Towards the nationalization of Canadian sociology

Towards the nationalization of Canadian sociology MICHAEL GURSTEIN The discussion of the problems of English Canada's nationhood and statehood has so far been confined almost exclusively in academic circles to historians and economists. As a result the debate is notable first by its "lamentational" quality, a common historical reaction to the discovery of a loss of innocence ; and secondly by its "economism," the phrasing of both the problem and its solution in economic terms devoid of social or political circumstance either descriptive or tactical. This is the fault not of those who have bravely begun the discussion but of the social scientists who could not leave off marching up and down the marble corridors of the Canadian constitution, or torturing truths from the bodies of defenceless rodents , or playing games with gargantuan machines of noted intelligence but noticeable insensibility. The reason for this is to be located in the over-all failure of social science to come to terms with "nationhood," "statehood" and "imperialism" as real structural elements of the social world. This failure results from the theoretical vacuity and subordination of social science in the hinterland. It is also a product of the intellectual-cum-cultural-cumpolitical allegiance of social scientists in the colonized hinterland to the forms, techniques and concepts of the social sciences at the imperial centre, and thus a willed failure to come to terms with the uniqueness of their specific social and historical condition. The final and, perhaps, most easily remedied cause is the "settler" colonization of the social sciences by the legal or cultural nationals of the imperial centre - the "Americanization " of departments of social science. Canada (throughout this paper "Canada" 50 refers to the Anglophone Canadian nation and the apparatus of Canadian statehood and excludes except where it is specifically referred to, the Francophone nation of Quebec ) faces two crises simultaneously. One is the crisis of the demand for national liberation on the part of a very significant and active portion of the Francophone nation. This crisis is not a unique one; it confronts most multi-national states. Social science by ignoring the question of "nationhood" not only has failed to present the problem in a manner in which it could be resolved but it has actively obscured its understanding by the use of "scientific" approaches based on the employment of a priori concepts such as "society" (as co-terminous with the Canadian state), "ethnicity" (as a substitute for "nation") and "nation" and "state" as though they were interchangeable. In addition , social scientists have introduced theoretical schemas ("functionalism" and "pluralism ") and techniques ("voting analysis" and "stratification scales") without questioning whether they were appropriate to the empirical reality of Canada. Secondly, Canada is faced with the crisis of the independence of the nation and the state - economically, culturally and politically - from the imperial statehood of the United States. As social scientists are increasingly crucial in social self-reflection, their ignoring of the development of this crisis has been an active contributing factor. Their lack of awareness is a resu It of the subordination of social scientists to the mythology of a "value-free" social science and the general failure of Anglo-American social science to make provision for the economic context within which social relations exist the structural constraints which colour all social relations. Canada based social science has contributed nothing to the positive resolution of either of these two problems. The most notable attempts by social scientists working for the Commission on Bi-lingualism and Bi-culRevue d'etudes canadiennes turalism contributed little more than a static and meaningless portrait of the problem, important only for its clear illustration of the theoretical vacuum from which they started. What is needed is a "contextualized" Canadian social science, theoretically and technically appropriate to Canadian problems and aspirations, from which could emerge concrete programmes for the achievement of ends and the resolution of problems. II The dominant sociological ideology of Canadian social scientists is some brand of "functionalism" derived, it is said, from Weber via Parsons, Merton, Naegele, etc. The actual path for the absorption of this ideology by Canada based social science remains to be documented but obviously it is related to the training...