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Innis and Economics*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

W. T. Easterbrook
W. T. Easterbrook*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

Over the three decades of teaching and research allotted Harold Innis, no subject concerned him more than, the state of economics. He looked to economic history to enrich and broaden economic thought, and he sought to explain fashions in economics and to make economists intelligible to themselves. Although Veblen's influence left its mark on his work, Innis remained throughout a disciple of Adam Smith and no name appears more frequently in his observations on economics past and present. His plea was, as he put it, for “a general emphasis on a universal approach” and in his unfinished paper he writes, “The economic historian must test the tools of economic analysis by applying them to a broad canvas and by suggesting their possibilities and limitations when applied to other language or cultural groups.”

Apart from this search for perspective in economic thought there were other elements of continuity in Innis's thinking which give his life's work a coherence and a unity whether his interest centred on Canadian economic history or the duration powers of empires. It is scarcely necessary here to refer to his dislike of concentrations of power in any form or to his uncompromising belief in the free and creative powers of the individual, attitudes which stamp his research from beginning to untimely end. In his writings on economic history, technological change, free or controlled, links past and present. In his more specific references to economics, the pricing system provides the key to his reflections on the state of the subject. Early in his work there is present the same price-technology dichotomy that is to be found throughout Veblen's writings; later Innis sought to resolve this dichotomy in his studies of communication in which he saw technology and pricing as elements interacting with politics, law, and religion in a larger network of human relationships.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , August 1953 , pp. 291 - 303
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1953

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Footnotes

*

This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Association in London, June 5, 1953.

References

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4 This appeared in Papers and Proceedings of the Canadian Political Science Association, VI, 1934, 17–31 Google Scholar and in revised form in the Introduction to the volume The Canadian Economy and Its Problems edited by Innis, H. A. and Plumptre, A. F. W. (Toronto, 1934).Google Scholar

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12 Ibid., 65.

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19 A more complete survey would include reference to the influence of J. M. Clark. In the economics of overhead costs, Innis found much of the dynamic of change in both Canadian expansion westward and the spread of industrialized communications on a world scale. See Innis, H. A., “Unused Capacity as a Factor in Canadian Economic History,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, II, no. 1, 02, 1936, 1–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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22 Ibid., 1938, 5.

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25 Ibid., 307.

26 Ibid., 318.

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33 Ibid., 86–7.

34 Ibid., 92.

35 Ibid., 97.

36 Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, X, no. 1, 02, 1944, 107.Google Scholar

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38 International Journal, I, no. 1, 31.Google Scholar See also his “The Problem of Mutual Understanding with Russia,” Queen's Quarterly, LIII, no. 1, 1946, pp. 92–100.Google Scholar

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43 A Plea for Time. Sesquicentennial Lectures, University of New Brunswick. (Fredericton, 1950), 8.Google Scholar

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47 Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, XV, no. 4, 11, 1949, 457–76.Google Scholar

48 Sesquicentennial Lectures, University of New Brunswick. (Fredericton, 1950.)

49 The Common Law with its flexibility and receptivity to change, its emphasis on facts and their interpretation, favourable to the scientific tradition and to industrial development, is contrasted with Roman Law and its appeal to principles and its greater emphasis on continuity and duration.

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