Moral Vision, Empirical Rigour

Shaped by its roots in the intellectual and political ferment of the French Revolution, sociology is popularly identified with radical ideologies, Marxism and socialism in particular. Yet sociologists are uniquely diverse in the range of research methods they use—ethnographic, historical and statistical—and are heirs to a rich tradition of creative intellectual innovation from Durkheim, Weber and Merton to expatriate Canadian Erving Goffman. Intellectually diverse and creative disciplines with a strong critical edge are destined to give rise to factional battles, and so it is with sociology. We are a contentious discipline with lower status within the university and among the general public than economics, political science, psychology and philosophy. Modern-day sociologists often feel embattled and set upon, for good reason: our scientific status is often questioned, we tend to fight among ourselves, and our ideas run against the individualistic culture and neo-liberal and conservative grain of our times.

Canadian sociology has its own challenges—so much so that it is arguably facing an institutional crisis. (1) In English Canada, a preference for historically based methods, narrow “Chicago school” qualitative research and 1970s-era British-style Marxism has often led to an insular Canadian perspective at the expense of broader international influence in a discipline increasingly oriented toward theoretical generalizations and rigorous scientific methods. In Quebec the discipline has been defined by nationalism and sociology’s important policy role during the Quiet Revolution, at similar intellectual cost. On university campuses, sociology’s place as one of the core liberal arts is being progressively weakened by the growth of closely related applied areas such as criminology and health studies, as well as by new competition from humanities-based cultural studies.

One useful way to discuss these larger issues is to re-examine the life, career and ideas of John Porter, Canada’s most famous sociologist as described in Rick Helmes-Hayes’s Measuring the Mosaic: An Intellectual Biography of John Porter. Porter stands head and shoulders over other Canadian sociologists because of The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada, a classic work of 20th-century social science published in 1965. Based at Carleton University in Ottawa, Porter worked patiently for years gathering original primary source data on inequality in Canada, doing alone what teams of Statistics Canada researchers would do today. Committed to the rigorous gathering of empirical data and the testing of theories using the statistical methods developed in both British and, especially, American social science communities, Porter’s analysis of inequality in Canada transformed the debate overnight. And he created a disciplinary tradition oriented to the rigorous macro-level analysis of class and ethnic inequality in Canada that exists to this day.

Written with one eye toward the scholarly sociological elite in the United States (The Vertical Mosaic won the best book award bestowed by the American Sociological Association in 1966), Porter’s classic text helped define modern scholarly standards while simultaneously influencing policy makers and public debate. It is a remarkably readable book that gained a mass audience in the 1960s and ’70s with sales of well over 100,000 copies, unheard of at that time in Canada. Politicians seized on Porter’s title and began talking about Canada’s “cultural mosaic,” an irony since Porter himself was no fan of multiculturalism.

Much luck and happenstance went into the making of the most important piece of social science likely ever produced in Canada. Porter was offered a teaching job at Carleton University when the institution was small and undistinguished, and Porter himself was a demobilized World War Two soldier. He had taken some sociology at the famous London School of Economics, but was without a PhD, and he published little for a number of years. But after The Vertical Mosaic, Porter became a much-discussed celebrity whose book challenged the myth that Canada was a classless society. Porter observed that Canada relied heavily on its elite groups to make major decisions and to determine the shape and direction of its development, and he noted that our elite was a tightly knit group of wealthy, predominantly Anglo-Saxon men centred in Montreal and Toronto. Obvious as these observations are today, at the time they were momentous and controversial insights. Helmes-Hayes argues that The Vertical Mosaic did three things: it established sociology as a legitimate discipline in the Canadian context, it pioneered a macro-sociological class approach and it helped create the emergent field of inequality and diversity studies in Canada. Nothing else Porter did in his career came close to the impact of The Vertical Mosaic (he died in 1979 at the relatively young age of 58), but it is impossible to talk about Canadian sociology without taking serious account of Porter’s legacy.

Perhaps the most widely discussed question about the contemporary discipline is whether it should be a public sociology or a fully professional, theoretically and methodologically driven science. Canadian academics, more generally, have been talking about our responsibilities to the society that funds our work for some time now, particularly in relation to debates about the federal government’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) becoming a knowledge council, not simply a source of academic research grants. Recent discussions in Canada have been influenced by a controversial and widely debated proposal by the American sociologist Michael Burawoy, who argues that sociologists must creatively juggle four distinct but essential roles: the professional, policy, critical and, most important, the public. For Burawoy, the foundation of sociological insight and contributions comes from the combination of professional peer-reviewed knowledge aimed at solving empirical and theoretical puzzles, policy interventions where scholars help solve problems defined by non-academic clients or stakeholders, critical internal discussions of our own ethical and intellectual assumptions, and public sociology where we engage in dialogue with the general public on issues of broad interest. Burawoy’s perspective emerged out of and overlaps with a larger debate about the role of the public intellectual in the contemporary knowledge society, where, in our case, English-Canadian public intellectuals such as Naomi Klein, John Ralston Saul, the late George Grant, Charles Taylor and (before he came home and became a politician) Michael Ignatieff discuss social and political issues in accessible language aimed at the general public. John Porter provides an early model for Burawoy’s vision for sociology and social science, transcending all Burawoy’s categories and carving out, as he did, a multifaceted, scholarly, policy, critical and public role in Canada after 1965.

Porter’s contribution to what Burawoy now calls critical sociology is remarkable. Helmes-Hayes’s most original argument in his account of Porter’s life and career is the case he makes for understanding his roots in the late 19th-century “New Liberalism” of Leonard Hobhouse. The standard discussions of Porter’s intellectual influences revolve around his Fabian socialist orientation, along with polarized debates about whether Porter was hostile to Marxism because of his American-influenced functionalist sociology. Helmes-Hayes compellingly argues that Porter transcends these various perspectives with his New Liberal view that social science must be rooted in both a moral vision and empirical grounding. For Burawoy, social science will be of little use to society if it becomes a purely technical enterprise unaccountable to the people it studies and divorced from ethical imperatives. Even if it is true that social scientists are moral philosophers in disguise, as Alan Wolfe once argued, we must certainly avoid the absurd costumes that some of our most technical statistical procedures represent, insisting, as Porter reminds us, that our work must engage the public and policy makers with arguments that make moral as well as purely academic sense.

Porter’s life and work, moreover, have important things to teach us regarding the second major challenge the social sciences face today: the contemporary relevance of the traditional disciplines and research universities. Much of the debate we hear about interdisciplinary research in Canada is polarized and de-contextualized, as senior administrators push traditional disciplines to open up in order to save money, and faculty empire builders on campus peddle their own pet projects outside traditional disciplinary organizational forms. Traditional social science disciplines such as political science, economics and sociology are 19th-century creations, to be sure, as is the very notion of a research university itself. But Porter understood, as some contemporary scholars seem not to, that scholarly excellence requires the setting of boundaries around the evidential standards one employs to produce useable knowledge. Before Porter, sociology in Canada was an eclectic mix of historical writings, Marxist-inspired political economy, ethnographic observations and demographic data gathering. After Porter, Canadian sociology developed an identity organized around the social scientific study of inequality, politics and institutions, concerned in central ways with policy-relevant work on the role of education and ethnic origins in the reproduction of unequal opportunities in a class-divided society.

Porter’s vision of Canadian sociology is not uncontroversial, and Helmes-Hayes gives us a detailed chapter discussing the reception and debate about The Vertical Mosaic. For many Canadian sociologists Porter was not radical enough, preferring Weberian stratification theory to a Marxist focus on the means of production. For others, Porter’s analysis shared the gender blindness of traditional American-style status attainment models, and his emphasis on an ethnic hierarchy (starting with elite English-speaking British and moving to French-speaking Québécois through to various new immigrants) did not put enough emphasis on race, First Nations and the white settler colonial nature of the Canadian national project itself. Despite these criticisms from the left, Helmes-Hayes is surely right that Porter’s careful and original empirical documentation of massive and systemic social inequity in Canada was a major contribution to the country’s intellectual culture, especially since, as the prominent University of Toronto scholar John Myles has argued, sociologists have ceded the study of social inequality to economists and think tanks.

The debates on inequality, stratification and higher education that Porter engaged in the 1960s and ’70s were not, of course, purely parochial matters—then as now, scholarly debates and institutional reforms within higher education were part of an increasingly global context that has accelerated in the early years of the 21st century. But he was, if nothing else, concerned with a uniquely Canadian approach to social scientific studies of inequality, and thus his legacy looms large as we confront contemporary challenges to our disciplines, universities and society at large. Porter was often criticized for being too openly pro-American in his intellectual orientation, but this complaint seems overwrought and exaggerated. Porter was, to a very large extent, Canada’s C. Wright Mills, a renegade sociologist who emerged out of the mainstream of the discipline and established ways of doing social science in the name of a higher moral calling.

The issues are important, because American social science certainly casts a wide shadow on our own indigenous intellectual traditions. Canadian economists might well want to consider distancing themselves from the free-market orthodoxies that infect the economics profession in the United States. And Canadian political scientists have done a reasonably good job—if the atmosphere of the recent American Political Science Association meetings in Toronto is an indicator—of maintaining a distinctive Canadian identity without excessive servility to the profession south of the border. Canadian sociologists, in contrast, tend to go back and forth between the hostility and indifference toward the American version of the discipline one sees in the Canadian Sociological Association and the tendency of generally only hiring Americans or U.S.-trained PhDs at the University of Toronto and McGill. Porter represented a model of good sense and balance, as he endeavoured to build a Canadian version of the discipline while holding himself and others to the very highest scholarly standards. Our best social science students deserve only the best training and role models for intellectual ambition and standards, something Porter provided at the very highest level.

The last thing that Canadian sociologists and social scientists need, however, is a hero figure to show us the way to a scholarly promised land. Helmes-Hayes admirably presents Porter as a flawed human who inspires because of both his accomplishments and the challenges he overcame. Driven by moral commitments and a desire to change as well as understand the world, Porter followed his heart and a New Liberal vision for a social science that matters. Young social science scholars today face new and different challenges from Porter’s generation; they must choose from an almost paralyzing array of theoretical and methodological options, and the incentives in modern universities push young academics to publish lots of mediocre work as opposed to one great book or a small number of quality research products. Sociology’s critical edge is not always appreciated in the brave new world of our contemporary corporate-style institutions of higher learning. Yet a discipline that produced scholars of the quality of John Porter and works of the influence and rigour of The Vertical Mosaic is an intellectual project worth building on, and thus will surely continue to contribute much to the scholarly and public debate about inequality in Canada.

Notes