The Canadian State is a powerful collection of essays. Leo Panitch’s theme essay, dealing with the theories of recent neo-Marxist thinkers such as O’Connor, Miliband, and Poulantzas on the nature and role of the state and sketching their relevance to Canada, sets the tone and interpretation of the whole work, which thus has a rare unity and cohesion. Reg Whitaker and Garth Stevenson provide papers offering profound analyses of the history and functioning of the federalized state in Canada. The twelve further contributors develop this theme, dealing with such topics as the aspirations of those behind the governments of Alberta and Quebec, relations between the government elites and Canada’s classes and ethnic groups, the management of the economy through budgets and welfare state policies, and the management of culture through education, the arts, and citizen participation. Together they illuminate various aspects of the way the bourgeois state organizes our society above all, for the accumulation of capital and legitimation of capitalism and, at times, uses coercion to these ends.

The work as a whole brings together Canada’s economics and politics in a new and penetrating way.

Leo Panitch is a Distinguished Research Professor, renowned political economist, Marxist theorist and editor of the Socialist Register. He received a B.A. (Hons.) from the University of Manitoba in 1967 and a M.Sc.(Hons.) and PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1968 and 1974, respectively. He was a Lecturer, Assistant Professor, Associate Professor and Professor at Carleton University between 1972 and 1984. He has been a Professor of Political Science at York University since 1984. He was the Chair of the Department of Political Science at York from 1988-1994. He was the General Co-editor of State and Economic Life series, U. of T. Press, from 1979 to 1995 and is the Co-founder and a Board Member of Studies in Political Economy. He is also the author of numerous articles and books dealing with political science including The End of Parliamentary Socialism (1997). He was a member of the Movement for an Independent and Socialist Canada, 1973-1975, the Ottawa Committee for Labour Action, 1975-1984, the Canadian Political Science Association, the Committee of Socialist Studies, the Marxist Institute and the Royal Society of Canada. He is currently a supporter of the Socialist Project.

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