Harold Innis and Classical Scholarship

Harold Innis and Classical Scholarship* A. JOHN WATSON I once had to choose between going into university work or into politics and I decided to go into politics. - H..A. Innisl At the height of his professional success, Harold Adams Innis chose to "leave behind" his colleagues in economic history and enter serious research in a field in which he mispronounced the names of even the most common authorities. There followed more than a decade of intense work resulting in four books and innumerable articles of stimulating, but cryptic, character. By the time of his death in 1952 his scholarly reputation had become truly international and this was recognized in his election as President of the American Economic Association, among other honours. Yet, the irony in Innis' life is that, largely because of his mid-career shift in research matter, he became less understood as he became more celebrated. Twenty-five years later, as we look back on the scholarly legacy left to us by Innis, the prospect is not a bright one. Apart from specialist audiences, his contribution has been largely forgotten or ignored. I doubt that more than a small minority of Canadian undergraduates in the social sciences would even recognize the name of the most brilliant scholar produced by our country in this field. The sad truth is that the continuing struggle he waged against specialization in the social sciences and for an authentically indigenous school of scholarship has largely been lost since the time of his death. Mainly for this reason there is still no clear consensus of what Innis and his life's work were about. Everyone agrees that he was an outstanding scholar. But the concern has been with using his work rather than understanding it, with attempts to enlist his authority in posthumous support for this or that point of view. In consequence , he has been variously viewed as an Journal ofCanadian Studies incipient fascist, a liberal, an anarchist, a radical democrat, an elitist and the forerunner of current Marxist scholarship in Canada. Furthermore , there are passages from his work which seem to support each one of these interpretations. Is it possible to find an essential Innis amid this welter of seeming contradiction and ambiguity ? Perhaps we can take our lead from one of Innis' recurring themes and start our investigation by looking at the biases of the principal perspectives on Innis' work. If we adopt this approach, we find ourselves dealing with two frames of reference corresponding to the two main phases of Innis' intellectual activity. I am referring of course to the "staples approach" of the "early" Innis and the communication studies of the "late" Innis. The years of the Second World War form the transitional period between these two phases of Innis' intellectual life. In approaching Innis, then, we tend to read only the works of one or the other of these two phases of his life according to our own research inclinations. The perspective thus attained is further exaggerated by the commentaries available on the works of either phase which tend naturally to share the biases of that phase. Thus, Innis becomes the victim of the very specialization in the social sciences that he warned about. An intellectual tyranny is set up in which the "late" Innis dominates the "early" or vice versa. I would suggest that this presentation of Innis' life work as a kind of intellectual schizophrenia is accepted all too readily, for it, ironically enough, provides the built-in coherence that goes with a specialized branch of the social sciences, be that economic history or communications theory. Studies which attempt a new approach at integration of the two periods, such as Neill's presentation of his work as the development of a ''new theory of value,'' have so far tended to exaggerate the ambiguity rather than to dissipate it. I would suggest that this categorization of Innis into "early" and "late" follows from the fact that he was essentially a colonial intellectual who continually struggled against the dominant and myopic paradigms in research set by metropolitan institutions and intellectuals. These dominant habits of thought tend to emphasize indivi45 dualism and external influences on the peripheral area...