Political Emotions: Aristotle and the Symphony of Reason and Emotion, Marlene K. Sokolon, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006, pp. 217.

Marlene K. Sokolon has provided an intellectually stimulating and highly original work on Aristotle's understanding of the emotions, mainly as presented in his treatise the Art of Rhetoric. The central thesis of Sokolon's book manifests itself in her analysis of the emotion of anger. According to Sokolon, for Aristotle anger is the paradigmatic human emotion, defined as the desire for revenge for a dishonourable and undeserving public insult against oneself or those one loves. Of this desire for revenge, Sokolon argues that “for Aristotle, unique human anger is not ‘at’ something, but more properly ‘with’ what some other person did or intends to do. Anger and the other political emotions are certain kinds of judgments or perceptions about sociopolitical circumstances. Anger judges specific kinds of events with an acknowledged political, or what we now call ‘cultural,’ meaning” (p. 55). Thus, Sokolon argues that for Aristotle the emotional experience of anger occurs in social and political contexts where there are evaluations of worth in situations involving relations of power. But if anger is the paradigmatic human emotion, this means that anger is not simply representative of various political emotions, but illustrates that human emotion as such is an essentially political phenomenon. Sokolon's thesis, therefore, is that for Aristotle, “man is by nature a political animal” not simply because he possesses reason, the apparent claim of the Politics, but also because he experiences emotions.

One of the main points of “Ghosts of the JCPC” is that the study of Charter politics is currently dominated by a sterile and well-worn debate over the legitimacy of judicial review. Rainer Knopff and F. L. Morton return to these issues in their reply. They frequently refer to their own position or to my putative positions in their reply to my work. But, they do not engage in a discussion of what is, or in making arguments about how we might understand or explain what is, rather than on constantly judging what is according to our own personal and partisan political prejudices.

Résumé. Cet article propose une réflexion autour de la création du Bureau des affaires francophones et francophiles de l'Université Simon Fraser, institution dont la mission est de stimuler le rayonnement du français dans un contexte majoritairement anglophone et qui attribue sa réussite aux efforts conjoints des communautés francophone et francophile de la Colombie-Britannique ainsi qu'aux structures gouvernementales provinciales et fédérales. La recherche vise à identifier l'apport de chacun des groupes pour l'aboutissement du projet, en utilisant dans l'explication le modèle de la fenêtre d'opportunité de Kingdon ainsi qu'un corpus constitué de 17 entrevues réalisées avec plusieurs acteurs ayant participé au processus et des documents portant sur la création du programme.

Abstract. This article proposes a reflection on the creation of the Bureau des affaires francophones et francophiles from Simon Fraser University. The institution's mission is to foster the influence of French in a predominantly English-Speaking environment. The Bureau attributes its success to the joint efforts of Francophone and Francophile communities from British Columbia and the Provincial and Federal governments. The research aims to identify the contribution of each group to the success of the project. Our article is based on Kingdon's theory of the “window of opportunity” and our findings were as a result of 17 interviews of stakeholders. A comprehensive literature review was also carried out as part of the impaired research.

In a world beset by problems of accelerated development and structural adjustment, influencing the level and direction of investment has become a major governmental preoccupation. Investment is the key to economic growth and transformation; hence there is concern over where it will go. In this connection investment control in post-war Britain provides a fairly good but neglected case study. Although generalization must hurdle many obstacles of time, place, institutional framework, and history, British experience affords some insights into the nature and workings of investment control, its limitations, and its possibilities.

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the quality of democratic accountability mechanisms in Latin America. It begins by reviewing the concept of democratic accountability quality and its operationalization by means of factor analysis. As a result, three quality indicators are identified corresponding to the types of accountability that prevail in the literature: horizontal, electoral and social. The study reveals considerable differences among the Latin American democracies. Set out below is an exploratory analysis of the factors explaining these differences. The analysis yields three main conclusions. First, it confirms the usefulness of the model. Second, the quality of each type of accountability is explained by specific factors: no one factor explains all three cases. Third, a different logic behind social accountability mechanisms is detected as compared with the other two types of accountability mechanisms.

The historian of the future, in attempting to interpret developments in the middle years of the twentieth century, may well be appalled by the mass of documentary evidence that confronts him. Particularly is this likely to be the case if he is foolhardy enough to explore the decisions of governmental regulatory agencies and the processes by which such organizations undertook to define the public interest. These public bureaucracies, exposed to strong political pressures and staffed largely by lawyers, characteristically accumulate very large masses of testimony, oral and written, in the course of their hearings. Partly for reasons of expense, this testimony is seldom published, and the lay inquirer, if he delves into the morass, is more than likely to find himself confused rather than enlightened by the unfamiliar phraseology and by the sheer bulk of the record.

Nevertheless, such agencies have come to play a very significant role in determining the rate and direction of economic development in the United States and Canada, and it is important that we should understand the kind of reasoning that underlies their decisions. The present inquiry stemmed initially from an interest in the Canadian natural gas industry, and from curiosity about the impediments that seemed to be delaying the export of Canadian gas to the United States.

La science politique n'a pas encore réussi à élaborer de grands ensembles théoriques. A vrai dire, les politicologues doivent se contenter de quelques généralisations, assimilables tout au plus à des hypothèses de travail d'une nature bien particulière, de typologies destinées à faciliter le dépouillement des données politiques. Signalons à la volée, les multiples typologies des régimes politiques, les essais de classification de « l'homme politique » et les théories des « élites ». Toutefois, devant la nécessité de développer et de multiplier démarches et recherches en vue d'échaffauder un début de théorie, il nous paraît intéressant, utile peut-être, de tenter de découvrir la dynamique qui agite et soutient les divers éléments d'une telle typologie.

Ainsi, la typologie des partis politiques, mise au point par Maurice Duverger. Le juriste français a regroupé autour de deux principaux pôles les divers types de partis politiques que connaît le monde contemporain. Les « partis de notables », groupes restreints composés de personnalités en vue dans un milieu et dont l'objectif unique se définit par l'organisation des campagnes électorales, se dressent contre les « partis de masse », créés par les mouvements socialistes européens et destinés à rallier tous les sympathisants d'une même cause politique, de façon permanente. Bien sûr, Duverger reconnaît la possibilité de multiples variantes, sur un continuum reliant ces deux pôles extrêmes.