Postmodernism, H. A. Innis, and the media of communication

Paul Heyer is to be commended for producing a very informative book on Harold Innis’ history of communications. It pulls together the communications elements in Innis’ wide-ranging works, and presents the result in an account that an otherwise uninformed reader can digest. The book is unique. Donald Creighton's biography of Innis is about the man, primarily, and only secondarily about his contribution to economic history (Creighton, 1957). Indeed, it is more about Creighton's own interpretation of Canadian history than about much that Innis had to say. My own intellectual biography of Innis (Neill, 1972) is a labored presentation that fails in at least one respect in which Heyer has not failed so badly. Heyer'sHarold Innisis a neat, readable presentation of something Innis had to say. Of course, Heyer has been limited by his commission. In a contribution to a series of books on “Key Thinkers in Critical Media Studies,” Innis’ broad interest in many aspects of economic activity and his obsessive concern with the state of economics itself had to be relegated, more or less, to comments in passing. Still, it is Heyer who notes that Innis’ book of essays,Political economy in the modern state(Innis, 1946) “is pivotal” in his thought, though not given much attention by his interpreters, among whom I must include myself.