The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History

How can we get beyond the present socio-cultural versus national-political impasse in Canadian history writing? By a historical practice of re/connaissance, which begins not with the essentialist project of ‘rethinking Canada,’ but rather with the more modest goal of mapping the Canadian state as a project of liberal rule in northern North America. Those who undertake this re/connaissance of the complex moment of liberal hegemony called Canada will have much to learn from the national-political and socio-cultural historians who have come before them. But they will also be doing (and some are already doing) something radically new -because the reconceived category ‘Canada’ in their work denotes not an untheorized context or an unanalyzable essence, but that socio-cultural project through which liberal order became the national-political ‘commonsense’ in northern North America.