| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Michael Dorland and Maurice Charland. Law, Rhetoric, and Irony in the Formation of Canadian Civic Culture. Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press. 2002. Pp. xiv, 359. Cloth $65.00, paper $35.00.

This book views Canadian constitutional and legal history through the prism of social, communications, and discourse theory. Much stress is placed on law's role as the product of/site for coherence-generating communicative interaction of a distinctly Habermasian kind. The manner in which legal forms both embody and constrain heterogeneity and particularism receives a good deal of attention. The "waves of discourse" that make up "the law" are seen as "strategic and agonistic in character, directed towards forging consensus among some and challenging the authority of others, and ultimately resting upon the conditions that they seek to create" (p. 4). The notion that "Canada was created by and through law" (p. 118) is made to rest on what Michael Dorland and Maurice Charland plainly see as rich, new, and fruitful ground.

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