Differing political trajectories of the United States and Canada have long been a puzzle for historians and political sociologists. Differences have once again been highlighted by the juxtaposition of a protracted, fierce, partisan debate in the US over the passage of healthcare reform against a four-decades-old Canadian healthcare system that ranks as one of the country's most popular public policies, with unanimous support from all political parties whether of the left or the right. Similarly, rancorous opposition to same-sex marriage remains a deeply rooted passion in America, while Canada a few years ago became one of the first countries in the world to recognize same-sex unions on an equivalent legal basis to traditional marriages.
The puzzle of differences between two countries sharing a continent, a largely integrated economic infrastructure, a common popular culture, deep cross-border linkages of family and friendships, and (save for the official recognition of the French language in Canada) a common language has long been an almost obsessive focus of attention among Canadian intellectuals and social scientists – but has rarely drawn the notice of American thinkers. This is hardly surprising given the huge disproportion in population, power, and wealth of the two countries. It is thus ironic that the classic study of Canadian–American political differences was contributed by an American, Seymour Martin Lipset. Professor Lipset noticed the appearance in the 1940s of the first North American socialist government, elected in Saskatchewan, and set out on a lifelong scholarly quest to explain “value differences” in the political cultures of the two countries. Now a young Harvard scholar, Jason Kaufman, has weighed in with another important American contribution to this ongoing debate.
Although motivated by the same basic questions as Lipset, Kaufman parts company with his distinguished predecessor on the crucial matter of methodology. “Political culture” has been in decline for some years as an analytical tool. Kaufman takes issue with Lipset's
tautological reasoning common to the social science of his generation: national ideology is both cause and effect in his model … We gain little by declaring cultural differences to be self-evident and then using them as explanations for the eccentricities of national political development. (22)
Kaufman takes another, more promising, tack. He looks at the development of law and legal culture in the two national jurisdictions, from the earliest colonial origins. He convincingly argues that legal regimes, bounded by clear jurisdictional limits, shape human actions in ways that are “verifiable, common, explainable, and concrete.” The “intractable puzzle of national political differences is thus reduced to the highly tractable trajectories of comparative sociolegal development” (6).
His historical account of how America developed a highly litigious society, in which private corporations loom as large or larger than the state, draws on a wealth of detail from a relatively rich American literature. His task is not to bring forth new facts, but to synthesize and reinterpret earlier authors. This reader found his reinterpretation of American sources fascinating and, on the whole, convincing.
Canadians may find his sections on Canada marginally less persuasive. Partly, this is due to a thinner existing interpretive literature for Kaufman to draw upon. But there is another problem: like many liberally minded Americans, Kaufman is perhaps a trifle too inclined to see the liberal, progressive side of Canada (that is, after all, what stands out as different from contemporary America). Canadian–American differences are differences of degree, and are as easy to exaggerate as to deny.
Even given some imbalance in the two sides in this comparative study, Kaufman has produced a readable and thought-provoking work that definitely moves the standard forward in this small but intriguing academic industry.
