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Book Review
| Jeffrey L. McNairn, The Capacity to Judge: Public Opinion and Deliberative Democracy in Upper Canada, 1791–1854, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. $75.00 (ISBN 0-8020-4360-7).
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| Jeffrey McNairn's Capacity to Judge is a much-needed, carefully researched account of the accession of public opinion as a foundational constitutional principle in Upper Canada. Relying on correspondence and, particularly, an impressive assessment of the periodical literature from 1791 to 1854, McNairn tracks the growing sense, in the heated political debates of the period, that something called enlightened public opinion had to form the basis for political legitimacy. By the 1840s, older political theories about the few and the many, about the fitness of the many leaving their governance to the few, had lost political currency. |
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McNairn argues that "mixed monarchy" (three estates: monarch, lords, commons, all perfectly balanced) was the predominant constitutional understanding of the early decades of the nineteenth century. Mixed monarchy was, McNairn shows, an ideal appealed to by both conservatives and reformers to support their views. Gradually, however, the broad shape of parliamentary democracy governed along party lines came into view through the crises of the 1840s, with the fundamental assumption being that government had to be accountable to public opinion. |
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Public opinion was not then what it is now, as McNairn takes pains to point out. Some of the strongest writing in the book is devoted to describing, for Upper Can-ada, a process that has been described elsewhere for the United States and Europe: the birth of the democratic sensibility and the institutions that fostered it. During the 1820s and 1830s, the population of Upper Canada increased substantially. The frontier pushed back, and larger centers grew. Newspapers multiplied and increasingly focused on political news (initially parliamentary debates were not published at all; in decades they became central). These papers appealed very closely to people's political opinions, and therefore they provided a dispassionate, often anonymous forum for debate. With the growth of newspapers came the emergence of voluntary associations devoted to giving their members (men, and sometimes women as auditors only) a space in which to debate civilly topics of the day and expand their knowledge, while often providing their members opportunities to experience the workings of democratic constitutions. These associations, and news-rooms, libraries, and a multitude of other organizations, were devoted to expanding minds, focusing attention on important issues, and schooling men in the forms and practices of reasoned public debate. |
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Even when these organizations banned the discussion of politics, which they frequently did, they still promoted a certain kind of argument, and they stood for the proposition that this kind of reasoned, idea-driven debate could and should be engaged in by men of almost all ranks in society, who would develop the "capacity to judge." Along with newspapers, these institutions prepared men to claim and expect accountability from their government. McNairn is careful to point out the roads not traveled: women were excluded from this vision of citizenship, and so were indigenous peoples, unless they abandoned their cultural connections. We might well feel nostalgic for a public sphere which was imagined as intelligent and productive—not merely the terrain of pollsters who question and count—but it strikes me that it was perhaps its distinctness from the larger society that made it feel like a real institution with constitutional potential. |
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The constitutional debates of the 1840s, centered around the uncomfortable union of the Canadas, are in many ways the heart of the book. McNairn does a great service to Canadian constitutional history by pointing out how influential the writing of the American Federalists was on some conservative thinking during the period. He goes on to describe the triumph of the party system and parliamentary government over republicanism, showing the arguments of the day to have been deeply rooted in the certainty that government had to rest on the opinions of those members of society with the capacity to judge. The final substantive chapter is a case study of Upper Canada's long struggle to end primogeniture, in which the need to ascertain and follow the public will was paramount. Primogeniture was unpopular for decades, but the politics around replacing it with equal partibility (which was also unpopular)—or something else—were complicated. |
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Methodologically, this book is an interesting hybrid. Acknowledging his overall debt to Jürgen Habermas, McNairn undertakes the admirable project of bringing together politico-legal and social history. The book mixes descriptions of the material manifestations of social change (the rise of voluntary associations, the spread of the press) with those of political debate (over the Metcalfe crisis, republicanism, primogeniture). The oft-told story of the rise of responsible government in Canada is at the core here; the invaluable addition McNairn makes to our knowledge of Upper Canadian is his detailed illumination of the sea-change in assumptions about social life that underlay it. |
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| Lyndsay Campbell
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| University of California, Berkeley |
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