The room was packed at last week’s CHA meetings for the discussion of Ian McKay’s new interpretative framework for the study of Canadian history. People were propped against the walls. There’s something about McKay’s bold proposal that’s very attractive.
He first advanced the argument in an essay entitled, “The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History” (Canadian Historical Review, 2000). In 2006, Michel Ducharme and Jean-François Constant organized a colloquium on McKay at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.
Ducharme and Constant have now edited the colloquium papers. Liberalism and Hegemony, Debating the Canadian Revolution (University of Toronto Press) appeared this spring, just in time for the Canadian Historical Association session. It includes McKay’s original essay, and – surprise – a long and equally impressive second one on the same lines.
Liberalism and Hegemony is long (over 450 pages); there are twelve chapters, each a substantial essay, and, in all, fourteen authors. If your time is limited read at least Ducharme and Constant’s excellent Introduction, “A Project of Rule Called Canada.” They point out for one thing that McKay uses a definition of liberalism akin to C.B. Macpherson’s “possessive individualism,” and they ask – I’m grateful – why this definition of liberalism “should prevail over Janet Ajzenstat’s essentially political definition, which bases itself on British constitutionalism.”
Mckay is indebted to Antonio Gramsci as well as Macpherson. Perhaps we need an essay on Canadian historians’ debt to Marxists. In the 1960s the great influence was Louis Hartz. His views on historical determinism were attractive to some historians and many political scientists.
Feudal conservatism, classical liberalism, socialism: Louis Hartz and Gad Horowitz taught us that the progression was inevitable – as sure as the day follows the night. (They made an exception for the United States, which, they told us, may well be doomed to wander forever in the dim twilight of classical liberalism.) Equally influential in the 60s and still read today is the eminence C.B. Macpherson, a man who never abandoned his enthusiasm for the twentieth century’s deadliest philosophies of government. His admiration for the Soviet Union’s form of rule knew no bounds, and he had a soft spot for the one-party systems that emerged in post-colonial Africa. (Think of the Congo. Think of Zimbabwe. Weep.)
And now Gramsci. Canadian historians are looking for new ways to write and teach Canada’s national story. I’m paying attention.
Fascinating comment. I remember a professor of Political Thought once seriously asking me (a History major) if there were still any Marxists in the History department at our university. Turning the tables, I asked if there were any in Political Science, and he replied that the last one was probably C.B.Macpherson. Can you please explain this huge difference? I am really curious.
Thanks.
Everyone wants to be a political philosopher. They’d even rather be a bad political philosopher than an historian, I guess.
Macpherson was probably the last, or almost the last to identify himself as a member of the Party. But sympathies linger. Louis Hartz is still an influence in Political Science Departments.