Duncan Black has proposed a theory of political choices in which the individual ordering of preferences and voting procedures in committees are the basic elements. This paper shows that the theory must also take into account certain “objective” orders of preferences which affect individual rankings. To this end, the author analyses the results of a pre-1968 election poll in the federal ridings of Langelier and Louis-Hébert. All the respondents do not rank the four parties (Liberal, Progressive Conservative, New Democratic Party, and Social Credit Rally) in the same order; this can be explained in terms of the complexity of political issues, party strategies, or certain social characteristics of the respondents. The ranking by a majority of the respondents seemed related to two sets of criteria. The first, the sociopolitical, corresponds roughly to a left-right axis, on which the parties are aligned as follows: NDP–Liberals–Progressive Conservatives–Créditistes; the second is an ethnic criterion, according to which the parties take this order: Créditistes–Liberals–Progressive Conservatives–NDP.

Among the other insights provided by the analysis, two are particularly important: the strong rejection of the Social Credit Rally by those who do not place it first, and the indifference towards the other parties by those who do.

Herbert Marcuse owes his notoriety primarily to the loud echoes evoked by his words among American and European student militants; he is in danger of becoming their first victim as is the wont of fashionable men and ideas.

But the real interest of his intellectual approach lies elsewhere, in his unceasing and relentless efforts to criticize advanced industrial societies which he judges to be repressive; to explain the mechanisms through which this repression is internalized, thus blocking any perspective allowing for radical change; and to found a new type of industrial society, compatible with, and favourable to, the “liberation” of man.

This paper retraces the main lines of this intellectual development, stressing particularly its philosophical foundations and its innovations with respect to the sources from which it is derived.