Studying Canada or Paradigms Lost and Found: The Waves of Canadian Historiography

Abstract

This article is entitled “Studying Canada or Paradigms Lost, Paradigms Found: The Waves of Canadian Historiography” because its purpose is to review the recent record of Canadian historiography and assess its current condition. There has been a sequence of scholarly paradigms in the study of Canadian political culture dating back to the 1920’s and so the article proceeds on the basis of a tripartite periodic division between the earlier Whig-Monumentalist-Essentialist-Idealist phase, the “revisionist” period of the Hartz-Horowitz/Tory Touch approach, and the more recent Postmodern-Pluralist-Contextualist-Eventist tendencies. These approaches are reviewed beginning with the Hartz-Horowitz/Tory-touch thesis as the most dominant paradigm over recent decades. The article then turns to the more recent trends away from this argument by those under certain postmodern influences. It then goes on to ask whether the eschewal of the Whig-Monumentalist-Essentialist-Idealist approach has not been too hasty and in need of review. The article concludes that a broad academic consensus in the field of “Canadian Studies” is not reasonably to be expected in the near future. Scholarly and philosophical names that will come up in the course of the discussion include Ajzenstat, McKay, Vaughan, Horowitz , Forbes, McRae, Granatstein, Romney, Bannister, McNairn, Fierlbeck, McKillop, Careless, Underhill, Morton, Creighton, Innis, Leacock, Grant, Cook, Preece, Binnie, Christian, Gramsci, Foucault, Locke, Tocqueville, Mill, Carlyle, Nietzsche, James, Spencer and others.