Harold Innis: A Canadian nationalist

Harold Innis: a Canadian nationalist DANIEL DRACHE The most important fact to consider about Harold Innis is that his work is almost unknown - least of all understood - in Canada, the place where he gained unusual prominence as an innovative writer and a brilliant researcher of Canadian problems. As a writer and for the reader Innis is not an easy person to get to know. This in itself does not explain the obscurity which envelops his work The cause lies rather in the course of events which coincides with Innis' death in the early fifties. Most simply it was the Cold War atmosphere which seized liberalism with a fury and made it back away from the type of inquiry Innis was into. More specifically, his assessment of American influence in Canada challenged the liberal establishment's contention that continental co-operation was for the good of Canada. Innis was resolutely anti-American and believed that continentalism and American foreign policy in the world at large were imperialistic. America was the new imperium and its species of technology was no less ruthless or ambitious than others in the long line of its imperial predecessors . It is not difficult to imagine how this kind of thinking put Innis out of touch with the times. His followers, as well as those of his public who continued to read him, found it not to their taste to extol the virtues of a man whose views rankled them. Whatever respect he gained, he won because of his reputation as the committed academic and chairman of the prestigious Department of Political Economy at the University of Toronto . His accomplishments in both of these areas - large, formal, original studies of Canada's economy in a pre-industrial era and the careful building of a department of political economy with much talent and broad interest? - gave him a place of prominence in the life of his country which could not go unnoticed. And yet, despite Journal of Canadian Studies all this, soon after his death his writings stopped being read and his critical spirit disappeared from the places where it had been pre-eminent. To understand Harold Innis, there are two basic characteristics of him that should be stressed. He was a nationalist because of his liberalism. He was a liberal. Whatever ideas he held about the state in national life did not subtract from his belief that liberalism had been instrumental in seeding the growth of Canada from a colony to a nation. Having come that far along the path of nationhood , the problem for Canada was to sustain and advance its political independence. Innis' great contribution to the cause of building the Canadian nation was his personal example of providing his students and his public alike with the beginnings of a Canadian liberal tradition rooted in the history and economy of his country. He was not an anglophile like so many of his contemporaries whose writings were distinguished by their colonial fascination for warmedover fabianism and/or the stately and irrelevant majesty of nineteenth century jurisprudence. Nor did he covet America's liberal methodology or traditions. His original bent of mind should not be put down to the overworked idea that he struck the mean between British liberalism and its American variant. What he achieved, and what his followers failed to grasp, is that he laid the foundation for a new liberal tradition with its own language and concepts which was neither American nor British but Canadian. The task he undertook was to repatriate liberalism by dialectically changing it. He wanted to push it in directions it had not travelled. To do this liberalism had to be stretched so that it had a new historical perspective on its origins and o:q. the forces driving it forward. Prefacing his collection of essays, The Bias of Communication, Innis summarized his radical efforts in words marked for their restraint and awkwardness: Moreover, the papers are concerned primarily with the political approach and reflect an Anglo-Saxon obsession. They are restricted to consideration of two dimensions of political organiza7 tion, on the one hand the length of time over which the political organization persists, and on the other hand the...