On Reading Industry and Humanity: A Study in the Rhetoric Underlying Liberal Management

On Reading Industry and Humanity: A Study in the Rhetoric Underlying Liberaf Manage111ent BARRY COOPER I In his Introduction to the recent re-edition of Mackenzie King's Industry and Humanity, David Jay Bercuson surveyed the generally unenthusiastic scholarly reception the book has received.I It appears in a series of reprints entitled ''The Social History of Canada'' and can, indeed, tell readers, nearly 60 years after its publication, much of the human costs of industrialization, of the problems of labour relations earlier in the century, and of King's proposals to deal with these questions. The dust jacket of the new edition informs the reader that it deals with industrial relations and liberalism. But just here one encounters an ambiguity: the contextual meaning of . "industrial relations" seems clear enough, but · what does "liberalism" mean? One may, with Dawson, draw a link between Industry and Humanity and certain pieces of legislation passed by King's government or, with Ferns and Ostry, interpret the work as a foundation of his policy and a guide to his actions.2 While such interpretations are valid enough, they need to be supple- . mented by an examination of King's text in terms of its rhetoric and argument. That is, one may learn something else of what liberalism means in Canada by examining the chief literary work of its chief architect on its own terms and not with one or both eyes on its author, his intentions, and his later career. In terms of the approach I would like to make in this essay, the identification of liberalism with the policies of the Liberal Party amounts to a petitio principii. Yet, perhaps, in the end, this is unavoidable. If one looks, for example, at the standard treatise on liberalism, approximately contempo28 raneous with Industry and Humanity, Guido de Ruggiero's A History of European Liberalism, one finds the author proceeding upon the assumption that liberalism is a clearly denoted subject with a history of its own. Such books are not written today. Rather, liberalism is viewed less as a distinctive topic than an aspect or phase of a broader .historical process of secularization and tolerance, the growth of a technical and industrial society, and the accompanying growth of ideological symbolisms that interpret the meaning of this process to the human beings that undergo it. If by political theory one means the discursive or noetic interpretation of political reality, then liberalism is not political theory but an element of political reality that the theorist is called upon to interpret. More specifically, liberalism is an ideological symbolism with, customarily, a middling place on the familiar spectrum that runs from left to right, from revolution to reaction. The history of political ideas (for want of a better term) affords some support for this conventional placement of liberalism. The second decade of the nineteenth century saw the introduction of the terms liberal, conservative, and restoration, all three of which constituted reactions to the French Revolution. The first thing to note, therefore, is that liberalism in its most general sense is a configuration of opinions and sentiments existing in the midst of a surrounding revolutionary movement whose origins can, no doubt, be traced back long before the outburst of 1789. At least, it would appear so for European liberalism. There it made sense, for example, ·to talk of a restoration of the old regime because it had once existed and had been swept away by a full-scale revolution. That is, the actual course of historical events gave sufficient stability to the new terminology that de Ruggiero could legitimately claim to write a history of European liberalism. The political vocabulary of Canada, as of the United States, is in this respect quite different. Here we find such oddities as the LiberalConservative Party and the Progressive Conservative Party; fortunately, we do not find them at the same time. Or, in the United States, roughly speaking, one could maintain that the Republican Party is conservative because of its liberalism in Revue d'etudes canadiennes Vol. 13, No. 4 (Hiver 1978-79 Winter) the older European sense. These remarks, which are in no way original, serve to support the proposition that the specific...