Harry G. Johnson : Scholar, Mentor, Editor, and Relentless World Traveler - 1923-1977

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  July, 2001  by Max Corden,  James S. Duesenberry,  Craufurd D. Goodwin,  J. Allan Hynes,  Richard G. Lipsey,  Gideon Rosenbluth,  Paul A. Samuelson,  Elizabeth Johnson Simpson,  LAURENCE S. Moss

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We studied the radical theory of John Maynard Keynes under the guidance of Roger Anderson, a recent graduate of prestigious Harvard. Some of us fitted empirical consumption functions (God only knows where we got the data), although the course provided no training in statistical methods. We read the new works of Joan Robinson and Edward Chamberlin on imperfect and monopolistic competition, and Joseph Schumpeter's monumental work on business cycles, all studies in the imperfections of capitalism.

We had lectures from Harold Innis, by this time already the doyen of Canadian economic historians, and a populist radical of sorts. He explained that the founding of the Dominion of Canada in 1867 was a maneuver by Canadian entrepreneurs to get cheap financing for building the Canadian Pacific Railway. As Innis read the new works of Robinson, Chamberlin, and Schumpeter, he made us write essays on imperfect competition between drainage basins (the fur trade), and on Kondratief cycles in the Canadian economy.

In coping with Innis' lectures and books, Harry's powers of speed-reading gave him an almost unfair advantage. It took me, with no Canadian background, awhile to discover that what one had to do was to take detailed notes, and then read them very fast. The masses of boring detail would then merge into an interesting pattern that only Innis' fertile brain could have dreamed up.

A major radical intellectual influence was the course on the history of political theory given by C. Brough Macpherson, who classified himself as a Marxist and explained that political ideas are shaped by class interest. The countervailing influence in political science was exerted by Alex Brady, who explained the shortcomings of Marxist theory by telling us that a theory that predicted a revolution without predicting exactly when or where could not have scientific validity. I think of this when I hear the experts tell us, as they frequently do, that Vancouver is bound to have a major earthquake, but whether this year, next year, in 10 years, or in 100 years, we cannot tell.

A purveyor of more homegrown radical political economy was Lorne T. Morgan, who lectured on the politics and economics of fascism and nazism. His only published work not devoted to those topics was a satirical pamphlet, The Permanent War, or Homo the Sap, published by the Workers' Educational Association (Morgan 1943). He "proved' that democratic capitalism could not maintain high employment except by war, and proposed that since Canadian workers were too ignorant to opt for socialism, Canada should provoke a war with one of the weaker Latin American republics and manage it as a counter-cyclical stabilizer of output and employment. Imaginative readers might see Morgan as a prophet of more recent developments in military-economic strategy.

Under the influence of these events and ideas, Harry, like others among us, became quite radical. Possibly his family background predisposed him to the mild radicalism associated with the left wing of the Liberal Party in Canada. His father, Harry senior, a former journalist, had been appointed in 1929 as the secretary of the Ontario Liberal Association, and was instrumental, as back room tactician, in the rise to power of Mitch Hepburn, the notorious Liberal premier of Ontario. In Ontario Capital L Liberal meant in the '40s, as it does now, small c conservative, but in the '30s Mitch had been a bit of a radical rebel within the party (Saywell 1991).