Laurier Studies in Political Philosophy

This book shows how human rights became the primary language for social change in Canada and how a single decade became the locus for that emergence. The author argues that the 1970s was a critical moment in human rights history-one that transformed political culture, social movements, law, and foreign policy. Human Rights in Canada is one of the first sociological studies of human rights in Canada. It explains that human rights are a distinct social practice, and it documents those social conditions that made human rights significant at a particular historical moment. A central theme in this book is that human rights derive from society rather than abstract legal principles. Therefore, we can identify the boundaries and limits of Canada's rights culture at different moments in our history. Until the 1970s, Canadians framed their grievances with reference to Christianity or British justice rather than human rights. A historical sociological approach to human rights reveals how rights are historically contingent, and how new rights claims are built upon past claims. This book explores governments' tendency to suppress rights in periods of perceived emergency; how Canada's rights culture was shaped by state formation; how social movements have advanced new rights claims; the changing discourse of rights in debates surrounding the constitution; how the international human rights movement shaped domestic politics and foreign policy; and much more. In addition to drawing on secondary literature in law, history, sociology, and political science, this study looked to published government documents, litigation and case law, archival research, newspapers, opinion polls, and materials produced by non-governmental organizations.

The essays in The Question of Peace in Modern Political Thought address the contribution that political theories of modern political philosophers have made to our understandings of peace. The discipline of peace research has reached a critical impasse, where the ideas of both "realist peace" and "democratic peace" are challenged by contemporary world events. Can we stand by while dictators violate the human rights of citizens? Can we impose a democratic peace through the projection of war? By looking back at the great works of political philosophy, this collection hopes to revive peace as an active question for political philosophy while making an original contribution to contemporary peace research and international relations.

This book stems from an examination of how Western philosophy has accounted for the foundations of law. In this tradition, the character of the "sovereign" or "lawgiver" has provided the solution to this problem. But how does the sovereign acquire the right to found law? As soon as we ask this question we are immediately confronted with a convoluted combination of jurisprudence and theology. The author begins by tracing a lengthy and deeply nuanced exchange between Derrida and Nancy on the question of community and fraternity and then moves on to engage with a diverse set of texts from the Marquis de Sade, Saint Augustine, Kant, Hegel, and Kafka. These texts-which range from the canonical to the apocryphal-all struggle in their own manner with the question of the foundations of law. Each offers a path to the law. If a reader accepts any path as it is and follows without question, the law is set and determined and the possibility of dialogue is closed. The aim of this book is to approach the foundations of law from a series of different angles so that we can begin to see that those foundations are always in question and open to the possibility of dialogue.