Harold Innis
Harold Adams Innis FRSC (November 5, 1894 – November 8, 1952) was a Canadian professor of political economy at the University of Toronto and the author of seminal works on media, communication theory, and Canadian economic history. He helped develop the staples thesis, which holds that Canada's culture, political history, and economy have been decisively influenced by the exploitation and export of a series of "staples" such as fur, fish, lumber, wheat, mined metals, and coal. The staple thesis dominated economic history in Canada from the 1930s to 1960s, and continues to be a fundamental part of the Canadian political economic tradition.[7]
Harold Innis
November 5, 1894
November 8, 1952 (aged 58)
- The Fur Trade in Canada (1930)
- Empire and Communications (1950)
- The Bias of Communication (1951)
Innis's writings on communication explore the role of media in shaping the culture and development of civilizations.[8] He argued, for example, that a balance between oral and written forms of communication contributed to the flourishing of Greek civilization in the 5th century BC.[9] He warned, however, that Western civilization is now imperiled by powerful, advertising-driven media obsessed by "present-mindedness" and the "continuous, systematic, ruthless destruction of elements of permanence essential to cultural activity."[10] His intellectual bond with Eric A. Havelock formed the foundations of the Toronto School of communication theory, which provided a source of inspiration for future members of the school Marshall McLuhan and Edmund Snow Carpenter.[11]
Innis laid the basis for scholarship that looked at the social sciences from a distinctly Canadian point of view. As the head of the University of Toronto's political economy department, he worked to build up a cadre of Canadian scholars so that universities would not continue to rely as heavily on British or American-trained professors unfamiliar with Canada's history and culture. He was successful in establishing sources of financing for Canadian scholarly research.[12]
As the Cold War grew hotter after 1947, Innis grew increasingly hostile to the United States. He warned repeatedly that Canada was becoming a subservient colony to its much more powerful southern neighbor. "We are indeed fighting for our lives", he warned, pointing especially to the "pernicious influence of American advertising.... We can only survive by taking persistent action at strategic points against American imperialism in all its attractive guises."[13] His views influenced some younger scholars, including Donald Creighton.[14]
Innis also tried to defend universities from political and economic pressures. He believed that independent universities, as centres of critical thought, were essential to the survival of Western civilization.[15] His intellectual disciple and university colleague, Marshall McLuhan, lamented Innis's premature death as a disastrous loss for human understanding. McLuhan wrote: "I am pleased to think of my own book The Gutenberg Galaxy as a footnote to the observations of Innis on the subject of the psychic and social consequences, first of writing then of printing."[16]
Graduate studies[edit]
McMaster and Chicago[edit]
Harold Innis completed a Master of Arts degree at McMaster, graduating in April 1918. His thesis, called The Returned Soldier, "was a detailed description of the public policy measures that were necessary, not only to provide a supportive milieu to help veterans get over the effects of the war, but also to move on with national reconstruction."[32]
Innis did his postgraduate work at the University of Chicago and was awarded his PhD, with a dissertation on the history of Canadian Pacific Railway,[33] in August 1920.[34] His two years at Chicago had a profound influence on his later work. His interest in economics deepened and he decided to become a professional economist. The economics faculty at Chicago questioned abstract and universalist neoclassical theories, then in vogue, arguing that general rules for economic policy should be derived from specific case studies.[35]
Innis was influenced by the university's two eminent communications scholars, George Herbert Mead and Robert E. Park. Although he did not attend any of those famous professors' classes, Innis did absorb their idea that communication involved much more than the transmission of information. James W. Carey writes that Mead and Park "characterized communication as the entire process whereby a culture is brought into existence, maintained in time, and sedimented into institutions."[36]
While at Chicago, Innis was exposed to the ideas of Thorstein Veblen, the iconoclastic thinker who drew on his deep knowledge of philosophy and economics to write scathing critiques of contemporary thought and culture. Veblen had left Chicago years before, but his ideas were still strongly felt there. Years later, in an essay on Veblen, Innis praised him for waging war against "standardized static economics."[37]
Innis got his first taste of university teaching at Chicago, where he delivered several introductory economics courses. One of his students was Mary Quayle, the woman he would marry in May 1921 when he was 26 and she 22.[38] Together they had four children, Donald (1924), Mary (1927), Hugh (1930), and Anne (1933).[39] Mary Quayle Innis was herself a notable economist and writer. Her book, An Economic History of Canada, was published in 1935.[40] Her novel, Stand on a Rainbow appeared in 1943.[41] Her other books include Mrs. Simcoe's Diary (1965), The Clear Spirit: Canadian Women and Their Times (1966) and Unfold the Years (1949), a history of the Young Women's Christian Association.[40] She also edited Harold Innis's posthumous Essays in Canadian Economic History (1956) and a 1972 reissue of his Empire and Communications.[40]
Donald Quayle Innis became a geography professor at the State University of New York. Mary married a surgeon and did graduate work in French literature. Hugh Innis became a professor at Ryerson University where he taught communications and economics. Anne Innis Dagg did doctoral work in biology and became an advisor for the independent studies program at the University of Waterloo and published books on zoology, feminism, and Canadian women's history.[42]
Academic and public career[edit]
Influence in the 1930s[edit]
Aside from his work on The Cod Fisheries, Innis wrote extensively in the 1930s about other staple products such as minerals and wheat as well as Canada's immense economic problems in the Great Depression. During the summers of 1932 and 1933, he travelled to the West to see the effects of the Depression for himself.[73] The next year, in an essay entitled, The Canadian Economy and the Depression, Innis outlined the plight of "a country susceptible to the slightest ground-swell of international disturbance" but beset by regional differences that made it difficult to devise effective solutions. He described a prairie economy dependent on the export of wheat but afflicted by severe drought, on the one hand, and the increased political power of Canada's growing cities, sheltered from direct reliance on the staples trade, on the other. The result was political conflict and a breakdown in federal–provincial relations. "We lack vital information on which to base prospective policies to meet this situation," Innis warned, because of "the weak position of the social sciences in Canada."[74]