Changing the subject(s) of the "History of Canadian Sociology": The case of Colin McKay and Spencerian Marxism, 1890-1940

Although Canadian sociologists, responding to such issues as Canadianizatio n, feminism, and postmodernism, have over the past quarter century shown a strong interest in writing historical narratives about their discipline, th ey have tended to focus exclusively on university-based sociology. This foc us has obscured the extent to which "sociological discussion" was a broadly -based intellectual activity in the North Atlantic world, especially among self-taught working-class intellectuals fired by evolutionary theory and a sense of sociology's emancipatory potential. Colin McKay, one of the most p rolific and important of these working-class sociologists in Canada, exempl ified their general tendency to work within a paradigm influenced by both K arl Marx and Herbert Spencer. His work, taken as an outstanding example of radical sociological writings in this tradition, had important things to sa y about class, culture, and capitalism in Canada.