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UMJ® THE STATE OF THE INTERWAR SOCIAL SCIENCES IN NOVA SCOTIA by Paul Fraser Armstrong Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia September 2009 © Copyright by Paul Fraser Armstrong, 2009 Library and Archives Bibliotheque et 1*1 Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington OttawaONK1A0N4 OttawaONK1A0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-56381-6 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-56381-6 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non­ L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, preter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distribute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non­ support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. 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My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness. 2 Corinthians 12:9 IV Table of Contents Abstract vi Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Chapter 2: Existing Canadian Models The Prehistory Model 6 The Humanist Model 10 Chapter 3: Interwar Social Science at Toronto John Allan Irving (1903-1965) 15 Samuel Delbert Clark (1910-2003) 18 Chester Bailey Martin (1882-1958) 22 Final Remarks 25 Chapter 4: The Social Economics Model An Alternative Moral Science 26 Weberian Social Economics 28 Transmission to America 35 Young' s Correction of Mitchell 3 7 Chapter 5: Interwar Social Science in Nova Scotia Daniel Joseph MacDonald (18 81 -1948) 41 Samuel Henry Prince (1886-1960) 48 Alfred Burpee Balcom (1876-1943) 56 Final Remarks 63 Chapter 6: Conclusion 64 References 69 V Abstract I begin by setting out a methodological dispute concerning the respective roles of recursive causation and contingent history in the development of the social sciences, and suggest that greater attention to the comparative analysis of forms of intellectual practice may contribute to a resolution of this dispute. In Canada, early institutional and structural analysis by sociologists focussed on the disciplinary separations that occurred in the 1960s, and was later rationalized with Robert Brym's prehistory model. Detailed investigations in intellectual history, however, showed the coherence of social science practice in the interwar period, and A.B. McKillop's humanist model represents a robust alternative. Using representative faculty members, I examine the form that interwar social science took at the University of Toronto, and conclude that it is a good match for the McKillop model. The practice of interwar social science in Nova Scotia, however, has other salient features, and I elaborate an alternative model of social economics that appears to be a better match for the historical practice in Nova Scotia. I conclude that this kind of analysis offers some prospect for advancing a resolution of the underlying methodological dispute. VI Chapter 1 - Introduction In a stimulating article on historical epistemologies, Peter Wagner (1995) advances a cogent argument concerning the development of the social sciences. He suggests, reasonably, that the level of epistemological certainty varies from time to time within a scientific community, and that this variation can be an object of investigation. He traces various changes in epistemological understanding within the social sciences, arguing that the confidence of social scientists in their concepts and methods reached an all-time high in 1960, gradually giving way again to skepticism.1 Wagner recognizes that a state-transition occurred between the interwar and postwar periods, but he regards it as only a moment in a larger development process in which institutional, cognitive and political linkages were built during the first half of the twentieth century. My own reading of the history of the social sciences suggests the existence of a long-term intellectual transformation that began during that classical period and ended in the 1960s ... It was the transformation of the restricted liberal modernity of the 19th century into a fully inclusive social configuration. (Wagner, 1995: p. 185) Stephen Turner, in a series of incisive essays over the last twenty years,2 provides a similar explanation for the development of sociology, although with more emphasis on the institutional and cognitive interactions, and less on the linkages with, and influence of, the state. He relates the story of the development of mainstream American sociology We should limit this self-understanding of the social sciences to the mainstream and not the moving edge: the moving edge would be the breakdown in the positivist separation of facts and values. See Putnam (2002) for a discussion of Quine's 1951 criticism of the analytic/synthetic dichotomy and its implications for the separation of facts and values. 2 See, for example, Turner, (1991, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2007a, 2007b), and Turner and Turner (1990). 1 as one of continuity - of a steady rise to dominance of quantitative method as the ruling paradigm. American quantitative sociology, as a distinctive enterprise with something resembling a "paradigm", began to take a distinctive form in the 1890s and came to dominate the field in the first three decades of the 20th century under the leadership of Franklin H. Giddings, the first professor of sociology at Columbia. (Turner, 2007b: p. 13)3 There is an alternative account, however, which emphasizes a transition period over a much narrower segment of time, perhaps a decade or so in duration from the interwar period to the immediate postwar period, say 1939-1949. We see fundaments of this account, for instance, in a discussion by Carl Schorske of the postwar change in American academic culture: The most important cross-disciplinary illumination was the identification of a virtual refounding of all four disciplines [literature, philosophy, economics, political science] in the 1940s and 1950s. (Bender and Schorske, 1998: p. 6) It bespeaks a moment in American academic culture when it was preparing to turn away from the nineteenth century primacy of a loose, historical conception of meaning - from range to rigor, from a loose engagement with a multifaceted reality historically perceived to the creation of sharp analytic tools that could promise certainty where description and speculative explanation had prevailed before. (Schorske, 1998: p. 315) In recent work, George Steinmetz has advanced an analysis of the "radical transformation" thesis in a series of strong, provocative essays on American sociology.4 Consistent with his story about the rise of methodological positivism in the postwar 3 Cristobal Young (2009) is the latest to support this account. He uses a stage theory with a new dataset to argue for the progressive separation of sociology from economics. 4 See, for example, Steinmetz (2004, 2005a, 2005b, 2005c, 2007). 2 period, he argues for a sequence of contingent, historical events interacting with macro- structures in American society. The consolidation of the sociological-scientific field after World War II cannot be explained simply in terms of disciplinary maturation or generational succession ... After the war, social reality became more orderly and was presented using tropes of stability, repetition, and "the end of history" ... Because social practices were more regular and repetitive, it was plausible to forecast and even to control them. For historically contingent reasons, in other words, social reality