| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 60

REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS

Jeffrey D. Brison, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada: American Philanthropy and the Arts and Letters in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 2005)

JEFFREY BRISON?s Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada: American Philanthropy and the Arts and Letters in Canada is a good book. It is also deceptive. In the "Preface" Brison suggests that this text is designed to address a straightforward issue: "the relationship between American wealth [represented by the massive Carnegie and Rockefeller philanthropic foundations] and Canadian culture in the days preceding the advent of consistent federal support for the arts and letters in Canada [in the form of the Canada Council]." (ix) In reality, this book is a sustained engagement with two different but, as Brison explains, intimately inter-related narratives: the development of professionalized intellectual and cultural work in Canada and the processes of Canadian-American relations from the 1930s to the 1950s. What ties these two narratives together is the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations and the ways in which Canadian intellectuals and artists work with them to build a national cultural infrastructure in Canada.

Methodologically, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada is anything but simple. In Brison's view, the foundations' interaction with Canadian artists and intellectuals both was, and was not, a case of American cultural imperialism. Drawing heavily on the work of the late Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, Brison argues several key points. First, the creation – in the United States – of large philanthropic foundations represented a transformation of wealth into cultural power in civil society. Through their ability to channel resources, Rockefeller and Carnegie were able to influence a broad range of cultural processes from religious practice to the development of scientific medicine. Second, these foundations' interests in Canada represented an outward extension of American cultural practices. In effect, these foundations used their wealth to project upper-class American conceptions of medicine, scholarship, education, and artistic practice into other countries, most forcefully into Canada. Third, American ideals were not simply imposed on Canadians. Instead, these foundations worked with like-minded Canadians who shared their basic values to promote a Canadian cultural, intellectual, and educational infrastructure that served the interests of both a "self-selected" Canadian elite and American cultural imperialism.

As Brison explains in his conclusions, this is not a story of crafty Canadians taking advantage of American money for their own interests or wealthy American institutions manipulating Canadians. Instead, it is a story about nation-building through which a small, self-appointed inter-locking continental elite fashioned in Canada a particular type of cultural infrastructure. In Brison's view, there is nothing inherent or natural in this particular way of "imagining" Canada. Instead, the professionalized cultural, intellectual, and educational infrastructure built by this self-selected Canadian elite with American foundation money served to solidify elite influence over cultural and intellectual production and educational processes in Canada. Brison's point is that this was an intensely undemocratic process. Foundation staff was self-replicating and self-selecting, as was the Canadian elite with which they worked. Not only was this elite highly unrepresentative of Canadian society but they enjoyed no popular sanction for their actions.

Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada is not a book that "adds to our understanding" of a particular subject matter or "fills in an historiographic gap." Rather, it challenges narratives of Canada's development as a nation-state and, as such, opens up new avenues of enquiry. It is a work that asks its readers to think again about the processes of Canadian cultural formation, the organization of civil society, and Canada's historical and on-going relationship with the United States. In this work, Brison's key target is essentialist conceptions of Canadian/American difference. In a number of places he refers to the older fragment theory of cultural difference that posits foundational differences in Canadian and American national worldviews. According to this theory, the circumstances of Canada's foundational "moment" made it into a state-oriented paternalistic society in opposition to American liberal individualism. It is, Brison notes, ironic that it was American institutions – as opposed to Canadian – that established the infrastructure that was, late in the day, absorbed by the Canadian state and that Canadians, in fact, looked to Americans for models of cultural development. The fact that this history has been obscured, he believes, is a product of nationalist mythology that looks to define essential differences between Canada and the Untied States and so to legitimate particular conceptions of the Canadian nation-state.

This irony, however, is not what is important about this book. The fact that Canadian and American elites see eye-to-eye on a range of issues is not surprising. Nor is the idea that nationalist mythology is ... well ... nationalist mythology. What is important about this book is the way it opens up the question of the processes of Canadian cultural development and, by implication, the values and ideals that animate the Canadian national experience. The idea that Canada is not some haven of leftist progressivism set next to a free-market America is also far from shocking. A now appreciable scholarly literature on different facets of Canadian culture highlights both the limits of Canadian progressivism and the degree to which Canadian culture has been manipulated by elite groups to address their own interests. What Brison shows his readers is how we can study these processes. In this regard, he makes remarkably effective use of Gramsci's heuristics. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada passes over simplistic descriptive assertions of hegemony as cultural leadership in favour of an engagement with the specific and concrete processes through which cultural infrastructure was built, the negotiations that surrounded this, and the periodically blunt ways in which financial resources were translated into cultural power. It is these complicated and concrete material processes in which an analysis of national development and civil society should be rooted.

The next step is to look at oppositional forces. Brison's focus on elite cultural politics elides this issue. What did workers and left-wing intellectuals think about cultural institutions being built around them? What uses did they make of them? If the logical – and intended – outcome of pre-Canada Council elite cultural politics in Canada was the creation of a professionalized elitist cadre of cultural workers, what alternative conceptions of culture, civil society, education, and the state were displaced by this process? Said differently: what alternative ways of thinking Canada were marginalized by the developments Brison charts?

As Brison notes in his epilogue, these questions are not just historical. Over the last decade the Canadian state has engineered the construction of a new social scientific and technological research infrastructure designed to link the academy more effectively to the needs of capitalist political economy. Brison's book gives us the tools to better understand and assess the complex processes that are reconstructing civil society. What we now need to think about is how an understanding of these processes – this history – can be used to imagine a different, more democratic Canada whose civil society infrastructure can address human needs and aspirations.


ANDREW NURSE Mount Allison University

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