ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts a comparative exercise wherein Ryerson's tutorialist statecraft will be held up to the mirror of Professor Ajzenstat's “classical” or “Lockean” liberalism and vice versa. In short, Ryerson thought the native population of his time was very much in need of “elevation,” even as Canada herself had already been “elevated” by earlier pioneering efforts at “tutorial statesmanship.” Ajzenstat's purpose is to defend the principle of constitutional neutrality such that the rightness of tolerating all forms of politics without exception, “including, bien sur, the varieties of socialism,” is evident. According to Ajzenstat, “politics in a liberal democracy should not be constrained by a priori cultural and ideological assumptions.” Ryerson argues that there are times when the “existing powers” in society “spurn control” and it is at these times that the “statesman's object” is to “guide them into a right channel, and exercise over them that fixed and full command which belongs of right and by prescription to superior minds”.
