Contemporary Augustinian scholarship is distinguished among other ways by its emphasis on Augustine's alleged contribution to the development of the modern notion of history. Except for a few sporadic references to a possible theology of history in the City of God, one finds little in the literature of the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries to indicate that the content of that work might be of particular relevance to the problem at hand. The same is not true of the post-World War I period, which witnessed a sudden surge of interest in this hitherto neglected subject, to such an extent that there has scarcely been a major treatment of Augustine's thought written since that time which does not dwell on it at considerable length. Augustine, Langdon Gilkey has recently asserted, is “the father of the historical consciousness,” the first author to exhibit an awareness of the fundamentally historical character of human existence, the only early Christian writer to have brought the whole of history within the compass of a “purposive unity.”

In recent years, several writers using the new political economy or public choice approach to political analysis have sought to improve our understanding of bureaus, bureaucrats and governments and, in some cases, to suggest ways in which their behavior might be “improved” in the public interest. The public choice approach to public administration rejects the so-called sociological or traditional political science approaches with their alleged Parsonian, Weberian, Marxist, historical, institutional or organic biases and limitations in favor of an individualistic, deductive, noninstitutional analysis, which is thought to be more cogent, more fertile in testable hypotheses, more genuinely theoretical and more relevant in terms of reform. Here the view is taken that the pathos of the public choice approach to public administration consists in this: that public choice advocates by virtue of their methodology are fated to “lose” consistently on questions of administrative reform and prescriptive efficacy, even while contributing, potentially importantly, to the scientific understanding of nonmarket, usually public, organizations or “bureaus.”

The ultimate aim of political theory is to disclose the meaning of political activity. As such, political theory is, at one and the same time, interpretive and evaluative. In the phrasing of Dante Germino, political theory “takes as its starting point the empirical fact of the existing human person in the totality of his experience as a creature in society.” But, of course, the meaning of “the empirical fact of the existing human person” is a topic of philosophical inquiry. Facticity is not a given. It is an issue of paramount importance. On the resolution of that issue, much depends. According to Whitehead, “theories are built upon facts; and conversely the reports upon facts are shot through and through with theoretical interpretation.” The notion, for instance, of “history devoid of any reliance on metaphysical principles and cosmological generalizations, is a figment of the imagination.” The task of political theory therefore cannot be undertaken apart from considerations of cosmology. It is at this point that process thought is relevant to political theory. And that, in general, is the topic of this article.

Wallace K. Ferguson, the noted Renaissance scholar, once wrote that history must be seen through the eyes of the one writing it. He went on to say that, “since history is in this sense created by the historian, and he, in turn, is the product of his age and environment, history varies from generation to generation and must be constantly reinterpreted.” It is with this thought in mind that we will undertake a reexamination of the role of the Arctic in Canadian-American relations.

In recent years the Arctic has become a region of growing significance for both the United States and Canada after decades of marginal interest bordering on neglect. It is this article's position that Canadian foreign policy, concerning the Arctic regions to the north of her mainland, has consistently from 1880 to 1970 been based upon a perception of potential threats, which in fact never existed. Furthermore, such a perception has been based in part upon the unsettled nature of international law in the Arctic and the effect of certain environmental factors, labeled as domestic sources of foreign policy in Dale Thomson and Roger Swanson's Canadian Foreign Policy: Options and Perspectives. The article, then, shows how Canadian foreign policy in this issue-area illustrates the Sprout's paradigm of perception in decision-making. According to this paradigm, “what matters in policymaking (and, of course, in analysis thereof) is how the human policymaker (or group) perceives, interprets and responds to the environing conditions and events.”