Stanley Brehaut Ryerson - Intellectual Evolution

Intellectual Evolution

For Ryerson, an understanding of social relations was paramount if one was to garner an understanding of history; his encounter with Innis’s materialism led Ryerson to the charge that equated Marxism and economic determinism. He wrote “Marxism holds that it is the people who make history-their labor and their struggles and their dreams; and that these are understandable and have meaning when seen in their real setting….” He added, “Labor, production, the real relationships of living society: this is the point of departure for historical materialism….Thought and feelings, ideas and passion and imagination have their being in a material world, are conditioned by it, work upon it.” Ryerson’s approach to history is that of a man who sees the struggles and ideas of people as the driving force behind history. He did not believe they operate within a vacuum but within a given social system. Ryerson recognised the interplay of freedom and necessity within the development of history “as it is in the best Marxist historical writing.”

Following on the tradition of viewing his writings as a mode of class consciousness, The Founding of Canada was written very much as a popular Marxist introduction to Canadian History. This book offered very little new material and was instead more of a shifting in emphasis for Ryerson. This shift in emphasis stemmed primarily from Ryerson’s interest in prehistory and Soviet anthropology; this shift in emphasis is best illustrated by the six chapters on pre-European-contact Canada. This work was not a complete shift of emphasis; Ryerson still dealt with the issue of exploitation and freedom. He believed “he weight of ‘official’ historiography has hitherto been heavily on the side of efforts to smother the facts of exploitation,” and because of this “he idyllic patriarchal picture of these times that has become traditional, is a piece of flagrant deception.”

Unequal Union has been seen as the more adventuresome of these two works. It focused on only 60 years, rather than the 300-year scope of The Founding of Canada, and it discussed more deeply the events after the War of 1812 leading up to the expansion of confederation in 1870. In this work, Ryerson turned to an analysis of land and land-holding as he recognises the importance of land to the colonial ruling-class. Gregory Kealey felt Ryerson overextended himself in his argument that the land-monopoly represented a “sort of commercialised feudalism” which “loomed as the dominating problem before the Canadas.” But Ryerson’s analysis of the 1837 Rebellions held true for Kealey, as he agrees with the classical Marxist formulation, that “potential production forces were stifled by dominant property relations; and as long as the latter couldn’t be broken down progress remained illusory.” Therefore, the rebellions of 1837 were an effort to break the “rule of a landlord-merchant oligarchy,” blocking the development of industrial capitalism.