Agrarian Socialism The Co Perative Commonwealth Federation In Saskatchewan A Study In Political Sociology

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1950.

"Reflecting on the seminal work of Seymour Martin Lipset, Agrarian Socialism: The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan - A Study in Political Sociology, academics and political practitioners revisit these questions and consider whether the reputation of the best-known social science text on Saskatchewan still holds. As the political practitioners make clear, the geographic and constitutional boundaries may remain as they were, but the economic and cultural boundaries that once defined provinces have manifestly altered if not disappeared as a result of technological change and global perspective."--BOOK JACKET.

A revision of the author's thesis (Ph.D.), Columbia University, 1949. Cf. p. [ix]

Almost a century before the New Democratic Party rode the first "orange wave," their predecessors imagined a movement that could rally Canadians against economic insecurity, win access to necessary services such as health care, and confront the threat of war. The party they built during the Great Depression, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), permanently transformed the country's politics. Past histories have described the CCF as social democrats guided by middle-class intellectuals, a party which shied away from labour radicalism and communist agitation. James Naylor's assiduous research tells a very different story: a CCF created by working-class activists steeped in Marxist ideology who sought to create a movement that would be both loyal to its socialist principles and appealing to the wider electorate. The Fate of Labour Socialism is a fundamental reexamination of the CCF and Canadian working-class politics in the 1930s, one that will help historians better understand Canada's political, intellectual, and labour history.

Originally published: Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1948.

This unique political and biographical document records the words of T.C. Douglas, one of Canada's first and foremost Socialist leaders, in a series of transcribed interviews conducted in 1958 with political journalist Chris Higginbotham.