No description available.

Although the concept of liberty provided the intellectual foundation for the legitimacy of state power and social order in both Canadas from as early as the Atlantic Revolution (1776--1815), it has never been used to study the history of state formation in Canada. This dissertation examines the essential role that the concept of liberty played in the process of state formation in Canada between the American Revolution (1776) and the Act of Union (1841). It proposes a large-scale re-reading of the intellectual and political history of that period through the question of liberty within the framework of the British Empire and of the Atlantic world (Great Britain, The United States and France). Beginning from a theoretical framework inspired by the work of intellectual historians of the Atlantic world, such as J. G. A. Pocock, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon S. Wood and Quentin Skinner, by the philosophical considerations on liberty from Isaiah Berlin and by a reading of the most important philosophical writings of eighteenth-century Britain, France and United States, this dissertation argues that, from 1791 and onwards, Upper and Lower Canada developed according to a concept of liberty that, while being different from the notion of liberty at work during the Atlantic Revolution, still proceeded directly from the Enlightenment. Less preoccupied by equality and community than by individual autonomy, this ideal was based on a respect for certain individual rights which are often reduced to the trio of "liberty, property and security." Politically, this model of liberty recognized the existence of different interests within a society and their right to exist, and economically, the importance it gave to the protection of private property led to an ethic that encouraged the accumulation of wealth. / This conception of liberty (which might be called a modern definition of liberty) provides the intellectual base for the Constitutional Act of 1791 and was generally accepted in Upper and Lower Canadian societies until 1828. At that moment, some reformists, disappointed by the slowness of the British government to bring reform to the colonies, adopted a republican discourse based on the idea of popular sovereignty and the very different trio of "liberty, equality and community". The political struggles of the 1830s in both Canadas can be explained in part by examining the opposition between these two very different concepts of liberty. The tension between these two models ended with the 1837 rebellions and the triumph of the modern concept of liberty at the expense of the republican ideal defended by the patriots and the radicals in both Canadas. It is in this context that Lord Durham's report was published. By his recommendation of rendering the executive power accountable to the Legislative Assembly, Durham gave back to the reformists still adhering to the modern concept of liberty the leadership of the reform movement in the colony and re-focussed the movement's attention towards the issue of responsible government. After 1839, the debate within the colonies would concentrate on the practice of political power, rather than on its legitimacy.

This thesis does not attempt to trace British policy in Canada in the late eighteenth century, nor to discover the springs of that policy in other parts of the Empire or in Europe. It is only incidentally concerned with many of the statutes and ordinances pertaining directly to Canada, for their import was not always understood by the French-Canadians in the way that they were intended in London or even in Quebec; likewise, the military phases of the dispute between Great Britain and the American colonies, and even the invasion of Canada in 1775-76 have been most summarily treated. The vast volume of secondary material upon the late eighteenth century in Canada deals almost exclusively with these subjects, either justifying British policy, attacking it from the point of view of the modern French-Canadian, or attempting to reconcile these divergent views. Instead, this thesis attempts to disoover the effects of the transfer of authority from French to British hands, in so far as that transfer affected the population of Canada in 1760. It is thus primarily concerned with the reactions of one generation of French-Canadians to the substitution of British for French rule, and to the economic and social changes that they encountered as a result. The fact that these reactions were frequently negative or else rested upon an erroneous conception of the policy of the British government has often led to the conclusion that they were either negligible or non-existent. [...]

No description available.

No description available.

Note: 2 page 212s, 2 page xxvi (at end).

No description available.