------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------  
Published by EH.NET (March 2006)  
  
Alexander John Watson, _Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold   
Innis_. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. ix + 525 pp. $65   
(Canadian) (cloth), ISBN: 0-8020-3916-2.  
  
Reviewed for EH.NET by Robin Neill, Department of Economics, Carleton   
University and the University of Prince Edward Island.  
  
  
Watson asserts a dominating and consistent intention in all of Harold   
Innis's academic activities, from before his service in the First   
World War to his death in the early 1950s: an intention to raise   
concern about the condition of Western Civilization. In the past,   
according to Watson's Innis, Western Civilization had been renewed by   
activity liberated from ossified intellectual and institutional   
expressions of its genius. This renewal took place on the margins of   
established forms of civilization. Indeed, Watson's Innis, born on   
the frontier of Euro-American civilization, is a "marginal man"   
crying doom. As he saw it, the forces suppressing insurgency on the   
margin were getting the upper hand. By exhaustive reference to Innis'   
writings, the sources of his ideas, and his political program in the   
academic world, Watson makes his point. It may be a mere imputation   
that Innis was from the beginning self-conscious of his role as   
prophet, but that Innis assumed this role, whether deliberate and   
self aware or not, is evident from Watson's exhaustive and exhausting   
exposure of Innis's analysis of the advance of Western civilization.  
  
Watson is not writing as a practicing academic or private sector   
economist. Following degrees in English Literature, Political   
Science, and Political Economy (PhD, 1981) he has given most of his   
time to Care Canada, a non-sectarian international humanitarian aid   
organization. At the time of the publication of _Marginal Man_ he was   
its Chief Executive Officer. Still, there is something that can be   
said apropos of the book that should be of interest to Canadian   
economic historians, and historians of economic thought of whatever   
nationality.  
  
There are now at least four book-length treatments of Innis, each   
with a different purpose. (1) Donald Creighton's _Harold Innis;   
Portrait of a Scholar_ (University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1957)   
is a eulogy out of which, by reference to Innis's studies of the fur   
trade and the cod fisheries, Creighton drew the conclusion that   
Canada was a British country, and, by implication, not French and not   
American. (2) My own, _A New Theory of Value: The Canadian Economics   
of Harold Innis_ (University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1972) was   
part of an extended attempt to take a fresh look at Canadian economic   
development through the history of economic thought in Canada. In   
that exercise I had some success in extracting Innis's economics from   
his broader considerations, but I was more successful later when I   
compared Innis to Herbert Simon and found similarities. I was not   
fully successful (in my own estimation) until I saw Innis as a   
partial contributor to a grand narrative of Canadian economic   
development. Innis wrote about primary product exports. Others,   
bringing the narrative closer to the substance of the Canadian case,   
wrote about agriculture, manufacturing, and banking. This grand   
narrative, to which they (Adam Shortt, Donald Creighton, W.A.   
Mackintosh, W.J.A. Donald, S.D. Clark, Vernon Fowke, and others) were   
all contributing, was still unfinished when grand narratives of   
national emergence passed from intellectual fashion in North American   
history. Watson's account quite misses this. (3) Paul Heyer's _Harold   
Innis_ (Rowman and Littlefield, London, 2003), focusing on "the later   
Innis," is a most readable account of the content of Innis's essays   
on media of communication. Innis's essays were considered, and   
perhaps still are considered, unreadable by all but a few devoted   
disciples. Watson apologizes for this by asserting that Innis   
developed a special method of presentation with hidden purposes,   
without explicitly explaining what those purposes were. I think   
Innis's "special method" was a consequence of the time constraints on   
a very busy academic administrator, and of the less than felicitous   
literary style that marked all of his work. Heyer goes some distance   
in overcoming the difficulty. Finally there is John Watson's   
_Marginal Man_.  
  
Watson focuses on Innis's personal life, his motivation and his inner   
struggles, but in a one-sided way. At the very end of his   
exhaustively researched account Watson refers to Innis as a pleasant,   
encouraging, even light hearted and sociable person. The depiction   
comes as a surprise after most of the book depicted him as an   
obsessive, psychopathic, Machiavellian academic entrepreneur,   
successfully bullying his way up the administrative ladder at the   
University of Toronto. Indeed, after reading Watson's restrained   
account of Innis's apparently pathetic relationship with a particular   
female student, it takes some effort to see him as in any way light   
hearted. The book presents Watson's dark vision of Innis, as much as   
it presents Innis's dark vision of the trend of Western Civilization.  
  
In other ways Watson's treatment of Innis is one-sided. He reveals,   
with painstaking, even excessive, proof, that in his communication   
essays Innis relied on the writings and insights of a number of   
contemporary Classicists -- to a point just short of "plagiarism"   
(the word is Watson's). But much that Innis wrote from 1935 on was   
heavily influenced also by a number of economists in the United   
States, and Watson only mentions this. Watson seems not to have been   
looking for the economist in Innis. Terms such as "Historical   
Economics," "Institutional Economics," "Neoclassical Economics," and   
"Positive Economics" do not appear in the index. Three pages (111-14)   
out of 416 are devoted to Innis's place in the history of economics.   
The term "cyclonics," by which Innis pointed to the dynamics of an   
economy passing from one general equilibrium to another under the   
impetus of technological change, is given a passing nod in two pages   
(159-60). All of this, of course, is not a criticism of the book, but   
an indication of its content.  
  
Watson's biography of Innis, like all biographies, is a work of art.   
It puts a construction on Innis's work, attributing to it a single,   
consistent, life-long intention to elaborate a paradigm of the   
advance of civilization. In this paradigm, advance is generated by   
the vision of frontiersmen who are free from the entrenched,   
unchanging, and suffocating mentality of those at the center of which   
the frontier is a frontier -- hence, "marginal man." With this   
construction Watson is able to assert that the communication studies   
that Innis produced towards the end of his life were not an outgrowth   
of his staples histories, but part of a larger pre-existing project.   
By the end of the book one is almost convinced.  
  
Watson misses the fact that Innis was not the only one dealing with   
the generality of his concern in the middle years of the twentieth   
century, though Innis took a different approach. Frank Knight, with   
whom he was in constant contact, and J.J. Spengler, like Innis, were   
shocked at the passing of Modernity. In Modernity, rationality,   
objectivity, a generally accepted moral order, and truth, though not   
achieved, were thought to be achievable and approaching achievement.   
Much of what Innis wrote in his last seventeen years was an account   
of changing informational environments -- an attempt to explain the   
passing of Modernity. The account was depressing for Innis, Knight,   
and others, because it led up to the advent of the Postmodern view in   
which objective truth and emotion-free rationality are thought to be   
not attainable. There were many others, however, who, writing very   
shortly after Innis, saw the same thing without dismay. Intellectual   
historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science (Jacques   
Derrida, John Higham, Maurice Mandelbaum, H.J. White), whose work was   
germinating contemporaneously with "the later Innis," saw that the   
informational environment was changing, and accepted that all   
informational environments were largely constructed and constantly   
changing under pressure from internal and external forces.  
  
It was Marshall McLuhan, who was aware of trends in literary   
criticism and pursued communication studies with Innis, who   
introduced me to Postmodernism at Toronto in the early 1950s -   
indeed, even when I was first hearing of Innis. That aspect of   
McLuhan's thought and its implications for the place of Innis in the   
history of thought have not found a place in _Marginal Man_.  
  
  
Robin Neill is Adjunct Professor of Economics at Carleton University   
and the University of Prince Edward Island. Neill is author of _A New   
Theory of Value: The Canadian Economics of H.A. Innis_, University of   
Toronto Press, 1972; "Rationality and the Informational Environment:   
A Reassessment of the Work of H.A. Innis," _Journal of Canadian   
Studies_, 22, 1988: 78-92; and "Innis, Postmodernism, and   
Communications: Reflections on Paul Heyer's _Harold Innis_," _History   
of Economic Thought and Methodology_, 24, 2006 (forthcoming). He is   
currently researching the place of the history of economics in the   
practice of economics, and continentalizing forces in the economic   
development of Canada.  
  
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