Myth and Measurement: The Innis Tradition in Economic History

Myth and Measurement: The Innis Tradition in Economic History HUGH G.J. AITKEN Most people past middle age would probably agree, if they look back on their early years, that there were a few individuals who, without ever intending to do so or being conscious of having done so, exercised a decisive influence on their later thoughts and attitudes. The effect of such people is, as it were, accidental; they transform without intent. Harold_ Innis played such a role in my life, as in the lives of many other scholars now in their fifties and sixties. I am sure that he never thought of me as in arty sense_ '·'his" student. If, during my one year as a graduate student in economic history at Toronto, I was under the wing of any particular faculty member, it was Tom Easterbrook's, not Harold lnnis's. Any suggestion to Innis that he was somehow responsible for the later trend of my thoughts and interests would have evoked from him no more than :some ch~racteristically acidedged piece of ironic self-depreciation. Yet I am convinced that it was so. I suspect that Thorstein Veblen played a similar role - perhaps all great teachers do. North American scholarship is full of people who came under Veblen's influence, either personally or through his writings, and were irrever ~ibly changecJ by the .experience. But Veblen would not-have taken kindly to_any suggestion that he had been ''influential'' in a person-to-person sense. Influence. of that kind carries with it an implication of responsibility. Veblen would have repudiated with scorn the suggestion that he was personally responsible for anyone's destiny other than his own; and I suspect that Innis's reaction would have been no different. The comparison between.Veblen and Innis is appropriate in another respect. In both cases one is consciou~ .of tremendous intellectual power. This eonsciousness necessarily evokes respect, even when one disagrees with particular assertions. But this respect in both cases is time and again intermixed with what one must candidly call exasper96 ation. In Veblen what exasperates is the deliberate search for paradox, the patent glee with which he turns convention on its head, the wilful contrariness of the man. With Innis it is the obscurity, the consistent refusal to write clearly and plainly, the shrouding of meaning in a fog of allusions and implications. At its worst this trait - in lectures and in writings - could be infuriating. One became infuriated because, in the last analysis, one was being asked to believe that, behind the ambiguity and imprecision there was profound meaning. What was required was, as Coleridge put it in another context, a willing suspension of disbelief. To be taught by Innis and to learn from Innis called for an act of faith. You had to believe that there was something really important there. Grains of doubt crept in from time to time - can anyone honestly deny it? Perhaps the Emperor had no new clothes after all. It is very hard to find in Canadian scholarship today any serious criticism of Harold Innis. There has developed a kind of "cult of personality" rather like the mystique that now surrounds the Annales school of historians in Europe. There are interesting parallels between the two cases. Innis is known mostly for his work in the "staples theory'' of Canadian history and for the later grand-scale extension of that theory to the ''staple'' of communications and the rise and fall of empires. The staples theory, it is now generally agreed, is not testable. It provides a framework for research, but no one can state what propositions one is required to accept or reject in order to qualify as a staples theorist. Melville Watkins, Gordon Bertram, and Kenneth Buckley have each in their own way gone as far as anyone can in the attempt to transform the staples theory into an operational model of development, but they would be the first to admit that their versions of the thesis - testable and quantifiable though they may be - fall far short of the rich suggestiveness of lnnis's approach. Similarly with the Annales school. What is their method? What hypotheses are they testing...