SOURCE: Clarke, George Elliot. “Must We Burn Haliburton?” In The Haliburton Bi-centenary Chaplet: Papers presented at the 1996 Thomas Raddall Symposium, edited by Richard A. Davies, pp. 1-40. Wolfville, N.S.: Gaspereau Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Clarke proposes that the writings of Haliburton and the Marquis de Sade have been consigned to obscurity due to their similar offensive views on reform—that liberalism is a false promise of equality and that the elite should rule by strength. Haliburton, a conservative, opposed capitalism, reformism, and abolitionism because he saw these as products of a liberal world resulting in a breakdown of the natural hierarchy. Sade, a liberalist, maintained that the strongest members should have the freedom to dominate the weak.

Admittedly, the incendiary interrogative that sparks this essay derives from Simone de Beauvoir's Faut-il brûler Sade?, or, in English, Must We Burn de Sade?, the title of her...