Republicanism and Responsible Government: The Shaping of Democracy in Australia and Canada, by Benjamin T. Jones

Abstract

Republicanism and Responsible Government: The Shaping of Democracy in Australia and Canada, by Benjamin T. Jones. Montreal & Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014. x, 299 pp. $100.00 Cdn (cloth), $34.95 (paper). There is no such thing as society, Mrs Thatcher famously expostulated with distillation of the essence of the liberal creed, There are individual men and women, and there are families. It is the contention of this work that such liberal emphasis on the individual was much less influential in changing the political culture of the Victorian British world than is commonly believed. Rather, it contends, the creed that did most to shape the reforming energies which brought about responsible government was energized by strain of thought which it characterizes as republicanism. Where liberals focussed on the individual and freedom from interference, was communally-minded and was actuated by fear of domination. Its classical roots are well captured in quotation from Cicero's De re publica: a people is not any group of humans ... but multitude of people who ... agree to serve the common good of the (p. 217)--a very different view of society to the atomistic form of liberalism underlying Thatcher's pronouncement. Civic republicanism, it is argued here on the basis of Canadian and Australian case studies, provided creed which could prompt change without sparking revolution. Importantly for citizens of the British world, it allowed for the retention of the monarchy while at the same time accommodating responsible government at the local level. The great architect of such constitutional dexterity was Lord Durham who proposed forms of colonial government which allowed for multiple centres of power within the British Empire while retaining the monarchy as common core of sentiment and identity. It was formula which, if followed by George III, might have kept Canada's southern neighbour within the British Empire. Hence avoided the disruptive and centrifugal forces of the separatist associated with the American and French Revolution. It meant, however, that the advocates of that communal political ideology which the author terms civic republicanism were cautious about the r-word with all its connotations of regicide in the case of the French and English Revolutions and fratricidal strife in the American. This means that often the presence of has to be inferred by its goals rather than by an explicit appeal to the term itself. The classical origins of mean, too, some difficulties in charting its transmission to the nineteenth century debates on constitutional government. …