Frank Underhill and the Politics of Ideas by Kenneth C. Dewar (review)

Kenneth Dewar, in this study of historian and public intellectual Frank Underhill, offers us a worthy companion to R. Douglas Francis’ Frank H. Underhill: Intellectual Provocateur, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986). Dewar provides a strong contextual examination of Underhill’s life, from his boyhood days in industrializing Toronto, his elite studies at Oxford University, his service in the World War I, his varied political interactions, and his experiences as an intellectual straddling the line between formal and informal academia. Underhill is a complex figure, and to capture his influence, influences, and thoughts in such succinct terms is to be applauded.

Dewar’s portrayal of Underhill’s role in the university and wider community is especially illuminating. The philosophy of education being torn between generalists and specialists, the higher levels of inter-disciplinarity, the audience of scholarly literature, the relative ease in finding tenure-track work, and perhaps most importantly, the increased profile of the professor as a societal force are all intriguing. If I have one agreement with Dewar above all others, it is that Underhill epitomized the Canadian public intellectual, and still today offers a model to academics that we ignore only at our peril, along with our refusal to change the world, rather than merely theorize about it.

But beyond the masterful chronicling of Underhill’s life, Dewar has a broader ideological frame of analysis, and general political purpose. This is the primary value of the book, and where the majority of analysis and constructive criticism should be aimed. In Dewar’s view, bolstered by the foreword of ndp premier turned federal Liberal leader Bob Rae, Underhill was always a liberal democrat, who sought to incorporate into the venerable traditions of 19th century liberal radicals the reforms spurred by social democrats disenchanted with the limitations – but not inherent failures – of profit and private property. Dewar feels that liberals like Underhill are who gave Canada its social and economic progress in the postwar period, and who can do so again providing that “progressives” work together against regressive social and economic interests. In Underhill’s words, the goal was to combine liberalism and social democracy to create a “real liberal party” (53) that was neither the business-oriented Liberal Party of post-Confederation Canada, nor the ideological socialist party that Underhill came to see the ccf as. The most “real” liberal party, in his view, came in the inter and postwar period, when Liberals like W.L.M. King, Lester Pearson, and Tom Kent brought social democratic ideas into the mainstream.

Key to Dewar’s argument is that, both historically and today, the differences between liberalism and social democracy, or between the Liberal Party and the ccf-ndp, are much smaller than the gulf that separates them from the Tory and neoconservative traditions. Underhill, especially as he grew into an elder statesman, understood this, and so should we as Canada approaches a federal election in which a splitting of the “progressive” vote is still possible, implores Dewar.

In this light, my criticism here is the somewhat rushed discussions of Underhill’s relationship with socialism and liberalism, and the meanings of those two ideological systems. One could have included a discussion of Ian McKay’s Liberal Order Framework, which asserts that liberalism, including the variety held by those 19th century radicals Underhill admired, was a force opposed to liberty, because liberalism’s primacy of property creates fundamental inequalities and oppressions. He could have better addressed the theoretical concept of Red Toryism, which questions the assertion that Canadian l/Liberalism is merely a centrist plot point between socialism and conservatism.

Ultimately, I am unconvinced of the assertion that social democracy is of the same tradition as liberalism. And while Dewar makes a convincing case for Underhill’s personal liberalism, his actions and associations during the ccf years were anything but. In my view, the ccf, while a force for liberty many liberals like Pierre Elliott Trudeau admired, was...