law School's seminar series "Legal Philosophy between State and Transnationalism."

Taylor on Habermas

At "The Immanent Frame," an essay written on the occasion of Habermas' eightieth birthday.

Perking lots

"The chancellor's job had come to be defined as providing parking for the faculty, sex for the students, and athletics for the alumni." --Then-President of the University of California Clark Kerr.

The University of California at Berkeley rewards Nobel prize-winners with free parking spots in desirable on-campus locations.

1999 movies

NYT movie critic A.O. Scott, in an article about the movies of 1962, writes

Searching beyond the dozen at the Brooklyn Academy you find enough riches to support the contention of Armond White, the current chairman of the Critics Circle, that 1962 was as bountiful a cinematic year as 1939. Or maybe 1999, or for all we know 2010.

I'm not on the film geek memo distribution list, so I wouldn't have heard if this were the case, but: is there some consensus that 1999 was an especially great year in movie history? I can't say that it felt that way to me at the time; it seemed like the indie/ Miramax wave of creativity had crested and become a new kind of routine. See: Holy Smoke, starring Kate "naked again!" Winslett and Harvey Keitel; combine ingredients, press play.

The Matrix, of course, was epoch-making in its way. Toy Story 2 seems to be many people's choice for the best Pixar movie ever, or until the last three years. And The Sixth Sense, The Blair Witch Project, and Being John Malkovich do make for a pretty impressive trio of creativity.

But that was the year of the greatest anticlimax in anticipated-blockbuster history (Star Wars Episode 1); a bunch of award-bait that I think are in retrospect agreed to have been overrated at best and really quite bad at worst (American Beauty, Cider House Rules, The End of the Affair, Eyes Wide Shut); some truly awful mass-market stuff (Wild Wild West); and I guess a couple of things that still inspire love-it-or-hate-it arguments (Magnolia, Three Kings, Talented Mr. Ripley).

And then it's the year of Runaway Bride, Never Been Kissed, The Mummy, Notting Hill, and Analyze This. Doesn't come any more ordinary than that, no matter how many "new classics" Turner anoints. I've never seen Notting Hill or Analyze This, and I do think The Mummy was a terrific ordinary movie, but I still think the overall judgment is sound.

Looking at the list, it turns out I can assemble a list to get enthusiastic about:
Being John Malkovich, Sixth Sense, Election, ExistenZ, Run Lola Run, South Park, Pushing Tin, The Matrix, Iron Giant, Dogma, Girl Interrupted, 200 Cigarettes, Better Than Chocolate. That seems like an impressive list, and maybe I'm letting my distaste for American Beauty carry too much weight.

But that's just my list, my tastes. Does that list make film geeks' hearts go a-twitter? Does it really tower over any other year of the 90s-- say, 1994, the year of Pulp Fiction, Clerks, Ed Wood, Muriel's Wedding, Reality Bites, two of the Three Colors movies, and Barcelona?

Or are American Beauty and Eyes Wide Shut really remembered as movies for the ages?

Jeff Isaac in the Chronicle on political science

Jeffrey Isaac takes to the pages of the Chronicle to discuss political science, the NSF, and the Coburn amendment. Jeff has recently assumed the editorship of Perspectives on Politics, a journal in part meant to bridge the gap between peer-reviewed social science and public accessibility and relevance, and he urges the discipline to take the occasion of the NSF fight to reflect on that gap-- not to so emphasize our science-ness as to lose sight of our public-ness.

Elinor Ostrom

In 2008, political scientist Elinor Ostrom was awarded an honorary degree from McGill University. In 2009, she was awarded the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Coincidence? Well, yeah.

I've only met Professor Ostrom once, when her husband Vincent Ostrom guest-lectured in my class in... 2002, I guess. But I certainly know, admire, and draw on her work, and am delighted with this outcome!

See discussions from Henry Farrell, Sean Safford, Alex Tabarrok, Arnold Kling, and Mike Munger (and for giggles, click through Munger's link to the anonymous econ grad students blowing gaskets), among people who (unlike Paul Krugman and Steven Levitt) had heard of Ostrom before today.

Update: On Henry's post, be sure to read down the comments thread far enough to see the illuminating exchange between him and Pete Boettke.

Hither and yon: UC Berkeley edition

Tomorrow I'll be giving "Federalism and constitutional entrenchment" at the Berkeley political theory workshop, Harris Room (Rm 119), Moses Hall, 3 pm.

Saturday I'll be giving "From Liberal constitutionalism to pluralism" at a Center for British Studies conference on "Modern Pluralism: Anglo-American Debates since 1880", Moses Hall 223, 9:30 am.

A good week for bragging

Two McGill alumni were awarded Nobel prizes this week: Jack Szostak, (BSc'72) (cell biology) was a co-winner of the Prize for Medicine and Willard Boyle (BSc'47, MSc'48, PhD'50) was a co-winner of the Prize in Physics.

And in the new Times Higher Education Supplement rankings, McGill was ranked 18th in the world, top in Canada, and top public university in North America. McGill was ranked 10th in life sciences, 17th in social sciences,and 14th in arts and humanities. Rankings need to be taken with many, many grains of salt, of course. But still: yay us.

And speaking of the Chronicle...

I happily endorse this plea from an editor at the University of Virginia Press: "If you don't buy 'em, we can't afford to publish 'em."

Great Books

From the Chronicle, an essay by W.A. Pannapacker called "Confessions of a Middlebrow Professor," parts of which strike home for me.

In my early 20s, when I was starting out as a graduate student in the humanities, I hosted a small gathering at my apartment. It didn't take long for my guests to begin scrutinizing my bookshelves. (I do the same thing now, of course, whenever I am at a party.) I remember that there were numerous battered anthologies, at least a hundred paperback classics, the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (acquired as a Book-of-the-Month Club premium), probably six copies of PMLA, and several shelves of books that I had retained from childhood, including the Time-Life Library of Art and the Old West Time-Life Series in "hand-tooled Naugahyde leather."

Perhaps the most revered set of volumes from my childhood—proudly displayed—was Great Books of the Western World, in 54 leatherette volumes. I remember I bought them all at once for $10 at a church sale when I was about 13; it took me two trips to carry them home in plastic grocery bags.

"Your clay feet are showing," said one of my guests, another graduate student, as she removed Volume 1 of the Great Books from my shelves. I caught the biblical allusion, but it took me a couple of years to realize the implication of the remark: My background was lacking. If graduate school was a quiz show, then I was Herbert Stempel trying to make it in the world of Charles Van Doren.[...]

The Great Books were expressions of hope for many people who had historically not had access to higher education.

There was something awe-inspiring about that series for me, even if I acquired it a generation late. The Great Books seemed so serious. They had small type printed in two columns; there were no annotations, no concessions to the beginner.[...]
there was a reason that you could buy the Great Books for $10 by that time. The whole notion of a stable canon of books had gone out of fashion, and not even recently: Writers such as Dwight MacDonald had been mocking the Great Books since they first appeared. As Beam observes, "The Great Books were synonymous with boosterism, Babbittry, and H.L. Mencken's benighted boobocracy." Display them in your living room, and you might as well put plastic covers on the colonial couch beneath your reproduction Grandma Moses with the copy of The Power of Positive Thinking on your coffee table. Great Books, Beam writes, "were everything that was wrong, unchic and middlebrow about middle America."

As Paul Fussell wrote in Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, "It is in the middle-class dwelling that you're likely to spot the 54-volume set of the Great Books, together with the half-witted two-volume Syntopicon, because the middles, the great audience for how-to books, believe in authorities."

I'm about the same age as Pannapacker, and like him, was not to the academic or highbrow manner born. I read my first Marx, Smith, Mill, Shakespeare, Plutarch, and Plato in that Great Books set. In sixth grade I carried the Marx and Smith volumes by turn into school with me and read them during reading time-- and if I didn't understand much, I also didn't understand nothing, when I worked at it.

And, like Pannapacker, I've received the occasional smirk or snarky comment about them, in my life as it is now.

Of course, lots of the substantive criticisms are right-- the two-volume Synopticon is bizarre. And the books themselves as physical objects, which once impressed me, now don't. I don't read from them anymore. The paper on which they're printed is unbelievably thin and fragile, the print ridiculously small. Even before all those public-domain works went online, it was easier to get a cheap Penguin or Dover paperback of whatever I wanted to read than to try to do serious scholarly reading out of those volumes. But they're still on the top shelf of the bookcases in my living room, and I'm still grateful to them-- and to Mortimer Adler's democratizing middlebrowness.

Come to Montreal: Canadian Political Science Association Annual Meeting, June 1-3 2010

Call for papers: open call in political theory as well as call for papers on "non-ideal and institutional theory

The CFP for the 2010 CPSA in Montreal is now open: Call for papers, Instructions for submitting, Proposal submission form.

Proposals are due by November 3, 2009.

For political theorists:

We welcome paper, panel, and roundtable proposals in all areas of political theory. In addition, we will be holding a conference within the conference on "Non-ideal and institutional theory." That CFP is below.

Workshop 8 – Political Theory: Non-ideal and Institutional Theory
Organizers: Jacob T. Levy (McGill) and Jennifer Rubenstein (Viriginia)

From the ethics of conduct during wartime to justice in transitional societies to restitution for collective harms, political theorists have long been concerned with understanding political morality in morally compromised or materially constrained settings—in what Arendt termed “dark times.” Since Rawls, we have come to call this “non-ideal” theory: theory about moral choices and political circumstances that wouldn’t arise at all under ideal conditions. In recent years, political philosophers have done a great deal of methodological and metatheoretical work on the ideal/non-ideal distinction, while political theorists have undertaken non-ideal normative analysis of a wide range of problems. We seek both papers that are explicitly about non-ideal political theory and papers that do non-ideal theory, in order to encourage engagement between methodological reflections and normative arguments.

We especially welcome papers that do these things with attention to political institutions, by—for example— proposing institutional designs for non-ideal settings, analyzing ideal versus non-ideal ways of thinking about the justice of institutional structures, or showing how particular institutions are themselves the sources of the morally compromised settings in which decision-making must take place. In other words, we invite papers that construe institutions as either sources of injustice or as mechanisms for mitigating injustice, as obstacles to reform or as frameworks for pursuing it.

While the workshop focuses on issues that have thus far been taken up primarily in the context of analytic normative theory, we actively encourage papers with historical or critical perspectives on these issues. Finally, while the workshop itself addresses substantive problems in non-ideal and institutional theory, papers need not be explicitly framed in those terms.

More American students enrolling at Canadian universities

See this story.

Michael Sandel to take to the airwaves

Sandel's Harvard course on "Justice" will be broadcast by PBS, as you may have heard. This article in the Chronicle by Christopher Shea (of the Boston Globe's Ideas section) treats that news in the context of Sandel's intellectual career and distinctive positions. Frequent blogtopic Charles Taylor , occasional blog commentator Josh Cohen, and Stephen Holmes all offer comments.

New SSPP website

The Society for Social and Political Philosophy ["historical, continental, and feminist perspectives," says the tagline] has a new website and blog.

MacArthur

Looks like I can just repost this verbatim, with this year's link on top, and substituting in "one economist."

posted September 23 2008: Continuing a recent trend...

noted here and here, academic humanists and social scientists are in notably short supply among this year's MacArthur Fellows. One archaeologist-anthropologist and one retired historian, out of a group of 25. The awardees are mainly practicing artists (novelist, violinist, sculptor, etc) or academic scientists, biomedical researchers, and engineers.

North America's leading Proust scholar and all his spiritual kin are safe for another year.

Shocking headline of the day

"Students Tend to Ignore Hygiene Tips, Study Finds"

That, surprisingly enough, is not from the Onion's indispensible series of "study finds" articles, such as New Study Finds College Binge Drinking To Be A Blast, Study Finds Link Between Red Wine, Letting Mother Know What You Really Think, and Teen Sex Linked To Drugs And Alcohol, Reports Center For Figuring Out Really Obvious Things.

Best passage:

College health officials who want students to change their habits must be creative, communicate through social-networking sites, and lose the scientific jargon and polite euphemisms, says Benjamin J. Chapman, an assistant professor of family and consumer sciences and a food-safety specialist at North Carolina State.

"For example," he says, "don't refer to something as a 'gastrointestinal illness.' Instead tell them, 'This could make you puke,' or 'Dude, wash your hands.'"

I hereby formally ask my students to wash their hands from time to time in the event of an H1N1 outbreak, and in exchange promise not to address them as "dude."

Berlin Centenary Conference at Harvard

Isaiah Berlin: Centennial Reflections

Harvard University, September 25th-26th 2009

Tsai Auditorium, Center for Government and International Studies,

1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge MA








Friday September 25
10:00am Welcoming Remarks

10:15-12:30pm Politics Between Utopia and Reality
Michael Walzer – Should We Reclaim Political Utopianism

Malachi Hacohen – Cosmopolitanism, the European Nation State and Jewish Life: Berlin and Popper

2:15-4:30pm Literature and the History of Ideas
Svetlana Boym – Dialogues on Liberty Beyond the Cold War: Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova

Alan Ryan – The History of Ideas as Psychodrama

9:00pm “Multi-Media Session” Featuring clips of filmed conversations with Isaiah Berlin

Saturday September 26

10:15-12:30pm Liberty and Liberalism
Janos Kis – Berlin's Two Concepts of Positive Liberty

Martha Nussbaum – Political Liberalism and Comprehensive Liberalism

2:15-4:30pm Pluralism: Historical Origins and Philosophical Foundations
Pratap Mehta – What is Pluralism and How Does it Matter?

Bernard Yack – The Significance of Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment

5:00-6:00pm Special Session
Amartya Sen – What Difference Does Pluralism Make?

Discussants and Chairs: Ioannis Evrigenis, Peter Eli Gordon, Stanley Hoffmann, Erin Kelly, Louis Menand, Michael Rosen, Nancy Rosenblum, Emma Rothschild, T. M. Scanlon.
Sponsored by the Department of Government, the Department of Philosophy, the Center for Jewish Studies, and the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics.

Le fédéralisme multinational en perspective : un modèle viable ?

Colloque organisé par Michel Seymour à l’Université du Québec à Montréal

25-26-27 septembre 2009, salle D-R200 de l’UQAM (Pavillon Athanase-David, 1430 Saint-Denis)

Qu’est-ce que le fédéralisme multinational ? Quels sont les enjeux soulevés par la présence de plusieurs peuples au sein d’un État fédéral ? Est-ce que le fédéralisme apparaît tout indiqué pour gérer la diversité nationale ? Ces questions se posent au Canada depuis toujours, mais elles se posent aussi dans plusieurs autres sociétés. Des États fédéraux multinationaux tels que l’URSS, la Yougoslavie et la Tchécoslovaquie n’existent plus. La Belgique vacille face au défi d’accommoder la diversité nationale en son sein. Aussi, même si d’autres États multinationaux fédéraux ou quasi-fédéraux tels que l’Inde, l’Espagne et le Canada existent encore, la question de la viabilité de l’État fédéral multinational doit être soulevée.

Des questions plus spécifiques peuvent aussi être posées qui mettent en relation les expériences de sociétés particulières avec la problématique générale du fédéralisme multinational. Quelles sont les promesses du fédéralisme multinational canadien ? Que penser de la reconnaissance du Québec comme nation, de la résolution possible du déséquilibre fiscal, de la limitation du « pouvoir fédéral de dépenser », du rôle international que joue ou que pourrait jouer le Québec et du fédéralisme asymétrique ? S’agit-il d’éléments qui composent le fédéralisme multinational ?


More information is here.

GRIPP: Cécile Laborde – Political Liberalism and the Separation-Establishment Debate: A Republican Interpretation

Wednesday, September 16, 4-6 pm, University of Montreal room Z-330 (Pavillon McNicoll): Cécile Laborde, Professor of Political Theory at University College London, and the author most recetnly of Critical Republicanism. The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy (Oxford Political Theory series, Oxford University Press, 2008) will present her paper "Political Liberalism and the Separation-Establishment Debate: A Republican Interpretation" to a session of the Groupe de Recherche Interuniversitaire en Philosophie Politique.

On nationalism and federalism

Via Matt Yglesias, I see that Lawrence Martin is in the Globe and Mail making the following interesting point.

Since its debut election campaign in 1993, the Bloc has never been beaten by a federalist party. Not in six elections. The demise of the Bloquistes is often predicted. It never happens. They are entrenched. In the next campaign, they are on course to rout the Liberals and Conservatives in Quebec again. [...]

The coddling of the BQ sees Canadian taxpayers subsidize the separatist party to the tune of millions of dollars to run its election campaigns. In that they have to campaign in only one province, the system absurdly favours it over federalist parties. The Bloc is allowed to participate in the English-language debates while running no candidates outside Quebec. Again, nothing is done. We wouldn't want to risk offending their delicate sensibilities.

But, for all its inroads, the Bloc has no reason to celebrate.

There's a great paradox at work here, a rollout of unintended consequences. The Bloc successes have bred failure. The better the BQ does, the further it gets from its goal of sovereignty. The separatists were closest to realizing that ambition in the early-to-mid-nineties, shortly after the Bloc arrived on the scene. Since that time, support for the sovereignty option, despite all the Bloc victories, has consistently been in decline.

The Bloc, it can be mischievously argued, has served the cause of a united Canada. Rarely over the past half-century has Canadian unity been as solid as it is today. It may well be that the Bloc, with its imposing fed-baiting presence in Ottawa, suffices for many Quebeckers as their instrument of sovereignty. It gives vent to pride, to autonomist passions. It wins concessions for the franchise.

If we were to take away the Bloc, if only Canada-minded federalist parties represented Quebeckers in Ottawa, a different scenario is easily imaginable. Conditions could well exist for a more spirited and fractious separatist movement.

Benefiting from the shrewd leadership of Gilles Duceppe and a smart, disciplined caucus, the Bloc has been able to address many of Quebec's grievances. But its steady progress now sees it scraping the barrel in search of meaningful injustices to fortify its underlying pathology (witness its current election advertising planning).

The idea that secessionist politics could be a stabilizing force in a multinational federation figures prominently in Wayne Norman's Negotiating Nationalism (see especially ch. 6) as well as in my own "Federalism, Liberalism, and the Separation of Loyalties," which adds to Norman's arguments an account of how the federal structure of the rest of constitution affects the outcomes of secessionist politics in one culturally distinct province. Three years after his book and two years after my article, I still think we're right, but it's a claim that makes Canadian audiences look at me funny. Interesting to see it start to go mainstream.