Liberalism and Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution

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New search User lists Site feedback Ask a librarian Help. Advanced search Search history. Browse titles authors subjects uniform titles series callnumbers dewey numbers starting from optional. See what's been added to the collection in the current 1 2 3 4 5 6 weeks months years. Cite this Email this Add to favourites Print this page. First, it moved us beyond the tired debate between J. Granatstein and the social [End Page ] historians. Moreover, McKay's paradigm offered a replacement for such discarded meta-narratives as colony-to-nation, the Laurentian thesis, and Marxism. Bereft of master narratives, Canadian historiography in the s had seemed in danger of degenerating into a series of unconnected thematic studies without a coherent organizing structure.

Indeed, the proliferation of historical research on what are essentially non-national topics gender, social class, sexuality, ecosystems, etc. As McKay puts it, does the adjective '"Canadian" still qualify that which it modifies in a meaningful way? McKay's framework also promised to answer a fundamental question in Canadian history: Why did a single nation-state emerge from heterogeneous set of First Nations and quasi-feudal neo-European societies that occupied Canada's landmass in ?

McKay concluded that, because many aspects of life in northern North America, not just politics, were influenced by the liberal 'project of rule' that we call Canada,' Canadian history is indeed a viable field and should not be discarded in favour of strictly transnational approaches to studying the past. In other words, political boundaries such as the forty-ninth parallel should matter to social historians.

The papers in this collection exemplify both what is good and what is deeply frustrating about McKay's liberal order framework.

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Many of the contributors have integrated material from many historical periods and regions in the course of applying the framework, thus avoiding the narrow temporal and geographical focus characteristic of so much recent historiography. Unfortunately, this book's readership is likely to remain confined to professional historians of Canada. Fort Henry, Kingston, Ontario.

Another major problem with this volume is that there is basically nothing about military and naval history in it. This is a shocking omission for several reasons.

Liberalism and Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution | History Department

First, the military, specifically the British military, played a crucial role in the development of Canada in the 19th century. Consider, the city of Kingston, where Professor McKay teaches, a British garrison town that is today physically dominated by the looming hulk of Fort Henry, which was built to protect the settlement from the United States. It is not for nothing that the main street of Ottawa is named for the Iron Duke.

Second, the military, a branch of the state fully funded by taxpayers and based on a hierarchical chain of command system, is a deeply illiberal institution, which is why 19th century classical liberals were so keen on cutting army budgets. Third, there is a large community of military historians in Canada.

Any paradigm that seeks to explain 19th century Canadian history needs to be able to integrate military and naval history if it is going to be taken seriously. The other problem with this book is the lack of a serious comparative element. In fact, this is a problem that bedevils the entire Liberal Order Framework literature in Canada. First of all, the Liberal Order Framework authors do very little in the way of Canadian-American comparisons.

I suspect that if they did more research along these lines, they would find out that the United States was more liberal than Canada in many ways in this period. Government played a somewhat less important role in the American economy, American judges took the idea of freedom of contract much more seriously than Canadian judges, it was much easier to incorporate a business in the United States than in Canada, it was easier to get a divorce. Just as importantly, neither McKay nor his followers engaged in other hemispheric comparisons. Canadian historians of the 19th century should be looking to both the United States and Latin America to make comparisons.

McKay and his followers fail to engage in either sort of comparative analysis or indeed any type of comparative analysis at all.

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The United States embodied liberal individualism as least as much as the Dominion of Canada, if not more so. Indeed, there is a vast literature on the ways in which American life has been informed by Lockean and other liberal ideas from the eighteenth century onwards. He reminds us that the leaders of the scattered British colonies were united by a desire to remain British subjects and that Britishness was central to the Canadian identity until the mid-twentieth century. Bannister is correct to suggest that it is the loyalist order and its legacies, not liberalism, that make Canada distinctive from the United States.

The British had lost most of their North American colonies in and they were determined to hold on to the rest. For their part, the United Empire Loyalists, the conservative clergy of Lower Canada, and other pro-British people in British North America were equally determined to remain British subjects and to escape absorption into the great republic.

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It is impossible to understand such pivotal events as the War of , Confederation, or even the election without recognizing that the Canadian nation-state was the product of a big counter-revolutionary project that was, in terms of scale, almost as dramatic as the Counter-Reformation or the Holy Alliance, the league of reactionary European monarchs formed in the 19th century to suppress liberal and nationalist movements. There were some republicans, some people who wanted to join the United States, and some ardent Free Traders who loved the ideas of Adam Smith.

Some of these liberals wanted Canada to join the United States. Goldwin Smith is one such example. Others wanted to implement the liberal agenda within the context of the inherited political framework, that is, a semi-autonomous colony within the British Empire. But these people were sailing against the current. For the dominant ideology, the hegemonic political project, was the counter-revolutionary loyalist one, which wanted to create a rival federation that would keep in the United States in check.

The strength of this ideology helps to explain why creole nationalism i. Canada was the anomaly in the 19th century and leaders such as John A. Macdonald were acutely aware of this. I would argue that the situation in 19th century Canada, where the contest between loyalist sentiment and the nationalist desire for independence from Europe became wrapped up the struggles between economic liberalism and conservativism, was fundamentally the same as the conflicts then raging in other American societies.

If McKay and the brigade of scholars he leads would engage in some comparative analysis, they would begin to realize the problems with the view that John A.