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AbstractSince his rise to national importance in Canada, commentators have been trying to make sense of Preston Manning and his Reform party. For the most part, however, such commentary has refused to see his political thinking as new at all, but instead regards it as a throwback to previous examples of western-based political protest movements. Yet Manning should be regarded as a postmodern conservative. His politics are a response to the process of postmodernization that has characterized Canada in recent years. This article traces the rise of postmodern politics in the Western world; examines the specifically Canadian manifestation of this process; discusses the Reform party in the context of the cultural tension driving Canada's recent political debates; and concludes with a commentary on Manning's contribution to the fragmentation of Canada's traditional party system.

This article argues, contrary to the analyses of many scholars, that the political thought of the nineteenth-century Swiss cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt is neither frivolous nor irrelevant. More specifically, this essay combines biographical information about Burckhardt with an analysis of his major writings in order to challenge the notion that Burckhardt was simply a cultural historian and not a serious political thinker. The central teaching of Burckhardt's life is that the intellectual in mass society can best serve the community, not by direct political participation, but by working for the intellectual, aesthetic, and moral cultivation of the individual. The central teachings of his political writings are that "great men" often rule but unjustly, that successful leaders approach politics as a "work of art" and master the devices necessary to shape their subjects, that culture should not be subordinated to the state, and finally that individualism, class conflict, mass democracy, and the erosion of culture are both unfortunate and inevitable aspects of modernity.