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Steven High, Ian McKay. Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and the People's Enlightenment in Canada, 1890–1920. Toronto: Between the Lines. 2008. Pp. x, 643. $49.95, The American Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 3, June 2010, Pages 828–829, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.3.828
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Ian McKay provides a reconnaissance of the beginnings of Canadian socialism—what he calls the “first formation” of the Canadian left. In describing his project as a reconnaissance, McKay eschews the sentimentalism and sectarianism that have characterized so much of left scholarship. To reconnoiter something is to obtain information of military value about your enemy: “A left that understands its own past, that ‘acknowledges its own determination,’ has a far better chance of strategic interventions in the present” (p. 2). McKay's ambition is to awaken in us a desire to rethink how and why we write history. It is a political project that is highly reflexive, intellectually challenging, and historically grounded.
The focus here is on the emotive force of ideas and of new ways of seeing. In compelling fashion, McKay shows us that early Canadian socialists saw themselves as the guardians of scientific evolutionary theory. The revolutionary science of social evolution provided them with a vocabulary and an alternative ideological framework through which the world could be understood. If Darwinism provided a vocabulary and frame for this new practice of leftism, it also afforded socialists with a sense of optimism that history was on their side. McKay discovers working-class autodidacts weaving evolutionary theory and revolutionary politics together into socialist Darwinism. The working-class enlightenment was therefore characterized by openness to science and by new ways of thinking. An alternative discursive space was thus opened up to critique industrial capitalism and the liberal order.
