On Good Intentions: A Critical Note on Recent Studies of State Planning in Canada

Abstract

Writing about the modern state is notoriously difficult.1 Historians have both to come to grips with the immensity of its coercive and administrative apparatus and to not lose sight of the complexities, failings, and incoherencies of the various social groups and individuals that make up this leviathan. The Canadian example, to borrow a phrase from Suzanne Morton’s excellent biography of social worker Jane Wisdom, makes for a particularly “messy case file” – the growth of the liberal welfare state under conditions of capitalism and colonialism necessitates that any critical scholar grapple with the contradictory legacies of genuine good will and immense harm.2 Where there are discordant notes in the vast chorus of voices contributing to the historiography of the Canadian state, then, they are often to be found in the register of disagreements about the relative weight that should be placed on intention or impact, a debate carried out in the language of hegemony, legibility, biopower, and governmentality.3 But if this lexicon conjures up for graduate students such as myself visions of the “1990s” section of our comprehensive reading lists, recent arguments playing themselves out in the pages of this