Harold Adams Innis (November 5, 1894 – November 8, 1952) was a Canadian professor of political economy at the University of Toronto and the author of seminal works on media, communication theory, and Canadian economic history. He helped develop the staples thesis, which holds that Canada's culture, political history, and economy have been decisively influenced by the exploitation and export of a series of "staples" such as fur, fish, lumber, wheat, mined metals, and coal. The staple thesis dominated economic history in Canada from the 1930s to 1960s, and continues to be a fundamental part of the Canadian political economic tradition.Easterbrook, W.T. and Watkins, M.H. (1984) "The Staple Approach." In Approaches to Canadian Economic History. Ottawa: Carleton Library Series, Carleton University Press, pp. 1–98. Innis has been referred to as the "father of communications theory" and as the "father of Canadian economic history".
Innis's writings on communication explore the role of media in shaping the culture and development of civilizations.Babe, Robert E. (2000) "The Communication Thought of Harold Adams Innis." In Canadian Communication Thought: Ten Foundational Writers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 51–88. He argued, for example, that a balance between oral and written forms of communication contributed to the flourishing of Greek civilization in the 5th century BC.Heyer, Paul. (2003) Harold Innis. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., p. 66. He warned, however, that Western civilization is now imperiled by powerful, advertising-driven media obsessed by "present-mindedness" and the "continuous, systematic, ruthless destruction of elements of permanence essential to cultural activity."Innis, Harold. (1952) Changing Concepts of Time. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, p. 15. His intellectual bond with Eric A. Havelock formed the foundations of the Toronto School of communication theory, which provided a source of inspiration for future members of the school Marshall McLuhan and Edmund Snow Carpenter.
Innis laid the basis for scholarship that looked at the social sciences from a distinctly Canadian point of view. As the head of the University of Toronto's political economy department, he worked to build up a cadre of Canadian scholars so that universities would not continue to rely as heavily on British or American-trained professors unfamiliar with Canada's history and culture. He was successful in establishing sources of financing for Canadian scholarly research.Watson, Alexander John. (2006) Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 14–23.
As the Cold War grew hotter after 1947, Innis grew increasingly hostile to the United States. He warned repeatedly that Canada was becoming a subservient colony to its much more powerful southern neighbor. "We are indeed fighting for our lives", he warned, pointing especially to the "pernicious influence of American advertising ... We can only survive by taking persistent action at strategic points against American imperialism in all its attractive guises." His views influenced some younger scholars, including Donald Creighton.
Innis also tried to defend universities from political and economic pressures. He believed that independent universities, as centres of critical thought, were essential to the survival of Western civilization.Innis, Harold. (1951) "A Plea for Time." In The Bias of Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 83–89. His intellectual disciple and university colleague, Marshall McLuhan, lamented Innis's premature death as a disastrous loss for human understanding. McLuhan wrote: "I am pleased to think of my own book The Gutenberg Galaxy as a footnote to the observations of Innis on the subject of the psychic and social consequences, first of writing then of printing."McLuhan, Marshall. (2005) Marshall McLuhan Unbound. Corte Madera, CA : Gingko Press v. 8, p. 8. This is a reprint of McLuhan's introduction to the 1964 edition of Innis's book The Bias of Communication first published in 1951. Mel Watkins declared that Innis was "without doubt the most distinguished social scientist and historian, and one of the most distinguished intellectuals, that Canada has ever produced".
Rural roots Early life
Innis was born on November 5, 1894, on a small livestock and dairy farm near the community of Otterville in southwestern Ontario's Oxford County. As a boy he loved the rhythms and routines of farm life and he never forgot his rural origins.Creighton, Donald. Harold Adams Innis: Portrait of a Scholar. University of Toronto Press, pp. 8–9. His mother, Mary Adams Innis, had named him Herald, hoping he would become a minister in the strict evangelical Baptist faith that she and her husband William shared. At the time, the Baptist church was an important part of life in rural areas. It gave isolated families a sense of community and embodied the values of individualism and independence. Its far-flung congregations were not ruled by a centralized, bureaucratic authority.Watson, pp. 50–51. Innis became an agnostic in later life, but never lost his interest in religion.Babe, Robert. Canadian Communication Thought: Ten Foundational Writers, University of Toronto Press, p. 51. According to his friend and biographer Donald Creighton, Innis's character was moulded by the church:
Innis attended the one-room schoolhouse in Otterville and the community's high school. He travelled by train to Woodstock, Ontario, to complete his secondary education at a Baptist-run college. He intended to become a public-school teacher and passed the entrance examinations for teacher training, but decided to take a year off to earn the money he would need to support himself at an Ontario teachers' college. At age 18, therefore, he returned to the one-room schoolhouse at Otterville to teach for one term until the local school board could recruit a fully qualified teacher. The experience made him realize that the life of a teacher in a small, rural school was not for him.Creighton, pp. 18–19.
University studies
In October 1913, Innis started classes at McMaster University (then in Toronto). McMaster was a natural choice for him because it was a Baptist university and many students who attended Woodstock College went there. McMaster's liberal arts professors encouraged critical thinking and debate.Watson, pp. 64–68. Innis was especially influenced by , the university's one-man philosophy department. Ten Broeke posed an essay question that Innis pondered for the rest of his life: "Why do we attend to the things to which we attend?"Watson, p. 326. Innis refers to the question in the preface to The Bias of Communication, his book of essays on consciousness and communication.
Before his final undergraduate year at McMaster, Innis spent a summer teaching at the Northern Star School in the frontier farming community of Landonville near Vermilion, Alberta. The experience gave him a sense of the vastness of Canada. He also learned about Western grievances over high interest rates and steep transportation costs.Creighton pp. 26–27. In his final undergraduate year, Innis focused on history and economics. He kept in mind a remark made by history lecturer W. S. Wallace that the economic interpretation of history was not the only possible one but that it went the deepest.Creighton p. 28.
First World War service
After graduating from McMaster, Innis felt that his Christian principles compelled him to enlist in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He was sent to France in the fall of 1916 to fight in the First World War.Creighton, p. 31. Creighton wrote that Innis believed if German aggression went unpunished, it would be fatal to Christian hope for the world. Innis wrote to his sister: "If I had no faith in Christianity, I don't think I would go." Trench warfare with its "mud and lice and rats" had a devastating effect on him.Quoted from a later Innis letter by Creighton, p. 107.
Innis's role as an artillery signaller gave him firsthand experience of life (and death) on the front lines as he participated in the successful Canadian attack on Vimy Ridge.Creighton, pp. 34–35. Signallers, or spotters, watched where each artillery shell landed, then sent back aiming corrections so that the next shells could hit their targets more accurately. On July 7, 1917, Innis received a serious shrapnel wound in his right thigh that required eight months of hospital treatment in England.Watson, p. 70.
Innis's war was over. His biographer, John Watson, notes the physical wound took seven years to heal, but the psychological damage lasted a lifetime. Innis experienced recurring bouts of depression and nervous exhaustion because of his military service.
Watson also notes that the Great War influenced Innis's intellectual outlook. It strengthened his Canadian nationalism; sharpened his opinion of what he thought were the destructive effects of technology, including the communications media that were used so effectively to "sell" the war; and led him, for the first time, to doubt his Baptist faith.Watson, pp. 68–117.
Graduate studies McMaster and Chicago Harold Innis completed a Master of Arts degree at McMaster, graduating in April 1918. His thesis, called The Returned Soldier, "was a detailed description of the public policy measures that were necessary, not only to provide a supportive milieu to help veterans get over the effects of the war, but also to move on with national reconstruction."Watson, p. 93. Watson notes that 240,000 young Canadians died in the war, while 600,000 were wounded. The war was a devastating blow to Innis's generation.
Innis did his postgraduate work at the University of Chicago and was awarded his PhD, with a dissertation on the history of Canadian Pacific Railway, in August 1920.Watson, p. 94 His two years at Chicago had a profound influence on his later work. His interest in economics deepened and he decided to become a professional economist. The economics faculty at Chicago questioned abstract and universalist neoclassical theories, then in vogue, arguing that general rules for economic policy should be derived from specific case studies.Watson, p. 111.
Innis was influenced by the university's two eminent communications scholars, George Herbert Mead and Robert E. Park. Although he did not attend any of those famous professors' classes, Innis did absorb their idea that communication involved much more than the transmission of information. James W. Carey writes that Mead and Park "characterized communication as the entire process whereby a culture is brought into existence, maintained in time, and sedimented into institutions."Carey, J. W. (1992). "Space, Time and Communications: A Tribute to Harold Innis." In Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. New York: Routledge, p. 144.
While at Chicago, Innis was exposed to the ideas of Thorstein Veblen, the iconoclastic thinker who drew on his deep knowledge of philosophy and economics to write scathing critiques of contemporary thought and culture. Veblen had left Chicago years before, but his ideas were still strongly felt there. Years later, in an essay on Veblen, Innis praised him for waging war against "standardized static economics."In his 1929 essay, Innis concluded: "Veblen has waged a constructive warfare of emancipation against the tendency toward standardized static economics which becomes so dangerous on a continent with ever increasing numbers of students clamouring for textbooks on final economic theory." (The essay was republished in Innis, Essays in Canadian Economic History, pp. 17–26.)