Modes of Influence: The Making of the Calgary School

Abstract

The Calgary School, a group of conservative academics at the University of Calgary including the historian David Bercuson and the political scientists Barry Cooper, Tom Flanagan, Rainer Knopff, and Ted Morton, has been recognized as an important intellectual formation on the Canadian right since the early-1990s. These Calgary Schoolers have been associated closely with the political rise of Stephen Harper, who was Prime Minister of Canada from 2006-2015. They have also been associated more generally with histories of neoliberalism and neoconservatism in Canada. This dissertation is the first comprehensive history of the Calgary School; it traces the intellectual history of the group from the mid-1960s to the mid-2000s. The Calgary Schoolers were united most of all by their outlook on the proper role of states in socio-economic life. In their critique of the intentional state, which they inherited from various thinkers in the transnational orbit of conservative ideas, the Calgary Schoolers opposed the notion that states can purposely direct civil society towards acknowledged goals and outcomes. To seek outcomes like economic equality, for example, was to engage in what Calgary Schoolers often maligned as “social engineering.” Sharing in this perspective as they did, the Calgary Schoolers then sought to extend the influence of their views, doing so in various “modes of influence.” The Calgary Schoolers established their authority as scholars, used that authority to undergird ventures into public view as polemicists, and associated themselves with people and institutions that could give practical weight to their positions. While resisting the idea that the Calgary Schoolers somehow made the neoliberal era in Canada, this dissertation shows how they made influence from within the confines of that era, recognizing the opportunities it afforded them and leveraging those opportunities for their ends.