Staples Thesis In Canada

By the early to mid-1930s, however, Innis’ status within the Canadian scholarly establishment had changed dramatically, and by 1940, if not before, he was widely regarded as Canada’s pre-eminent scholar.One might well ask, therefore, why Innis, at the very apex of his career, Numerous commentators have wrestled with these questions.Innis was an “inner-directed,” honest scholar to begin with, and he remained just that until the very end.

This critical review and commentary will help delineate relations between Innis’ ) of the former.La dialectique ou contradiction entre le relativisme et l’universalisme dans les deux enquêtes majeures effectuées par Innis n’a pas jusqu’à présent été reconnue, et constitue le sujet de cet article.MOTS CLÉS Innis; Dialectique; Principales ressources; Théorie économique; Théorie des médias According to his biographer and friend Donald Creighton, Harold Innis’ first decade of scholarship at the University of Toronto (1920–1930) was filled with frustration and loneliness (Creighton, 1978): he was the only one on staff researching Canadian economic history, for example, and his book on the fur trade (finally appearing in 1930) had been rejected by several publishers.The dialectic or contradiction of relativism/universalism in Innis’ two major inquiries has hitherto remained unrecognized, and constitutes the focus of this article.KEYWORDS Innis; Dialectic; Staples; Economic theory; Medium theory RÉSUMÉ Harold Innis a entamé sa recherche sur l’histoire économique canadienne (théorie des principales ressources) pour contrer les postulats supposément universels de la science économique traditionnelle; il croyait que le courant traditionnel « justifiait » l’exploitation des pays en voie de développement par les pays les plus riches.That being said, I must point out that Innis had much more in mind than just testing for bias in developing his staples thesis.Actually, his main mission was the development such as Canada’s, to countervail the exploitative thrust, as he saw it, of the economics mainstream (Innis, 1972b; 1979a).Moreover, he was then calling for a new economics to countervail the hegemony of the economics establishment, hardly an enterprise endearing him to the economics mainstream.Indeed, he expressed deep admiration for ostracized economist Thorstein Veblen, a position sure to lose him friends and antagonize people (Innis, 1979b).Throughout his life Innis was always dialectical with regard to the mainstream.To continue, Innis later redeployed in his media/communication work tools he had originally developed to analyze staples (Easterbrook, 1953b), in part (again according to Easterbrook) to testlimitations or biases.