Gérald Bernier

Social Relations and Exercise of State Power in Lower Canada (1791-1840): Elements for an Analysis

While current political science has dealt at length with the nature, function, role and machinery of the contemporary Canadian state, it has remained strangely silent about the states history. Yet, in many respects, state power as exercised today continues practices that date to the nineteenth and even the eighteenth centuries. Tendencies of the modern Canadian state toward centralization and interventionism were already evident before 1867.