Changing the Subject(s) of the "History of Canadian Sociology": The Case of Colin McKay and Spencerian Marxism, 1890-1940

Abstract: Although Canadian sociologists, responding to such issues as Canadianization, feminism, and postmodernism, have over the past quarter century shown a strong interest in writing historical narratives about their discipline, they have tended to focus exclusively on university-based sociology. This focus has obscured the extent to which "sociological discussion" was a broadly-based intellectual activity in the North Atlantic world, especially among self-taught working-class intellectuals fired by evolutionary theory and a sense of sociology's emancipatory potential. Colin McKay, one of the most prolific and important of these working-class sociologists in Canada, exemplified their general tendency to work within a paradigm influenced by both Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer. His work, taken as an outstanding example of radical sociological writings in this tradition, had important things to say about class, culture, and capitalism in Canada. Resume: Depuis 25 ans, les sociologues canadiens, repondant aux questions telles que l'independance canadien, le feminisme, et la condition postmoderne, ont construit des recits historiques au sujet de leur discipline, concentre presque exclusivement sur le monde universitaire, une strategie qui passe sous silence les traditions du sociologie populaire, souvent inspires par Marx et Herbert Spencer. Ici on examine les ecrits sociologiques de Colin McKay, un autodidact ouvrier, qui a propose des theses eclairantes a propos de la culture et le capitalisme au Canada. In every one of their recent "great debates" -- over Canadianization, Quebec, Marxism, feminism, postmodernism -- Canadian sociologists have been drawn into a discussion of the significant events in the history of sociology in Canada. A new development in the field is often "historicized" by relating it to "the Canadian sociological tradition," made up of a certain number of key events and personages (e.g., the "beginnings" of sociology at McGill under C.A.Dawson in the 1920s and 1930s, the emergence of the Toronto School in the 1930s and 1940s, with Harold Innis and S.D. Clark as the significant figures, Americanization in the 1960s, Canadianization in the 1970s, postmodernism and cultural studies in the 1990s, and so on). Such historical narratives have naturalized a narrowly academic definition of "Canadian sociology." A broader approach to the history of Canadian sociology may bring rewards not just to sociologists but also to all scholars concerned with the exploration of "the social" in Canada. I begin with a brief consideration of the academic emphasis in existing histories of Canadian sociology, then proceed to an analysis of the work of Colin McKay, a working-class intellectual who exemplified a wide-spread enthusiasm for radical sociology in turn-of-the-century Canada. Drawing upon theories of Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer, such "sociologists" as McKay developed their own critical understanding of capitalist development. a. Narratives of Sociological Development Accounts of the history of Canadian sociology almost always work with an implicit equation: sociology = the discipline taught in sociology departments. Gillian Creese is typical in remarking that The history of sociological research on British Columbia is not much older than BC Studies [b. 1969]. The first sociology course was offered at the University of British Columbia in 1918 and the first sociologist was appointed in 1929, but the discipline did not develop until the late 1960s.... This pattern was not unique to B.C. Until 1961 McGill University possessed the only independent Sociology Department in Canada.... (Creese, 1993-1994: 21). The implicit assumption here is that sociological research is obviously the same as academic sociology, and that nearly all sociologists, as intellectuals, worked as teachers in the universities (see also Childers, 1973: 40). Frank E. Jones has claimed that sociology in Canada was largely neglected until the 1950s (Jones, 1992: 21). …