Uniting in Measures of Common Good: The Construction of Liberal Identities in Central Canada (review)

Since Tocqueville identified America as a ‘nation of joiners,’ scholars have recognized voluntary associations as significant cultural phenomena in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western societies. Historians have studied North American, British, and European manifestations, especially in the context of other major post-Enlightenment developments such as the rise of religious evangelicalism, industrialization and urbanization, class formation, and the advent of political liberalism. The Canadian literature has focused primarily on nineteenth-century associationalism as either an incubator for middle-class culture or an instrument of middle-class domination. More recently, historians have considered the movement as a part of state formation or illustrative of an emerging democratic political culture.

Darren Ferry has added an interesting new monograph to this body of literature. In Uniting in Measures of Common Good, Ferry examines six types of voluntary associations established in Ontario and Quebec during the nineteenth century: Mechanics’ Institutes, temperance societies, mutual benefit organizations, agricultural societies, the Dominion Grange, and Patrons of Industry, and scientific and literary associations. Ferry’s central argument is that ‘voluntary associations played a critical role in the cultural, socio-political, and economic processes inherent in the construction of a liberal social order in central Canada during the nineteenth century’ (8).

Ferry takes his lead from Ian McKay’s liberal order framework, which suggests that Canada ought to be studied as a ‘project of rule’ wherein philosophical liberalism was transplanted, contested, and renegotiated. Although Ferry acknowledges that the primacy of the individual is, as McKay insists, a sine qua non of liberal thought, he also borrows from Jean-Marie Fecteau, whose work on crime and poverty in nineteenth-century Quebec has suggested that versions of liberalism could encourage mutualism and the formation of collective identities. From these two perspectives, Ferry proposes that voluntary associations incorporated both ‘collective liberal identities and individualist liberal doctrines’ (9).

Ferry identifies four principles that were shared among associations. The first was inclusivity: Most societies purported to include all members of the community, regardless of class, gender, or ethnicity. Associations usually invited working-, middle-, and upper-class men to join, and seldom disallowed female membership. This rhetoric of inclusion barely obscured persistent class, gender, and ethnic divisions within colonial society, however. Even when male-dominated associations included female members, a discourse of domesticity justified their segregation and marginalization. Ferry also shows that although voluntary associations such as Mechanics’ Institutes and agricultural societies attempted to include men of all classes, they were ultimately vehicles for the ‘middling sorts’ to exert their cultural authority (6).

Associations insisted that political partisanship and religious sectarianism would not be allowed to interfere with associational sociability. Ferry provides evidence that members could be punished for introducing ‘divisive’ discussion topics, and speakers who espoused particular political perspectives were censored. The other principles that appeared consistently in associations’ records were honest industry, which was purported to be the surest and most virtuous path to material success, and ‘rational’ recreation, which limited members’ leisure activities to respectable entertainments, such as picnics, excursions, and exhibitions.

Ferry argues that these principles composed a ‘liberal rhetoric of community,’ which directors of voluntary associations appropriated to ‘engineer consent to a “liberal” social order’ and manage social unrest (6). Ferry proposes that these doctrines were subject to ‘ongoing social and cultural negotiations . . . between directors and members, and between members and non-members alike’ (8). Although voluntary associations could ‘become active vehicles in questioning and challenging the governing social, political, and cultural administrations’ (5), Ferry concludes that associations ‘were extremely successful in establishing some measure of cultural consensus,’ at least until 1870 (288). After this date, consent to a liberal order was undermined by industrialization, immigration, and class conflict.

This book’s key strength is the breadth and extent of its evidentiary base. Ferry based his study on minutes, constitutions and by-laws, annual reports, speeches, and periodicals generated by dozens of local associations from urban and...