The Books of My Life: Liberal Dreams and Nature's Limits

 

I have long been impressed by the work of historical, social, and cultural geographies. Some of the most impressive theoretical and substantive works--not to mention dense works--I have read on comparative and American history, for instance, have been by historical and cultural geographers like Donald Meinig and Wilbur Zelinsky. I can now add another name to the list of superb historical and cultural geographers and social scientists, the late University of Toronto historical geographer James Lemon.

Lemon's Liberal Dreams and Nature's Limits: Great Cities of North America since 1600 (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1996) is a geographic, economic, political, cultural, and demographic of the transition from traditional rural societies with their kin centred economic and political organisation and culture to a modern and a postmodern society of rich core nations characterised by laissez faire liberalism, at least in theory if not in practise thanks to state wealthfare, corporate capitalism, the movement from household production to work outside the home, the rise of bureaucratic manufacturing, retailing, and financial institutions, the increasing dominance of the retail sector, and increasing fragmentation and cultural complexity. Lemon tells this broader story of the transition from traditional society to modern and postmodern society by focusing on the geographic, economic, political, cultural, demographic aspects of six North American cities: Philadelphia around 1760, Manhattan around 1860, Chicago around 1910, Los Angeles around 1950, and Toronto around 1975. Lemon shows how the human striving for comfort, convenience, and safety led, in core nations, to the rise of an urban consumer society that by the Great Depression if not by the late nineteenth century had pushed up against the limits of economic growth imposed by nature resulting in economic stagnation in the core nations, an economic stagnation that has not been alleviated by the rise of a new communication culture and social formation associated with the new digital media, postmodernism.

Some, like me, will find Lemon's explorations of the differences between two core nation settler societies, the United States and Canada, both of which I have lived in over the course of my life, among the most interesting aspects of Lemon's superb book. As Lemon notes, Canada, unlike the United States, has been characterised by a less anti-governmental culture and ideology and hence less resistant to social democracy even among its Tories ("Red Tories"), social welfare, rational planning, and regulations on the economic sector, and transitioned earlier to postmodernism than did the US. As Lemon notes, these differences matter and are the reason Canada and Toronto are are less divided by economic divides of income and wealth, have lower levels of economic, cultural, and geographic segregation, have public housing in the suburbs, have stronger central cities and inner cities, are more rationally ordered, have more metropolitan political forms, and are less characterised by the geographic and economic urban transition the Chicago sociologists noticed in Chicago, than is the US.

Mandatory reading for anyone interested in comparative history, the comparative history of the US and Canada, the history of settler societies, and urban history.