The Dual Mandate of Social Science: Remarks on the Academic Division of Labour

Extract

When Carl A. Dawson, a Canadian of American sociological training, went to McGill University in 1922, he went as a pioneer. He succeeded to the directorship of a school of social work, but the sociological point of view he brought was novel in Canada. Robert M. Maclver had taught at Toronto in the twenties. After he left to continue his work with great distinction in the Graduate Faculty of Political Science at Columbia University, the late Professor E. J. Urwick carried on in somewhat the same mood. It was the mood of the British scholarly liberals in which interest in welfare politics joined with social philosophy. Courses called sociology had certainly been offered in other Canadian universities, usually as a sort of sideline.

I do not believe that there had been any formal courses in sociology in the French universities of Canada, but Léon Gérin, Edouard Montpetit, and other French-Canadian scholars had long since studied, and in some measure emulated, the work of Frédéric LePlay, that same LePlay whose name lived on more among British sociologists than among those of his own France. I have no doubt Montpetit was familiar with Durkheim, whose work had so great an influence first on American sociologists and, later, on British and American social anthropologists. One should add that during all of this time Marius Barbeau, an anthropologist of British training, was rummaging around for evidence of the nearly lost arts of early French Canada. He had no fixed place in a university. Edward Sapir, also an anthropologist and one who had a great influence on American sociologists and social psychologists, had spent some time in Canada under the same auspices as other Canadian ethnologists–the Bureau of Mines. The sociological mood was not completely wanting in Canada, but sociologists were, to put it mildly, not a group with strong vested interests. In fact, the students of that time were inclined to complain that sociologists assigned them far too many books and articles concerning the States. Professor Dawson warned me, when I joined him in 1927, that my predecessor, also an American, had been given quite a runaround on this point. When it came up in one of my classes, I countered by assigning large doses from English social and housing surveys. When the students complained of that, too, I suggested that we might all get together and create our own research on Canada.