1 The discussion of the NCPE which follows applies only to debates in English Canada. The importance of the “national question” and the evolution of Québécois political economy is described in Coleman, William D., “The Political Economy of Quebec,” in Wallace, Clement and Glen, Williams (eds.), The New Canadian Political Economy (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1989), 160–79.Google Scholar

2 For a presentation of the French regulation approach and discussion of its variety see “Avant-propos,” in Gérard, Boismenu and Daniel, Drache (eds.), Politique et régulation: modèle de développement et trajectoire canadienne (Montreal: Méridien, 1990), 27–34.Google Scholar

3 For an excellent discussion of the regulation approach's difficulties in dealing with politics—defined as the forces and processes which create stability or change—see Alain Noël, “Action collective, politique partisane et relations industrielles,” in Boismenu and Drache (eds.), Politique et régulation, 99–100. That book as a whole attempts to provide more analysis of politics and the state from within a regulationist perspective.

4 This lineage has been traced in many places. For an overview see “Introduction,” in Daniel, Drache and Wallace, Clement (eds.), The New Practical Guide to Canadian Political Economy (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1985), ix–xxiv.Google Scholar For a recent discussion see “Introduction,” in Clement and Williams (eds.), The New Canadian Political Economy, 3–15.

5 See McNally, David, “Staple Theory as Commodity Fetishism: Marx, Innis and Canadian Political Economy,” Studies in Political Economy, No. 6 (Autumn 1981), 35–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Panitch, Leo, “Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy,” Studies in Political Economy, No. 6 (Autumn 1981), 7–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 The classic statement of this position can be found in Panitch, “Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy,” 13.

7 There is much general agreement about this analytic strategy, as indicated by the definition of “strong” political economy given in Clement and Williams, “Introduction,” 6–7, 10–11. Nevertheless, the relative weight assigned to structures and agents differs widely, as do the lingering effects of elite analysis for many practitioners of the NCPE.

8 See Schmidt, Ray, “Canadian Political Economy: A Critique,” Studies in Political Economy, No. 6 (Autumn 1981), 65–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Panitch, “Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy.” This attention to class formation as one consequence of class conflict was the theoretical motivation for Brodie, Janine and Jenson, Jane, Crisis, Challenge and Change: Party and Class in Canada (Toronto: Methuen, 1980Google Scholar).

9 This distinction is from Hausmann, Ricardo and Lipietz, Alain, “Esoteric vs. Exoteric Economic Laws: The Forgotten Dialectic,” CEPREMAP Série Orange, 1980Google Scholar, incorporated in Lipietz, Alain, The Enchanted World: Inflation, Credit and the World Crisis (London: Verso, 1985Google Scholar), chaps. 1–2, 9–43.

10 On this point see also Jenson, Jane, “Paradigms and Political Discourse: Protective Legislation in France and the United States Before 1914,” this Journal 22 (1989), 236–37.Google Scholar This epistemological position differs from positivism's strict search for general laws or prediction. For a discussion of the method see Noël, “Action collective, politique partisane and relations industriels,” 107–08.

11 As Noël describes the problem, “Action collective, politique partisane et relations industrielles,” 106, the inability of the regulation approach to analyze politics in a meaningful way led not to economism but to a neo-structuralism in which the “rebel sons” did not escape their Althusserianism. See Lipietz, Alain, “Rebel Sons: The French Regulation Approach,” French Politics and Society 5 (1987), 3–17.Google Scholar

12 For a consideration of this distinction see Brodie, Janine and Jenson, Jane, Crisis, Challenge and Change: Party and Class in Canada Revisited (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1988), 1Google Scholar and passim.

13 This position reflects in part the impact of feminist theory on the notions of how collectivities create themselves in conflicts over legitimate identities. For a discussion of this lineage see Jenson, Jane, “The Politics of Crisis: Political Economy Looks to the 1990s,” paper presented at the Conference on Canadian Political Economy in the Era of Free Trade, Carleton University, April 1990.Google Scholar

14 The definition of “politics” used in this article is a broad one, as the next section makes clear. It incorporates a distinction sometimes made in French between le politique and la politique. Le politique, the more general term, refers to the forms of organization and exercise of power in society, including the power of the state. La politique, in turn, refers to the practices of power by “political actors.” The first provides the ordering principle for the second. See Legaré, Anne and Morf, Nicole, La Société distincte de l'Etat (Quebec: Hurtibise HMH, 1989), 38–39.Google Scholar This distinction between an ordering principle and practices is elaborated in the discussion of levels of analysis here.

15 For discussions of this literature see Mahon, Rianne, The Politics of Industrial Restructuring: Canadian Textiles (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984Google Scholar), chap. 1, and Gregory Albo and Jane Jenson, “A Contested Concept: The Relative Autonomy of the State,” in Clement and Williams (eds.), The New Canadian Political Economy, 180–211.

16 Panitch called for such analysis in “Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy” but did not devote much attention to it. See Albo and Jenson, “A Contested Concept: The Relative Autonomy of the State,” 202–03. For a recent theoretical discussion see Wolfe, David, “The Canadian State in Comparative Perspective,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 26 (1989), 97–98.Google Scholar

17 An analysis of such historical constructions since 1867 is offered in Brodie and Jenson, Crisis, Challenge and Change: Party and Class in Canada Revisited.

18 For an overview of strategies of comparison see Myles, John, “Introduction: Under-standing Canada: Comparative Political Economy Perspectives,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 26 (1989), 1–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 For an outline of this controversy see “Introduction,” in Drache and Clement (eds.), The New Practical Guide to Canadian Political Economy, xi–xii.

20 Myles labels this a method of “individualizing comparisons” (“Introduction: Under-standing Canada: Comparative Political Economy Perspectives,” 7). See also Noël, “Action collective, politique partisane et relations industrielles,” 107–10.

21 This position differs from that of Laxer, Gordon in his Open for Business: The Roots of Foreign Ownership in Canada (Toronto: Oxford, 1989Google Scholar 8). Laxer criticizes the neo-Innisians by setting out a typology in which Canada falls into the “late-follower” category, for which agrarian politics is particularly important. Nevertheless, despite making claims for an agency-centred form of analysis, his remains ahistorical precisely because the die was cast at the end of the nineteenth century and little space for actors making change existed after that. For this critique see Mahon's, Rianne contribution to a “Review Symposium” titled “New Developments in Comparative Political Economy,” reviewing Laxer's book, Canadian Journal of Sociology 14 (1989), 501–09.Google Scholar

22 For analysis see Janine Brodie, “The Political Economy of Regionalism,” in Clement and Williams (eds.), The New Canadian Political Economy, 144.

23 One of the routes of dispersion was via “hinterland” political economy. That approach was more political, assigning state institutions responsibility for creating regionalism and differential economic and political power. See Brodie, “The Political Economy of Regionalism,” 147.

24 An exception is obviously discussion of uneven development. See Drache and Clement (eds.), The New Practical Guide to Canadian Political Economy, Part V.

25 The “old” political economists, especially Harold Innis and Donald Creighton, were concerned to demonstrate the reasonableness of Canada's existence, despite the international effects creating regional variations. See Schmidt, “Canadian Political Economy: A Critique,” 69. For left nationalists in the 1970s, Canada's relationship with the US had become an all-consuming focus.

26 This dispute over the “national” versus the “regional” is seen in, inter alia, the discussions of 1919. Compare Kealey, Gregory S., “1919: The Canadian Labour Revolt,” Labour/Le Travail, No. 13 (Spring 1984), 11–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with Bercuson, David J., Fools and Wise Men: The Rise and Fall of the One Big Union (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1978Google Scholar) on whether 1919 should be interpreted primarily as a national or a regional event. See also Schmidt, “Canadian Political Economy: A Critique” and Paul Phillips, “Through Different Lenses: the Political Economy of Labour,” in Clement and Williams (eds.), The New Canadian Political Economy, 77–98, on the competition among class, regional and ethnic identities.

27 See Wallace Clement, “Debates and Direction: A Political Economy of Resources,” in Clement and Williams (eds.), The New Canadian Political Economy, 38. Given their emphasis on politics, the “hinterland” historians dated by National Policies (Brodie, “The Political Economy of Regionalism,” 147–48). Nevertheless, some neo-Innisians make no time distinctions in the twentieth century. “… Williams has stressed the essential continuity in various periods of industrial expansion that followed the National Policy. This continuity stems from the logic imposed on investment decisions of firms and states by Canada's unique location within the international political economy” (Neil Bradford and Glen Williams, “What Went Wrong? Explaining Canadian Industrialization,” in Clement and Williams [eds.], The New Canadian Political Economy, 67).

28 See, for example, Panitch, “Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy” which turns to union mobilizations to periodize the trajectory toward dependent development, and Brodie and Jenson, Crisis, Challenge and Change: Party and Class in Canada Revisited which dates crises of representations by major shifts in patterns of electoral support.

29 For the analysis which supports the generalizations in the next few paragraphs see Jenson, Jane, “‘Different’ but not ‘Exceptional': Canada's Permeable Fordism,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 26 (1989), 69–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar That article explores the consequences of permeable fordism for the unfolding crisis of the last two decades in Canada.

30 See Jenson, “‘Different’ but not ‘Exceptional’: Canada's Permeable Fordism,” and Gérard Boismenu and Daniel Drache, “Une Economie politique pour la compréhension de la crise et ses enjeux,” in Boismenu and Drache (eds.), Politique et régulation, 41–47.

31 Gérard Boismenu characterizes this situation as one of “fordisme à dominante privée” in his “L'État et la régulation du rapport salarial depuis 1945,” in Boismenu and Drache (eds.), Politique et régulation, 159.

32 These notions of representation imply that “interests” are never other than relative and subjective, because they cannot be separated from identities. Yet, everything is not possible. Specific conjunctures do give greater weight to some identities and their definitions of interest, because of the form of social relations at that time. For a similar discussion see Jessop, Bob, The Capitalist State (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1982), 255–58.Google Scholar

33 In these terms, the emergence of a universalizing class identity in advanced capitalist society was—and is—the result of struggle in concrete circumstances. Success for class institutions in particular times and places was measured by their ability, first, to shape a meaning system which represented class-based collective identities and political interests as coterminous; and second, to develop strategies to impose their world view, including their definition of interests, on others.

34 For an elaboration of the universe of political discourse see Jenson, Jane, “Gender and Reproduction: Or, Babies and the State,” Studies in Political Economy, No. 20 (Summer 1986), 25–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 Much of the rest of this theoretical section has been developed in dialogue and therefore collaboration with Alain Lipietz.

36 For a thorough discussion of the theoretical lineage of the concept of social bloc see Mahon, The Politics of Industrial Restructuring, chap. 1. For the joint use of regime of accumulation and social bloc, with reference to postwar France, see Alain Lipietz, “Governing the Economy,” in J. Hollifield and G. Ross (eds.), In Search of the New France (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).

37 For a discussion of such trajectories see Lipietz, Alain, “La Trame, la chaine, et la régulation: Un Outil pour les sciences sociales,” CEPREMAP Série Orange, 8816, 1988, 8–14.Google Scholar

38 The term “paradigm” derives from linguistics, where a paradigm links different forms of the same root, therefore ordering difference and demonstrating connections across forms which might not otherwise appear linked. The best-known use of the concept in social science is by Thomas S. Kuhn who suggests that paradigms are historical constructs, whose selection from a range of possible paradigms is based on struggle for allegiances. Paradigms illuminate the world until the contradictions which they can no longer absorb permit other scientists to imagine an alternative and gain support for that vision. See Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2nd ed.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970Google Scholar).

39 In the first years of the 1920s there was a serious economic downturn, but after that most indicators turned up again until the end of the decade. See Bothwell, Robert, Drummond, Ian and English, John, Canada, 1900–1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987Google Scholar), chap. 13.

40 The wheat boom was central to the process of industrialization as well as to international trade. Accumulation had an extensive character, at least until 1896 when manufacturing bounded forward, in part because of an improved international market but also because of a growing domestic one. See Noël, Alain, “What Went Right? The Political Construction of Postwar Canada,” paper prepared for the Conference on Canadian Political Economy in the Era of Free Trade, Carleton University, April 1990.Google Scholar

41 On the high-wage argument and its dependency-creating effects see Panitch, “Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy.” For a description of the shift toward Taylorist production and scientific management see Noël, “What Went Right?” as well as studies by historians cited below.

42 In 1929 the federal government's revenue was 6 per cent of GNP, more than three-quarters of it from customs duties. Expenditures were primarily for debt servicing and pensions to war veterans. Only 1 per cent of GNP was spending on buildings or structures. Bothwell, Drummond and English, Canada, 1900–1945, 223.

43 Mahon, The Politics of Industrial Restructuring, 11.

44 Clement, Wallace, The Canadian Corporate Elite: An Analysis of Economic Power (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975), 74.Google Scholar The incorporation of this comprador fraction into the heart of the hegemonic social bloc marks one of the specificities of the Canadian model of development, in contrast to other late-industrializing countries.

45 Traves, Tom, “Security Without Regulation,” in Cross, Michael S. and Kealey, Gregory S. (eds.), The Consolidation of Capitalism, 1896–1929 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1983), 33–34.Google Scholar

46 For example, Terry Copp's study of working-class incomes in Montreal during the 1920s found that the average income of males in the occupations which accounted for over two-thirds of the labour force fell well below the minimum required to support an average family. Cited in Guest, Dennis, The Emergence of Social Security in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1980), 65.Google Scholar

47 Traves (“Security Without Regulation,” 34) describes the emergence of this social distance, attributable to the fact that as capitalism became based on larger and larger units and factory production, individual workers could no longer anticipate moving back and forth between sometimes being waged labour and other times employing labour. Even skilled craftsmen would live out their working lives as waged workers.

48 While a class discourse in this period did organize attention to work life, it was much less influential in organizing partisan politics. See Brodie and Jenson, Crisis, Challenge and Change: Party and Class in Canada Revisited, chap. 3.

49 Jamieson, Stuart, Times of Trouble: Labour Unrest and Industrial Conflict in Canada, 1900–66 (Ottawa: Queen's Printer, 1968), 67.Google Scholar

50 Ibid., 70.

51 Craig Heron, “The Crisis of the Craftsman: Hamilton's Metal Workers in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Cross and Kealey (eds.), The Consolidation of Capitalism, 83–84.

52 Ibid., 82.

53 Brodie and Jenson, Crisis, Challenge and Change: Party and Class in Canada Revisited, chap. 3.

54 For the history of an alternative discourse and practice for representing class relations see Palmer, Bryan, Working-Class Experience: The Rise and Reconslitution of Canadian Labour, 1800–1980 (Toronto: Butterworth, 1983Google Scholar), chaps. 3 and 4. For a history of the internal conflicts in the labour movement in these years see Brodie and Jenson, Crisis, Challenge and Change: Party and Class in Canada Revisited, 27–41.

55 For example, conflicts within the TLC in 1918—while never exclusively opposing eastern and western unionists—did provoke the westerners to schedule their own meeting, the Western Labour Conference. The decision gave a regional designation to the militancy which western unionists shared with many in the east. On eastern militants and the TLC see Kealey, “1919: The Canadian Labour Revolt.”

56 Craven, Paul and Traves, Tom, “The Class Politics of the National Policy, 1872–1933,” Journal of Canadian Studies 3 (1977), 14–38.Google Scholar

57 I have taken this term from John Taylor whose article on urban politics in this period has been very helpful in illuminating the societal paradigm. See Taylor, John H., “Sources of Political Conflict in the Thirties: Welfare Policy and the Geography of Need,” in Allan, Moscovitch and Jim, Albert (eds.), The “Benevolent” State: The Growth of Welfare in Canada (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1987), 144–54.Google Scholar

58 Ibid., 147–48.

59 John C. Weaver, “Elitism and the Corporate Ideal: Businessmen and Boosters in Canadian Civic Reform, 1890–1920,” in Cross and Kealey (eds.), The Consolidation of Capitalism, 143–68.

60 Clement, Wallace, “Canada's Social Structure: Capital, Labour, and the State, 1930–1980,” in Cross, Michael S. and Kealey, Gregory S. (eds.), Modern Canada 1930–1980's (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1984), 87.Google Scholar

61 Noël, “What Went Right?,” 22.

62 Employment in manufacturing doubled between 1939 and 1943 (Clement. “Canada's Social Structure,” 89). For details of wartime restructuring see Paul Phillips and Stephen Watson, “From Mobilization to Continentalism: The Canadian Economy in the Post-Depression Period,” in Cross and Kealey (eds.). Modern Canada, 20–45.

63 Only where their numbers were great enough to carry provincial weight (that is, Saskatchewan) or at moments of crisis within the regulatory mechanisms of permeable fordism (that is, in the late 1950s when they contributed crucial elements to the coalition which brought Diefenbaker's Conservatives to office) did they emerge from the shadows to demand recognition.

64 Clement, “Canada's Social Structure,” 88.

65 Yates, Charlotte, “From Plant to Politics: the Canadian UAW, 1936–1984,” unpublished doctoral thesis, Carleton University, 1984Google Scholar, chap. 2.

66 Brodie and Jenson, Crisis, Challenge and Change: Party and Class in Canada Revisited, 194–95.

67 Roberts and Bullen, “A Heritage of Hope: Workers, Unions, and Politics in Canada, 1930–1982,” in Cross and Kealey (eds.), Modern Canada, 110–11.

68 The Workers’ Unity League, organized by the Communist party, promoted a clear class discourse. It was hampered, however, by affiliation with a clandestine party tightly linked to the Third International. In 1935 the party ordered the League to disband. See Roberts and Bullen, “A Heritage of Hope,” 107–08.

69 Brodie and Jenson, Crisis, Challenge and Change: Party and Class in Canada Revisited, 166.

70 Noël, “What Went Right?,” 29–31.

71 A major reason for even the CCL's reluctance to endorse the CCF was that the Federation housed unions dominated by both CCFers and Communists. After the USSR entered the Second World War the Canadian Communist party concluded that the most effective war effort required a Liberal government. Therefore, Communists within the labour movement strongly opposed any affiliation with the social-democratic CCF.

72 For an excellent description of the UAW's practices in the 1950s and the reasons they were adopted, see Yates, “From Plant to Politics: The Canadian UAW, 1936–1984.”

73 Roberts and Bullen, “A Heritage of Hope,” 117–23, and Clement, “Canada's Social Structure,” 91.

74 This claim was made by large parts of the French state at the end of the Second World War. See Jenson, Jane, “Learning to be Fordist: Conflict and Consensus in Postwar France,” paper prepared for the Seventh International Conference of Europeanists, Washington, March 1990.Google Scholar

75 This particular strategy of mobilization—also used in 1914–1918—is described in William D. Coleman and Kim Richard Nossal, “The State, War and Business in Canada, 1939–1945,” in Wyn Grant, Jan Nekkers and Frans van Waarden (eds.), Organizing Business for War: Corporatist Economic Organization during the Second World War (Providence: Berg Publishers, forthcoming).

76 Bothwell, Drummond and English, Canada, 1900–1945, 393–94.

77 The family allowance programme instituted after the war was one of the few new social programmes not directed towards veterans.

78 Taylor, “The Geography of Need,” 151.

79 Banting, Keith, The Welfare Slate and Canadian Federalism (2nd ed.; Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1987), 63.Google Scholar