Shirley Tillotson. Give and Take: The Citizen-Taxpayer and the Rise of Canadian Democracy; David Tough. The Terrific Engine: Income Taxation and the Modernization of the Canadian Political Imaginary.

Nearly forty years ago, historians Geoff Ely and Keith Nield asked, “Why does social history ignore politics?” (Ely and Keith, “Why Does Social History Ignore Politics?,” Social History 5, no. 2 [May 1980]: 249–271). The problem, as they saw it, was that historians of the working class had spent so much time examining work, culture, and experience—the everyday, the particular—that they had neglected not only traditional questions of political history, like leadership and institutions, but more avant-garde problems related to the “character of the state and its penetrations even of everyday life” (here 263). Ely and Nield were not the first to raise this general concern. Nor were they the last. Could the “bottom-up” methods and perspectives of social historians produce a “new political history”? In the Canadian context, which is less familiar to readers of this journal, it is difficult to avoid the contributions of historian Ian McKay in this regard. His 2000 article “The Liberal Order Framework” argued that the historical evolution of liberalism as a “project of rule” provides the theoretical and empirical orientation necessary to draw social and political history into a productive and all-encompassing problematique (McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History,” The Canadian Historical Review 81, no. 4 [December 2000]: 616–645, here 621). McKay’s piece is likely the most cited essay ever published by the CHR. In both the U.S. and Canada, scholarly interest in the general question posed by Ely and Nield and taken up by others like McKay has spanned a variety of fields and time periods, and it has reinvigorated the history of political ideas, institutions, parties, policies, and elites, to name but a few themes. Census taking, border making, and—as this review suggests—tax collecting have never been so interesting.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.