The recent period
Within a decade of Innis' untimely death, his student, Harry Gordon Johnson, though not a resident (cf. Anthony Scott, 1992) in Canada, had taken Innis' place in the Canadian economics establishment.
He soon passed judgment on his colleagues:There are four broadly defined areas in which I think Canadian economists have made or are making significant contributions to the scientific discipline of economics. These are the economics of natural resources, monetary economics, public finance and especially the theory of federal finance, and international economics.
(1968, 141)
These are fields of economics of particular interest in a small, open, regionalized economy. Actually Johnson stated that Canadians had dominated the field of international economics with major contributions to the subject on the world stage, but his concern was only with the role of resident Canadians, thereby ruling out himself. He named major contributors: Ed Safarian, Paul Wonnacott, and Harry Eastman and Stefan Stykolt on international economics, Tony Scott and H. Scott Gordon on resource economics, and Albert Breton on a neoclassical construction of a federal system of government.
Johnson was pointing to Canadian contributions, not to the general trend of economics in Canada. In fact there were three major components of the trend in the second half of the twentieth century: the Keynesian vision and its evolution into Monetarism, the “formal revolution” that mathematized economics, and positivist econometrics. In this information environment, with the Canadian economics profession multiplying in expanding university departments, and the Canadian Journal of Economics emerging from the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, we find Harry Johnson and his entourage at the University of Manchester, the University of Chicago, and the London School of Economics.
It would be rash to attempt yet another summary ofJohnson's contribution to the content of the discipline of economics (f Canadian Journal of Economics, vol.11, no.4, Supplement, 1978; Journal of Political Economy, vol.92, 1984, 565—711; Donald Moggridge's biography, 2008). In any case, his major contribution may have been of a different sort. He was a giant in the economics profession of his day, bridging the Atlantic Ocean by teaching at the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago at the same time. He exploited the divide between the “Post Keynesian” Joan Robinson and the Monetarist Milton Friedman, between socialists and neoconservatives, and between “nationalists” and “continentalists” in Canada. He rejected the post-Keynesianism of Cambridge, UK, but never totally accepted the Monetarism of Chicago.
He promoted free trade, though he showed that the qualitative arguments underpinning it were not proof against all historical conditions. He was a masterful teacher and a support for promising students. He was not resident in Canada, but he religiously attended the annual conference of the Canadian Economics Association, and he was the eminence gris in the development of the Economics Department at the University of Western Ontario.
His students and associates were prominent in the Canadian economics profession into the twenty-first century: particularly Christopher Archibald, Michael Parkin, Richard Lipsey, and David Laidler, but also others whom he encountered in Manchester, Chicago, and London. David Laidler (cf. Leeson, 2010) and Richard Lipsey, who, when history is written will stand among his best students, did have a certain nihilism in their work. Like Johnson, Laidler used the history of thought as an entry into current debate. He began as a Monetarist but eventually moved away from that position in matters of policy. Richard Lipsey will be remembered most for his “General Theory of the Second Best” (1956), and for his monumental Economic Transformations (2005), both of which proclaim the proposition, either read in or read into Harry Johnson's opera, that whatever qualitative theory might have to say, historical circumstance determines historical outcomes.
Economic Transformations brings to mind Johnson's comment at the end of a book on contemporary growth theory, “Abstraction is an indispensable element of scientific investigation... but not abstraction from the problem at hand” (Kraus and Johnson, 1974, 335).Clearly, however, I am making a case on the basis of a few, however outstanding, members of the profession. The period also encompassed “old Keynesians,” for example Pierre Fortin, and new style growth theorists, for example the internationally respected Peter Howitt. There were old Keynesians who were quite able to defend their view even in the presence of hostile company (Dimand, 2010). There were many others, and an opinion on their general character was put forward in the late Johnson era:
On the whole Canadian economists seem to be quite supportive of the price mechanism as an allocative devise, and convinced of the powers of market forces in delivering outcomes. The more highly educated the economist, the more likely he or she was to accept the role of markets... [Canadian economists are] not asinclined as American and European economists to accept Keynesian propositions regarding the stabilization functions of government. An astoundingly high 97 percent of Canadian economists accepted the view that tariffs and quotas reduced the general level of welfare... on the whole Canadian economists are less disposed to support interventionist policy than are their American counterparts... Canadian economists [are] slightly more supportive of the redistributive role of government.
(Black with Walker, 1988, 148—9)
Of course, this does not necessarily mean they were rigid adherents of qualitative theory.
Perhaps this was also true of economics in French-speaking Quebec. After Francois-Albert Angers, value-oriented economics, what Angers designated as truly “pensee economique” seemed to disappear (Fortin, 1984; Paquet, 1985). One would work hard to find the New Institutionalism of Migue or the conservative Currency School neoclassicism of Roger Dehem to be nihilistic in the Johnsonian sense.
The attack on neoclassical economics by the purveyors of Western Marxist Sociologie Economique was anything but Johnsonian. A possible explanation of this state of affairs may be found in Innis' assertion that demands of publication required a more standard view and non-Canada-specific topics (Innis, 1946, xi); and in Tony Scott's comment on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Canadian Economics Association: “For it is mostly senior Canadian economists who can develop a commitment to Canadian issues or policies” (Scott, 1993, 34). However, it was a “senior economist” who displayed a penchant for criticism of the discipline in general:Monetarists, neo-Keynesians, and New-Classicists passionately debate the respective merits of their views... [but] there is no generally agreed statement of their major theories... A science where, after decades of hypothesis testing, no one can agree on the precise specification of the hypotheses already subject to prolonged testing is a very dismal discipline indeed.
(Lipsey, 1983, 367)