Eric W. Sager

In Inequality in Canada Eric Sager considers one of the defining – but hardest to define – ideas of our era and traces its different meanings and contexts across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sager shows how the idea of inequality arose in the long evolution in Britain and the United States from classical economics to the emerging welfare economics of the twentieth century. Within this transatlantic frame, inequality took a distinct form in Canada: different iterations of the idea appear in Protestant critiques of wealth, labour movements, farmer-progressive politics, the social gospel, social Catholicism in Quebec, English-Canadian political economy, and political and intellectual justifications of the social security state. A tradition of idealist thought persisted in the twentieth century, sustaining the idea of inequality despite deep silences among Canadian economists. Sager argues that inequality goes beyond the distribution of income and wealth: it is the idea that there are wide gaps between rich and poor, that the gaps are both an economic problem and a social injustice, and that when inequality appears, it is as a problem that can be either eliminated or reduced. It is precisely because inequality appears in different contexts, and because it changes, Sager reasons, that we can begin to perceive the contours and cleavages of inequality in our time. In our century, a political solution to inequality may rest on the recovery of an ethical ideal and egalitarian politics that have long preoccupied the history of Canadian thought.

The History and Politics of an Idea

Inequality in Canada

Peter A. Baskerville

University of Victoria (B.C.). Public History Group

The original 1881 census was taken under the direction of the Canadian Department of Agriculture.

Vancouver Island

1881 Canadian Census

"Unwilling Idlers looks at the unemployed and their families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in six Canadian cities: Victoria, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Hamilton, Montreal, and Halifax. The authors provide a social profile of the men and women who identified themselves as unemployed, relate the phenomenon of unemployment to family characteristics and life cycles, and explore the importance of geographical location and seasonal occupation as defining characteristics of the unemployed. The authors assess the impact of unemployment on living standards and show how workers and their families tried to cope with the problem."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Eric W. Sager

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