Abstract
Australia and Canada resemble the United States in stressing equalitarianism, achievement, universalism, and specificity. But if Canada and Australia share these basic values with the United States, they differ from it also, and it is these differences which sharply illustrate the way in which even relatively slight variations in value patterns help account for important differences among the stable and highly developed democracies.
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Notes
Frank H. Underhill, In Search of Canadian Liberalism (Toronto: Macmillan, 1960), p. 12. He goes on to point out that, while Jacksonian Democracy triumphed in the United States in the 1830s and “swept away most of the old aristocratic survivals and made a strong attack on the new plutocratic forces”, its equivalent in Canada, the movements of Papineau in Quebec and Mackenzie in Ontario, were defeated and discredited. Hence in Canada, unlike the United States, the “social pyramid … was not upset”, pp. 12–33.
S. D. Clark, The Canadian Community (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), p. 65.
A sociological study made in the mid-1930s in English-speaking Montreal, based on a small sample of “seventy people, who were thought to be representative”, reports that the “notion of a social élite, of a culture based upon the traditions and ideals of aristocratic Britain, reappears over and over again in the interviews”. These attitudes, the authors note, are probably not characteristic of Canadian opinion much west of Montreal. S. D. Clark, assisted by C. A. Dawson and E. C. Hughes, “Opinions and Attitudes in English-speaking Quebec”, in H. F. Angus (ed.), Canada and Her Great Neighbour (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1938), pp. 383–9.
Some of the flavour of the social differences between Canada and the United States which reflect the greater strength of traditionalist and conservative values in the former country have been well summed up by an Australian historian who spent some time in Canada studying its values and attitudes: “I consider it not unfair to suggest, however, that if some Canadians think some Americans brash and loud, most Americans think Canadians generally are not only quiet and standoffish on occasion but also — let’s be frank about it, rather dull and often very drab. Even an overseas visitor to North America may detect the contrast with the friendly, talkative habits of the curious American which he finds among reserved Canadians in trains, in cafés, and even in some private homes. American women, moreover, find a sharp contrast in the apparent readiness of their Canadian sisters to leave public life in many forms to their husbands and to their brothers.” Fred Alexander, Canadians and Foreign Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1960), p. 121.
Ronald Taft and Kenneth F. Walker, “Australia”, in Arnold M. Rose (ed.), The Institutions of Advanced Societies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), pp. 144–5. These two Australian social psychologists sum up Australian values as being militantly equalitarian, “set in the background of politico-economio class consciousness…. These equalitarian attitudes have taken the form of militant attempts to eliminate the material and prestige liabilities of the working class. … Thus a high value is placed on activities aimed at protecting and promoting the standing of the ‘underdog’ by abusing privileged or would-be privileged persons. Although, as we have seen, middle-class Australians avoid identifying themselves as workers, they nonetheless typically share this militant equalitarianism. against authority or prestige figures…. Thus the middle class, by and large, supports the welfare state, maintains the right of workers to strike and to look after their own interests, and eschews the servility associated with certain necessary occupational roles. Australians are poor at providing personal service and are reluctant to demand it.”
Jeanne Mackenzie, Australian Paradox (London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1962), p. 8.
Frederick W. Eggleston, “The Australian Nation”, in George Caiger (ed.), The Australian Way of Life (London: Heinemann, 1953), p. 11; see also
A. P. Howe, If the Gown Fits (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1960), pp. 59–67; and
J. D. B. Miller, Australian Government and Politics (London: Duckworth, 1954), pp. 22–4.
W. F. Connell, “Education and Social Mobility in Australia”, Transactions of the Third World Congress of Sociology (London: International Sociological Association, 1954), V, pp. 75–6.
Leslie Lipson, The Politics of Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 487–8.
Russel Ward, The Australian Legend (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 14–16, 157–8.
Canadian unification in 1867 is associated with the Conservative Party, while the federating of Australia around the turn of the century was pressed by the Labour Party, which existed in most states. It is noteworthy that the “conservative” party in Australia has constantly changed its name to avoid association with traditional and privileged elements. “Not by accident but by design the term conservative early in the twentieth century disappeared from the nomenclature of parties in Australia and New Zealand. It could not obviously win enough varied backing among the surviving elements of conservative opinion.… In Canada a conservative outlook in many respects found great favor.” Alexander Brady, Democracy in the Dominions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958), p. 528.
Carter Goodrich has suggested that “the United States owes its individualism largely to its small man’s frontier; I think it not fanciful to suggest that Australia owes much of its collectivism [particularism] to the fact that its frontier was hospitable to large men instead.” See “The Australian and American Labour Movements”, The Economic Record, IV (1928), pp. 206–7. In Australia, unlike the United States and Canada, frontier farms were immensely large, and employed large numbers of workers. This pattern to a considerable degree reflected the difficulties of desert farming and ranching: “The typical Australian frontiersman in the last century was a wage-worker who did not, usually, expect to become anything else.” Ward, The Australian Legend, p. 226. Large groups of land labourers developed a sense of group consciousness, and very early farmed a major trade union, now the largest in the country, the Australian Workers Union. See also Fred Alexander, Moving Frontiers (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1947).
Claude T. Bissell, “The Image of America in Canada”, address delivered at the Canadian Studies Seminar, University of Rochester, March 16, 1962.
John Pengwerne Matthews, Tradition in Exile (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), p. 38.
James Bryce was struck by these attitudes before World War I. Thus he reports, “I was amazed to find in 1912 how many Australians believed Britain to be a declining and almost decadent country.” Modern Democracies (London: Macmillan, 1921), I, p. 268.
R. M. Crawford, “The Australian National Character: Myth and Reality”, Cahiers d’histoire mondiale, II (1955), p. 715.
See Robin Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics: A Study of Eastern Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1960), especially pp. 113–15. In drawing up their constitution, the Australians consciously modelled it “upon the American rather than the Canadian model”. See Brady, Democracy in the Dominions, p. 153.
Claude T. Bissell, “A Common Ancestry: Literature in Australia and Canada”, University of Toronto Quarterly, XXV (1955–6), pp. 133–4.
The assumption is often made that Quebec, which is a more traditionalist and Catholic area, shows lower proportions on statistics such as these. This assumption is not valid in the case of university education. In the academic year 1959–60, the proportion of the population aged 18–21 attending universities was higher in Quebec than in Canada as a whole, or than in the neighbouring, predominantly English-speaking province of Ontario. See Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Fall Enrolment of Universities and Colleges, 1959 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1960), p. 9.
S. D. Clark, “The Frontier and Democratic Theory”, Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 48 (1954), Series III, Section Two, pp. 71–2; see also S. D. Clark, Movements of Political Protest in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1959), pp. 3–10.
L. C. B. Gower and Leolin Price, “The Profession and Practice of Law in England and America”, Modern Law Review, XX (1957), p. 317.
Hugh Clegg, A New Approach to Industrial Democracy (London: Basil Blackwell, 1960), p. 22.
Geoffrey Gorer, Exploring English Character, “A Study of the Morals and Behaviour of the English People” (New York: Criterion Books, 1955), p. 295.
Kenneth F. Walker, Industrial Relations in Australia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 329–30.
Robert Alford, Social Class and Voting in Four Anglo-American Democracies (Berkeley: Survey Research Center, University of California, dittoed, 1961), p. 89. See Part IV/23, this volume.
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Lipset, S.M. (1968). Value Differences, Absolute or Relative: the English-Speaking Democracies. In: Blishen, B.R., Jones, F.E., Naegele, K.D., Porter, J. (eds) Canadian Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-81601-9_33
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