Barry Cooper, Key Porter Books, 279 pp, $21.95

Only a political theorist like Barry Cooper could peer into the heart of darkness that is the 1970s Calgary punk rock scene and divine the rotten spiritual core of the Canadian establishment. Combining philosophical, literary, and historical analysis, social science, and personal anecdote, Cooper analyzes the “logic” of the Canadian “regime,” which, borrowing from Plato and Aristotle, includes not only the offices and laws of a nation, but also its way of life, and with it the moral character types the regime calls forth to rule it. While the book focuses on Canada, Cooper’s analysis shows how Canada’s regime is in many ways typical of all modern regimes, since the end-point of Canada’s regime is in a sense the endpoint of a fault-line in modernity.

Since the 1954 Tremblay Report, which characterized the power of the Crown as “gift giving,” and so legitimated (or necessitated) federal spending in provincial jurisdictions, Canadians have ignored basic aspects of their constitution to override the distinction between federal and provincial responsibility, and the distinction between political representatives and bureaucrats. The result is a bloated “embedded state” that, instead of helping people out (the purported function of welfare), has created a culture of entitlements that has transformed what is left of citizenship into a “culture of grasping and seizing”. Canadians and foreign observers used to viewing Canada as a “kindler and gentler” (America will be surprised to see how the embedded state’s top-heavy attempt to create political friendship has left Canadians fragmented, dispirited, and resentful. ) All the incentives are in grasping for the levers of power.

Cooper’s analysis of Adscam forms the centerpiece of the book because that is where the “culture of grasping and seizing” expressed itself most clearly. But Adscam was created by the incentive structures of the Canadian regime, which itself is a microcosm of modernity. Cooper’s philosophical explanation of the Canadian regime as a microcosm of modernity constitutes this books’ most important contribution to our self-understanding.

Cooper characterizes the “problématique” of the modern regime (notice there’s only one) “as one of balancing pride and interest.” The modern regime is arranged to enable individuals to maximize their self-interest. This is the regime established by Hobbes and Locke (who stand behind both Canadian and American constitutions). However, this leaves open the question of what this “self” is and why it should care about its interest in the first place. That is, self-interest requires pride, or self-respect, to sustain it.

The Achilles heel of the regime of rights—the one almost everyone in the present is so accustomed to think is a good thing— is that one can ignore one’s pride in self-government (i.e., governing oneself as much as possible) by finding it in one’s self-interest to be dependent on the state. This is why, for instance, Abraham Lincoln had to argue against southern slave-owners on biblical, and not Lockean grounds: because the slave-owners rightly (at least from their premises) pointed out that slavery can be in one’s self-interest, as a slave gets cared for and need not take the risks associated with liberty. And so the problem with Canada is that Canadians have allowed themselves to be cowed by what Alexis de Tocqueville refers to as the benevolent despot that fulfils all the desires of its subjects. After all, is it not in our interest to have all of our desires satisfied? That is the crude understanding my students have of liberty before I correct them by pointing out that it is the liberty of the slave, as Locke observes in his critique of Filmer.

And so Canadians have come to view their sovereign as the agent of “gift giving,” and thus overriding, or at least ignoring, the division of powers between federal and provincial governments, as listed in sections 91-92 of the federal and provincial governments. This decadent regime has been rendered possible by a decadent Christian culture that has forgotten the distinction between compassion, which benefits bureaucrats (because the purpose of compassion is to feel good about oneself), and caritas, for which the language of costs and benefits are irrelevant (because the purpose of caritas is love for another). Subjects of the modern regime need to balance their interest-calculation with some pride, which Cooper describes as a “something that you hold on to without qualification as to whether it is in your interest to do so – otherwise there would be no ‘you’ to have an interest.” The greatest thing “you” can do, the greatest expression of character, is the “ability to fight and to win at war.”

This understanding of pride requires clarification. First, as Angelo Codevilla has argued so forcefully, it is possible to win a war, which the Americans generally do, and lose the peace, which the Americans nearly always do. War is a means whose end is peace. In other words, the character of the statesmen is greater than the character of the warrior because the statesman must see further, as classical philosophers have pointed out. The examples of Madison, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Reagan, show that one need not be a warrior to be a great statesman (Madison served briefly in the local militia in western Virginia, and Lincoln served in the Black Hawk War (1832), but neither seemed to have seen any action). But does statesmanship consist of pride in this sense (which, as self-respect, is not the same as arrogance)? More fundamentally, is it not the sign that the modern state is constricted, humanly speaking, if its “problématique” of balancing pride and interest is but a pale imitation of a Pelagian imitation of classical and Christian magnanimity on the one hand, and a pale imitation of deliberation and practical wisdom on the other?

Cooper rightly eviscerates the social scientists and economists, including those working for his old employer, the Fraser Institute, for explaining interest but ignoring virtue, but what kind of virtue does this crisis of the Canadian regime call forth? Lincoln’s example, of re-founding the republic by appealing to biblical religion and transcending the Lockeanism of the first founding, is closed to us. Canada is too secularized and individualized (in the Tocquevillian sense of pusillanimity) to follow this route. Moreover, treating Christianity as a civil religion produces dubious results at best. Cooper considers the ethic of volunteerism, which routinely gets scoffed at in Canada’s statist culture of grasping and seizing. After all, volunteer rates are highest in that most despised of provinces, Alberta. In the modern regime, the volunteer needs the patience of Job.

Cooper suggests pride in the constitution, which is the document of our self-government. Yet, Canadians have rejected their constitution’s vision for self-government. Moreover, the constitution is limited because the rot that Adscam exposed illustrates that the problem lies in the moral character of members of the regime, which the written constitution cannot change.

Barry Cooper has written the most insightful account of the Canadian polity in a generation. Pitched at the layman, but still demanding of his concentration and intelligence, Cooper has explained the political core and fault-lines of Canada better than anyone else.