“What Shadows We Are, and What Shadows We Pursue”: A Study of Edmund Burke’s Influence on Canadian Political Culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This historiographical study explores the influence of Edmund Burke on Canadian political culture.In the mid-twentieth century, conservative nationalist English-Canadian historians popularized the notion that Burkean thought had a formative influence on political traditions and government institutions in Canada.That claim has persisted to the present day despite its veracity having never been demonstrated by historical evidence.To address that oversight, this dissertation tests for the influence of Burke in a person and time that were critical to the formation of Canadian political culture, Sir John A. Macdonald and the Confederation project.Using an intellectual history methodology, it finds that Macdonald's letters and speeches, the Confederation debates, and the BNA Act do not offer definitive proof of the Burkean claim.Macdonald and Confederation are then analysed through a political economy lens to demonstrate that the explanatory power of the Burkean claim is comparatively weak.The dissertation then focuses on the mid-twentieth century figures who made the claim, locating its origins in their responses to political and intellectual issues of their times.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.057 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".