La démocratie, c'est le mal., Marc Angenot, Québec : Presses de l'Université Laval, 2004, 182 pages.

Par ce titre incisif, Angenot indique le point de départ de l'ensemble des critiques adressées à la démocratie parlementaire et au suffrage universel au cours du développement idéologique qui a préparé les grandes révolutions du siècle dernier: l'identification d'un mal social. L'auteur vise à retracer l'histoire des critiques et des contre-propositions formulées par certains secteurs de l'extrême gauche, socialistes et libertaires, au cours du “ long XIXe siècle ” (de 1815 à la Première Guerre mondiale) devant les vices et les crimes d'un état social jugé corrompu en ses principes. Il ne s'agit pas de soumettre d'anciennes querelles idéologiques à l'épreuve de la réalité car polémiquer avec des chimères est loin d'être le but d'Angenot. Si cette démarche a un intérêt d'actualité, c'est plutôt parce que les grands malheurs du XXe siècle, à savoir les dérives du bolchevisme et des fascismes, trouvent leur origine dans ce foisonnement idéologique, dans la mesure où il y a préparé les esprits. Il demeure donc pertinent d'interroger ces argumentaires et d'identifier l' “ aveuglement ” sur lequel ils s'érigent. Le problème est cette “ hostilité de principe ” qui s'est exprimée à travers le discours du militantisme antidémocratique. La méthode est de rappeler l'essentiel des conjectures et de recréer les débats internes et inhérents à toute mouvance militante, afin d'expliquer la persistance d'une telle hostilité.

Jeux d'échelle et transformation de l'État : le gouvernement des territoires en France et au Québec., Laurence Bherer, Jean-Pierre Collin, Éric Kerrouche et Jacques Palard (sous la direction de)., Québec : Les Presses de l'Université Laval, Québec, 2005, 527 p.

Les réformes territoriales initiées par Louise Harel au Québec et Jean-Pierre Chevènement en France sont au cœur du propos de cet ouvrage. Ces transformations ont eu lieu simultanément il y a environ cinq ans et attestent des préoccupations de réorganisation de la gouvernance territoriale dans ces deux États. L'ouvrage contribue à faire progresser la réflexion sur les formes émergentes de l'action publique territoriale en relativisant la portée de ce mouvement par l'analyse comparative. Approximativement cinq ans après que le Québec et la France eurent entrepris des réformes importantes de gestion territoriale, le besoin de faire le point et de dresser un premier bilan s'imposait. Cet ouvrage y participe directement.

Canada Among Nations 2005: Split Images, Andrew F. Cooper and Dane Rowlands, eds., Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2005, pp. xiv, 295.

Split Images marks the twenty-first installment of the Canada Among Nations series. It also marks a new beginning as the first collaboration between the series host institution, the Norman Patterson School of International Affairs, and the Centre for International Governance and Innovation at the University of Waterloo, editors Andrew Cooper and Dane Rowlands, and publisher, McGill-Queen's University Press. It is reassuring to see that others have come forward to assume the task of providing an annual assessment of Canadian foreign policy, its current challenges, and future prospects. The Canada Among Nations series has, through the years, provided a valuable chronicle of the pressing concerns of the day. On occasion the volume has been overshadowed by unexpected events, such as the terrorist attacks of September 11th, that give the text less urgency than it would otherwise have. Potentially, this volume could have suffered a similar fate, given the election of Stephen Harper's minority government after the collection went to press. Repeated references to the Liberal government's International Policy Statement (IPS), not to mention the image of Paul Martin, Jr., that graces the cover, seem somewhat nostalgic, in the face of the Harper government's move to put its own face on such critically important policy arenas as relations with the United States, defence spending, climate change and the Middle East, among others.

Municipal Reform in Canada: Reconfiguration, Re-Empowerment, and Rebalancing, Joseph Garcea and Edward C. LeSage, Jr., eds., Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. ix, 350.

This book will be an essential reference for students of local government in Canada. It deals with the most recent period of municipal reform, from 1990 onwards. There are chapters on each of the ten provinces, plus a combined chapter on the northern territories. The editors establish an analytical framework for the book in their introduction, and then try to bring things together in a long concluding chapter. The individual chapters differ somewhat in approach, but the editors were fairly successful in getting the contributors to keep to a common analytical framework. Reading the whole book straight through is a bit of a slog, because there is so much detail; on the other hand, it is handy to have all this material collected together. It will stimulate useful reflection, as much about what is not here as what is.

Political Writings, Margaret Cavendish (Susan James, ed.), New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. xxxix, 298.

The publication of Margaret Cavendish's Political Writings is part of a recent effort to make Cavendish's seventeenth-century works more accessible to students and scholars alike. Political Writings is a particularly significant addition to this effort in that it contains two of Cavendish's most explicitly political texts, A Description of a New World called the Blazing World (1666), Cavendish's best-known endeavour in utopian fiction, along with the first modern edition of Orations of Divers Sorts (1662). Combined with a concise introduction by the volume's editor, philosopher Susan James, who expertly navigates Cavendish's many influences and references—ancient and modern—the book effectively puts Cavendish on the map as a political thinker. Although the most published Englishwoman of her period, and now the subject of a veritable growth industry in the fields of early modern literary and gender history, Margaret Cavendish has received virtually no attention in the field of political thought. With her inclusion in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series, there is hope that Cavendish will now be treated and analyzed, not just as the prolific writer of drama, poetry and natural philosophy that she was, but as an incisive thinker who engaged with, and published on, the most vital political questions facing Civil War and Restoration England.

Les Yes Men. Comment démasquer (en s'amusant un peu) l'imposture néolibérale !, Andy Bichlbaum, Mike Bonanno, Traduction : Marc Saint-Upéry; Paris : La Découverte, 2005, 191 p.

Cet ouvrage ne comporte ni thèse, ni argumentaire. Ce n'est pas un essai à proprement parler, ni entièrement une œuvre de fiction. C'est un livre inclassable, drôle et engagé. Intelligent. Risqué.

Friends, Citizens, Strangers: Essays on Where We Belong, Richard Vernon, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005, pp. vii, 325.

“Should we put locality before citizenship, citizenship before human obligations?” This is the central question animating Richard Vernon's new book. He defines the three sorts of relationship it invokes as follows. Ties of friendship are those partial relationships which “arise from the particular and local character of our lives, lived as, clearly they must be, in particular local contexts”; ties of citizenship are those that “arise from sharing political space, from common subjection to law, and from participation in institutions and processes through which consent to political authority is generated”; and ties among strangers “arise among those who are ‘only humans,’ [who are] categorically but not concretely related to us” (3–4). Vernon recognizes that all three are important, and that is why he believes we need to face “the question of priority of attachment.” He himself does so through an investigation of citizenship, which he pursues in two ways. First, with a number of fascinating chapters—all of them models of scholarship in the history of political ideas—that examine how the question of priority of attachment was dealt with by eight writers, four English (Locke, Wollstonecraft, George Eliot and Mill) and four French (Rousseau, Comte, Proudhon and Bergson). Vernon claims that his question has, for historical reasons, been particularly pronounced in these two countries, although I must say that I cannot think of one country in which it has not. Regardless, he then deals with it more directly, in chapters about the notion of a crime against humanity and about the very nature of special ties and what they imply we owe each other. Finally, in the book's concluding chapter, Vernon offers us an outline of his own solution to the question.

Jacob Burckhardt's Social and Political Thought, Richard Sigurdson, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004, xii, pp. 279.

Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) has long been recognized as one of the most important historians of the nineteenth century. His principal works, The Age of Constantine the Great (1852) and The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), and his posthumous Greek Cultural History (1902) and Reflections on History (1905), remain in print and continue to be read and studied with profit today. Indeed, the questions raised in his study of the Italian Renaissance still define how historians interpret this field of history.

Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War, Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005, pp. x, 300.

Research by political scientists has established, fairly conclusively, that democratically governed states rarely go to war against each other. There is also evidence to suggest that democracies tend not to become embroiled in militarized disputes short of war. The policy implications of this body of scholarly research seem clear: one path to a more peaceful world is by encouraging, pressuring, even forcing autocratic governments to embrace democracy. Not so fast, say Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder in Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War, for a glaring exception to the “democratic peace” is their finding that societies undergoing democratic transitions may in fact be rather warlike.

International Dispute Settlement in an Evolving Global Society: Constitutionalization, Accessibility, Privatization, Francisco Orrego Vicuña, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp.xxiii, 156.

This compilation of the author's 2001 Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lectures at Cambridge provides a comprehensive overview of the methods and modes of international dispute settlement. Included in the broad survey are the central public and private dispute resolution processes at the United Nations and the International Court of Justice (ICJ), regional arrangements, national jurisdictions and private party-to-party arrangements. The book achieves its stated goal of identifying trends and provoking discussion of ways in which international dispute resolution can be improved, and in the process has created a useful primer on transnational dispute settlement for social scientists. The lectures have been supplemented with footnotes and the book includes a comprehensive bibliography that includes most of the important recent works in the international law literature on dispute resolution. The strength of the volume lies in its discussion of private dispute resolution and its interplay with public institutions, an area that is often ignored or played down in political science literature focused on state-to-state legal arrangements and interstate relations.

Dans l'œil du Sphinx : Claude Morin et les relations internationales du Québec., Jean Décary, Montréal : vlb éditeur, Collection “ Études québécoises ”, 2005. 241p.

L'année 2005 est celle des quarante ans de la fameuse déclaration de Paul Gérin-Lajoie devant le corps consulaire de Montréal et elle aura été marquée par un retour à l'avant-scène des questions liées au rôle international du Québec. Le sujet a défrayé la manchette des chroniqueurs politiques au momentoù Québec et Ottawa cherchaient toujours à définir un modus operandi acceptable de part et d'autre; un colloque d'importance a été organisé au printemps 2005 et deux ouvrages en seront issus; enfin, la même maison d'édition qui nous livre aujourd'hui une analyse de la contribution de Claude Morin à l'établissement des relations internationales du Québec, nous avait fourni un essai sur la carrière d'un autre acteur d'importance dans le domaine, André Patry. Le sujet est donc d'actualité.

Plaidoyer en faveur de l'intolérance, Slavoj Zižek, Éditions Climats, 2004, 164 pages.

La tolérance est aujourd'hui la nouvelle vertu cardinale de la science politique. Intégration, ouverture, compréhension de l'autre, hybridité : toute pensée politique doit être au diapason du discours sur la tolérance. Plusieurs seront heureux de voir un philosophe introduire une note discordante dans ce refrain. Dans son essai Plaidoyer en faveur de l'intolérance, Slavoj Zižek tente de démontrer qu'il est possible et même nécessaire aujourd'hui de penser et d'agir à contre-courant des tendances politiques actuelles qui favorisent la tolérance et le multiculturalisme.

Hard Choices, Soft Law: Voluntary Standards in Global Trade, Environment and Social Governance, John J. Kirton and Michael Trebilcock, eds., Global Environmental Governance Series; Aldergate: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2004, pp. xviii, 372.

This book sheds considerable light on the new forms of “soft law” governance (voluntary standards and informal institutions) that are emerging out of the confluence of rationally calculated interests, intersubjectively shared norms, and entrenched structures of power in the global economy. It benefits greatly from the analytical framework and meticulous exposition provided by the editors, John Kirton and Michael Trebilcock, whose introductory chapter repays close reading. The remaining chapters of the book are grouped in four sections.

La démocratie : histoire des idées., Boris DeWiel, Québec : Les Presses de l'Université Laval, coll. Zêtêsis, 2005, 270p.

“ Ensemble de procédures ”, “ régime ” au sens large du terme, forme de “ sociabilité humaine ”: la nature de la démocratie demeure l'objet d'une discussion théorique et pratique d'une importance primordiale, car il s'agit d'élucider les tenants et les aboutissants de cet “ horizon indépassable ” de la politique contemporaine qu'est la démocratie. La démocratie: histoire des idées s'inscrit précisément dans ce débat portant sur la nature et les finalités de la démocratie. Sous couvert d'une reconstitution intellectuelle de ses principaux enjeux, Boris DeWiel procède à un plaidoyer en faveur d'une conception de la démocratie en tant que régime qui accueille le conflit insoluble des valeurs. S'inscrivant explicitement dans la mouvance issue de la pensée d'Isaiah Berlin, l'auteur soutient qu'une compréhension véritable de la démocratie passe par une reconnaissance du “ pluralisme des valeurs ”, entendu comme “ la théorie embarrassante selon laquelle le bien n'est pas monolithique, nos intérêts communs entrent en conflit les uns avec les autres et, quand ils finissent par se heurter mutuellement, il n'y a plus de réponses universelles ” (2).

Mao: The Unknown Story, Jung Chang and Jan Halliday, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005, pp. 814.

Mao Tse-Tung has always had a radical allure. Mao's legions of fans have included such luminaries as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Pierre Trudeau and numerous others. Now we have a book that forces us to radically reconsider our view.