Relative autonomy revisited: The origins of Canadian unemployment insurance

The concept of “relative autonomy” is now routinely used by Marxist and non-Marxist students of public policy to describe the state's independence from class forces. A rare attempt to use the concept empirically is Carl J. Cuneo's work on Canadian unemployment insurance (UI) in the 1930s. This article argues that Cuneo focusses too narrowly on class struggle, and thus misses important aspects of Canadian UI policy. Relative autonomy must be more broadly conceived in terms of the state's administrative expertise, fiscal capacity, and jurisdictional divisions. It is constituted within, not outside, the state. The article illustrates these internal forces through a re-examination of the evolution of Canadian UI in the 1930s.