Building The New Canadian Political Economy

Abstract

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Building the New Canadian Political Economy: Oral histories of an intellectual community in the 1960s and 1970sBy Chris Hurl and Benjamin Christensen Abstract:Since the late-1960s, the New Canadian Political Economy (NCPE) has played an important role in shaping the trajectory of the social sciences in Canada and informing the political goals and strategies of a range of progressive social movements. However, there have been few studies that have attempted to trace the history of the NCPE as a distinctive intellectual tradition or account for its place in consolidating a left political milieu in Canada outside of Quebec. Exploring the NCPE as a part of a wider left formation, this article examines the role played by organic intellectuals in building this tradition. Drawing from eleven oral history interviews and archival analysis, we begin by locating these intellectuals in the disciplinary struggles unfolding within social science departments through this period. We then explore how, working through networks between the academy and progressive social movements, intellectuals were able to consolidate a space for the revitalization of this approach. Beyond simply acting as purveyors of new ideas, we argue that these intellectuals also played a vital role in establishing the institutional foundations -in texts, seminars, and meeting roomsthrough which the NCPE took shape as both an academic discipline and political discourse.

Conservative Economic Nationalism and the National Policy: Rae, Buchanan and Early Canadian Protectionist Thought

“…While the Canadian left nationalists of the 1970s have been widely studied, prominent CPE textbooks and even detailed surveys of CPE thought in recent decades do not analyze Canadian political economists from the nineteenth century, let alone economic nationalist ones. The discussion of the intellectual history of CPE usually begins, instead, in the interwar years, with a focus on thinkers such as Harold Innis (see, for example, Drache, 1978; Clement and Williams, 1989; Howlett and Ramesh, 1992; Hurl and Christensen, 2015).…”