“Canadian Political Culture: The Problem of Americanization” Definitions

Possessive Individualism - the desire to own or dominate one self.

Terms of Possessive Individualism (from the work of C.B. Macpherson):

a. Individuals are by nature equally free from the jurisdiction of others.

b. The human essence is freedom from any relations other than those one enters with a view to her or his own interest.

c. The individual's freedom is rightly limited only by the requirements of others' freedom.

d. The individual is proprietor (owner) of her own person, for which she owes nothing to society. One is free to alienate her or his capacity to labor, but one cannot alienate her whole person. (One cannot sell herself into slavery.)

e. Society is a series of relations between proprietors. Political society is a contractual device for the protection of proprietors and the orderly regulation of their relations.

Communitarianism - A belief system that stresses both the logical and the moral necessity of thinking about political lie in terms of the requirements of the community, rather than in terms of the isolated and abstracted individual.

Americanization - 1: to cause to acquire or conform to American characteristics. 2: to bring (as an area) under the political, cultural, or commercial influence of the U.S. intransitive senses: to acquire or conform to American traits.

Bottom of Form

Federalism - Federalism is a system of government that provides a division of and sharing of powers between a national government and a state or regional governments. (E.g.: In the United States they have states not regions. Their national government is called the Federal government.)

Political Culture - 1. The sum of attitudes, beliefs, and expectations that constitute particular orientations toward society in general and politics in particular. 2. The specifically political orientations--attitudes towards the political system and its various parts, and attitudes toward the role of the self in the system.

Ideology - a: a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture b: a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture c: the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program

Nationalism - loyalty and devotion to a nation; especially a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups.

Socialism- a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done.

Bottom of Form

Atomization - to treat as if broken up into many smaller units.

Hegemonic - preponderant influence or authority over others.