It would not be appropriate for me tonight to say anything at all closely related to the work I have been doing or anything that might be thought to be related to government policy. Accordingly, if you find that my remarks are somewhat lacking in content—as you very well may—I hope you will choose to attribute the deficiency, in part at least, to my high regard for the relevance of economics.

While I was trying to hit upon a topic which was sufficiently non-technical and general for the occasion, it occurred to me that it might be interesting to look once again at some analytical models of the market, developed over the years by a few of the great economists of the past, and at the characteristics with which, in their theoretical works, they endowed their market operators, to see in what ways and in what degrees they made their markets impersonal, as distinct from self-regulating or automatic; and, then, to consider some of the ways in which general attitudes to the market system may have been influenced by the degree to which markets have been impersonal, and by the kind and extent of the changes that the expansion of the market economy tends to bring about. Primarily I will have in mind modern Western economies.

I have called my talk “The Impersonal Market” and I introduce at the outset two quotations which serve to define the sense in which the word “impersonal” is used, and at the same time illustrate two distinct though similar attitudes to the market. One of them comes from a student of law who has extended his interests to include social science generally, and one from an economist of very great distinction.

Central banks are unique institutions. Most of them, including the Bank of Canada, are endowed with powers and charged with responsibilities that are as heavy and as general as those of the most important departments of government. Yet, by contrast, they usually enjoy a legal status which provides them with a degree of autonomy that greatly exceeds that of any department. In a political system based on parliamentary and responsible government, a central bank is, indeed, almost a constitutional anomaly.

A central bank, uniquely constituted or not, is a necessary organ of any monetary system based on an inconvertible paper currency. When money has a marginal cost of zero, it is necessary that the amount of the issue be limited by some means or another if its average market value is not also to become zero. Both logic and history seem to indicate that this limitation is best achieved by placing a monopoly of the note issue in the hands of a central bank or a similar agency. The creation of such a monopoly does not, of course, provide any indisputable answer to the important question of the degree of discretion which such an issuing authority might be permitted to enjoy. There are still some economists extant who advocate that the central bank be bound to a prescription so rigid that its role in the monetary system would be entirely mechanical. However, this view has a rather archaic quality. The dominant current opinion is quite different. Most economists and monetary analysts regard the central bank as, properly, an instrument of monetary management operating in an economy that requires, if it is to be stable and efficient, the continuous discretionary influence of such a management authority.

There is now an extensive literature on bureaucratic organization in general, and on governmental bureaucracies in particular. Recently there has been a tendency to view social power as being distributed through a set of counter-bureaucracies, each of which is a development within a particular institutional order. Modern corporations, the trade unions, the departments of state, the armed services, the church, and so forth are all bureaucratically organized. In other words they have an intensive division of labour, a hierarchical system of command and co-ordination, and an emphasis in recruitment on expert qualifications. Consequently, as bureaucratic organization pervades the entire social structure, we enter the age of the “managerial society,” the “organization man,” and “government by expert.” Hence bureaucracy takes on its true meaning of rule by officials.

While much of contemporary sociology in the fields of industrial relations and business and public administration is given over to improving the techniques of bureaucratic control, less attention is paid to the relationship of the various bureaucracies to one another within the total system of power. In this paper I have brought together data on the careers and social backgrounds of the top men—the élite—of the Canadian federal public service. The ordering of these data has been guided by models of governmental bureaucracy in relation to other institutional structures. Limitation of space precludes a full exposition here of these models, but a brief outline is necessary to give some meaning to the empirical materials that follow. The significant variables in these models are rationalization, rivalry, and openness.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the implications for Canadians of the recent report of the Franks Committee on administrative justice in England. This is the second English report of its kind to be made in twenty-five years, the first being the famous Report of the Committee on Ministers' Powers in 1932. Both committees made exhaustive inquiries into the actual day-to-day working of English administrative justice and in the light of that knowledge made recommendations for its improvement. In the United States, the Report of the Attorney General's Committee on Administrative Procedure reviewed in 1941 the federal administrative process as it actually operated; in the light of that report, Congress passed in 1946 the Administrative Procedure Act laying down in fairly general terms the minimum standards of procedure to be observed in the administrative exercise of delegated powers of adjudication; and in 1955 a Task Force on Legal Services and Procedure made a year-long study of the entire field of federal administrative law and submitted its conclusions in a 442-page report to the Hoover Commission. In Canada there has never been any offiicial inquiry into such questions.

For this reason—and we should do well to admit it before we begin trying to learn lessons from the Franks Report—we Canadians do not know much about our own situation. We do know that in our country, as in England and in the United States, there is at the federal level and at the provincial level a heterogeneous collection of bodies other than courts—independent commissions, civil service departments, and other statutory authorities—deciding disputes between that mighty engine, the state, and the individual citizen or business corporation; but of what most of them in fact do, how they do it, and to what extent they are supervised, checked, or controlled, we have only hazy and rather general knowledge.

Modern legislation, in Canada as elsewhere, has entrusted important functions to boards or commissions and has conferred very wide powers upon them. The basic purpose of such legislation is to supplement legislatures, courts of law, and ministers of the Crown by providing these venerable institutions with subordinate agencies which, within a strictly limited sphere, can act more effectively.

The legislative functions of a board consist in making regulations with the force of law. These regulations often require the approval of the supreme executive authority. They provide a necessary type of legislation which our legislatures, let us say it quite brutally, are not competent to consider in detail.

A second function of boards is to decide disputes. Not only do they supplement the action of the legislatures in cases in which it is likely to be cumbersome or ineffective, but they also replace judicial action in cases in which it is disliked or distrusted. Although control by courts of law may remain formally unimpaired, boards acting within the scope of the law which creates them are able to interfere, ostensibly in the public interest as they themselves define it, with many established or traditional rights.

A third function of boards is administrative. They are in principle able to act with complete immunity from the political pressures to which a minister of the Crown may quite properly be exposed. Their administrative work is facilitated by their legislative and judicial powers and part of their usefulness derives from their ability to combine three functions which cannot be conveniently—and perhaps cannot be safely—combined at higher levels.

The construction and use of occupational scales to serve as an index of social class have recently absorbed much of the time of sociologists in the United States. In Canada, on the other hand, very few studies of this nature have been published. This paper will outline the method used in the construction of such a scale, and the results obtained when it is applied to certain features of Canadian society.

The problems involved in the methodology of studies of stratification result partly from the lack of agreement among sociologists on a theoretical framework in this field, and partly from the lack of precise tools of measurement. The theoretical difficulties involved can be seen from an examination of four main lines of theoretical development in the works of Marx, Weber, Warner, Davis, and Parsons.

The individual's position in the system of production was seen by Marx as the fundamental determinant of class position. A subjective awareness of class is another vital element in his theory although such awareness follows from the objective position. The objective economic foundation of class is an important aspect of Max Weber's theory also, but unlike Marx, Weber gives equal importance to subjective awareness, and he shows the importance of power as well. The approach of W. L. Warner, which has been followed by so many sociologists, emphasizes the subjective awareness and claims that class is what people in the community say it is. It is the consensus of people about other people's position, and about the class divisions in the social structure.

Because Canada has a labour force composed of more than one language stock, it is of interest to ask what social organization has developed to take account of this pluralism in her work world. Such an interest may take two main forms. First, with respect to a language variable, differences in occupational opportunities may be seen as the sole problem of Canadian Indians and Eskimos, of French Canadians, or of New Canadians. Second, we may wish to find out how our different language groups achieve interdependence in actual work situations and with what consequences for society as a whole. It is the second approach which will be adopted here; in a sense it includes the first, since the problem of any group stems in large part from the ways in which groups act on each other. The groups to which I shall limit my discussion will be the English and the French Canadians, but my remarks will undoubtedly apply, at least in part, to groups who speak other languages.

The view taken in this paper is that in our society, because English is the sole language which has currency in all aspects of social activity, people of different mother tongues have unequal opportunities for work. In a plural society, two consequences follow from the dominance of one language: a limited utilization of the potential skills of those who do not know the dominant language perfectly and a disengagement of the other mother tongues from important aspects of social reality.

The market for books in Canada is of some interest in itself and as an example of the competition between British and United States goods in an important area. But perhaps no apology is required for addressing an article on such a subject to an academic audience, many of whom have an active and substantial personal interest in the matter.

The market for books in Canada is in reality several different markets, sometimes sharply differentiated on the side of the consumer, and often on that of the producer as well. There is, first of all, the division between French- and English-language books, bookstores, and publishers. Then there is the large and valuable market in school books, which is, in the main, dominated by provincial authorities and by a group of publishers catering to the very special and often parochial tastes of these bodies. The university market, though not so clearly differentiated, is coloured to some extent by the necessity of winning “adoptions” of a given text by the instructor, and by the importance of the university bookstore. There is again the substantial market organized by the United States book clubs. Even more important is the competing market in reprints and paperbacks. That sub-section of the English-language market on which most interest centres in this paper is that for so-called trade books, that is, books which are sold to the general reading public.

Halford John Mackinder, who has enjoyed considerable recognition as a founder of modern geographical study, achieved a widespread renown over a decade ago as the pioneer of the “science of geopolitics” of which Hitler had become a disciple. His other accomplishments, however, have been rather neglected, especially his work as an economic theorist and politician. At the beginning of the century, Mackinder was a principal spokesman for the Liberal-Imperialists; he was, in fact, well on his way toward a cabinet post. As a free trade Imperialist, he described with unusual insight the imperialism of capital export, anticipating at some points the later analysis of Hobson and the neo-Marxists, Hilferding and Luxemburg. Then, after a remarkable and sudden conversion to the Chamberlain programme of protection, he demonstrated a similar grasp of the rival neo-mercantile imperialism, and became one of its leading public advocates.

Mackinder was born at Gainsborough in 1861. His father was a doctor and, his first interests being in the field of science, he accepted, in 1880, a junior studentship in physical science at Christ Church, Oxford, where he intended to specialize in biology. While at Oxford, Mackinder discovered how broad and varied were his interests and his talents. He read for two honours schools, natural science and modern history, and for the bar–he was called at the Inner Temple in 1886. More and more, however, he devoted himself to geography, a subject to whose acceptance as an academic discipline he was to make so signal a contribution.

Field-work was conducted for several summer periods and one complete year (1954–5) among the northern Ojibwa at Pekangekum. Pekangekum is situated in northwestern Ontario (52 degrees north latitude and 94 degrees west longitude), close to the Manitoba border and to the northern Ojibwa–Cree boundary. The major occupations of the people are fur trapping and subsistence hunting and fishing. The band is composed of treaty status Indians, numbering 382 persons in 1955, who communally own a small reservation of approximately 2,000 acres at the summer fishing centre.

In 1947 the provincial government registered all the territory as traplines, and the trappers therefore became licensed in the area in which they already trapped. The band's territory, which is low-lying and poorly drained forest and muskeg, comprises 4,800 square miles, that is, about 12.5 square miles per person. During the trapping season, approximately six months of the year, the population breaks up into eighteen residential groupings, averaging twenty-two persons each, and these units proceed to the centres of the trapping territories allotted to them by tradition. Usually such domestic groupings are ten or fifteen miles apart and are spread throughout the total territory of the band, but in summer they live nearly contiguously at two major summer fishing camps.

The population is made up of five extended families with patronymic totems. Formerly political authority was vested in the senior man of a domestic group on the basis of his dream-sanctioned success and power. Sometimes an individual magico-medical specialist held sway over wider territory, but his position rested on prestige rather than power, and each domestic group was usually autonomous.

Perhaps never in the history of economic thought, and certainly not since the crash of 1929, has economic analysis lagged so far behind the demands of policy as it does at present. The elevation of economic development to the top ranks of policy issues, in under-developed and advanced countries alike, has caught professional economists more than ever unprepared to deal with the most pressing economic problem of the moment. One result of this unusually large inflationary gap between the demand for solid policy recommendations and the supply of them has been an unprecedented concentration of economists’ effort on the study of economic growth. The technical assistance programmes under the United Nations, the International Cooperation Administration, the Colombo Plan, other bilateral programmes, and the Ford Foundation have given economists opportunities for “laboratory work” on a scale never before open to them. In the universities, too, more and more economists have redirected their interests in research towards economic development.