Technological progress has brought some political difficulties: we have both too much power and too little control. Francis Bacon, a principal promoter of science and technology, was not naive about the uses to which the conquest of nature would be put; they may not all be good, humane and charitable. He was not uniformly optimistic about the result being “the relief of man's estate,” even though that is the overwhelming rhetorical thrust of his major writings. Bacon actually rejected many of our currently offered “solutions” for controlling science as being hopelessly impolitic and improvident. This is revealed in a little-known chapter, entitled “Daedalus,” in one of his most comprehensive political works, Of the Wisdom of the Ancients. He provides timely lessons for us to consider now, entering the twenty-first century.

The post-Cold War era has provoked a revival of various implicit as well as explicit returns to Stoic cosmopolitan theory as a possible source of a normative conceptual framework for international relations and global community. This article confronts this revival of interest in Stoicism with an analysis of Cicero's constructive critique of original Stoic conceptions of the world community. Particular attention is paid to the arguments by which Cicero identifies major flaws in the Stoic outlook and establishes the validity of his alternative notion of the “law of nations.” It is argued that Cicero's transformation of Stoicism issues in a more modest but more solid, as well as more civic-spirited, cosmopolitan theory. At the same time, the implications of Cicero's arguments for our understanding of justice altogether are clarified.

It has often been said that the closest thing we have to an empirical law in international relations is that democracies do not fight against each other. This study adds to the literature on democratic peace by focusing on the crisis behaviour of democracies and nondemocracies. International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project data are used to conduct a quantitative analysis of states' crisis activity from 1918 to 1988. Strong support emerges for the three hypotheses of the study. First, it is clear that democracies initiate fewer crises than nondemocracies. However, democracies tend to escalate crises to higher levels of severity. Finally, democracies eventually win the crises in which they become involved. The conclusion is that democratic leaders face strong incentives to “select” winnable crises against nondemocratic states because of the audience costs they face, but when the opponent is another democracy, the domestic audience expects leaders to compromise.

This article examines the impact of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms on social movement politics in Canada using the case of the gay liberation movement. Drawing on the comparative social movement literature, the article situates equality seeking as a strategy and meaning game that legitimates new political identities and that is aimed at mobilizing a movement's constituency. The article demonstrates that equality seeking was a strategy and a meaning frame that was deployed in the lesbian and gay rights movement (exemplified by the gay liberation movement of the 1970s) prior to the entrenchment of the Charter. Thus, it concludes that some claims about the Charter's impact on social movement organizing have been exaggerated.

Does the rise of new social movements (NSMs) represent a challenge for the traditional political parties in Quebec? Though this question can be answered from many perspectives, this study focuses on the programmatic aspect of this challenge that encompasses both a number of new societal issues and adherence to new values promoted by the NSMs. More precisely, it addresses the following questions: have the issues of environment and the respect of women's rights been already integrated into the political platforms of the two mainstream political parties in Quebec, the Liberal Party of Quebec and the Parti Québécois? Can the activists of those political parties be distinguished from the members of environmental and women's rights movements with regard to their values? On the one hand, both the Liberal party and the Parti Québécois have for a long time incorporated into their platforms issues linked to the defence of the environment and to the promotion of gender equality. On the other hand, the authors observe that the adherence to postmaterialist values is stronger in the NSMs than in the parties. One main conclusion is that one cannot compare adherence to the new values in the parties and the NSMs as two homogeneous blocs. Instead, the authors see four distinct organizations. They encourage further research to examine other dimensions of the problem such as the organizational aspect of the political challenge posed by the rise of NSMs.

This article argues that the cartel party thesis is not supported by empirical evidence in the Canadian case. Even though Canadian parties at the federal level colluded to provide themselves with funding and to hinder the entry of new parties into the system, they were not transformed into cartel patties. Canadian parties have not become primarily reliant on state resources, and the specific formulas for delivery of public funding do not remove or greatly diminish parties' incentives to solicit support from the public. Parties' ties to civil society consequently remain intact. There is little evidence for the consequent diminution of party competition or increased interpenetration of state and society posited by the cartel thesis. The article argues that the cartel model is largely inapplicable to anglo-american political systems because it fails to take into account the effect of specific forms of state funding.

This article analyzes data on incumbent turnover in 103 provincial elections in Canada from 1960 to 1997. The author examines total turnover and the proportions attributable to retirement and electoral defeat. He notes that the overall rate of turnover in the provincial legislative assemblies is similar to that of the Canadian House of Commons. Further, voluntary retirement and electoral defeat comprise equal proportions of the total turnover. There are, however, important differences in the turnover rate and in its makeup, both by province and by time period. The author tests several models in an attempt to determine the correlates of turnover in Canadian provincial legislatures.