Uses and Abuses of the Liberal Order Framework

The first issue of this year's Canadian Historical Review opens with an intriguing essay by Keith Walden of Trent University, ostensibly viewing turn-of-the-century tea parties in Toronto through the lens of Ian McKay's popular liberal order framework. Tea parties, Walden argues, were among the many sites at which the liberal individual was produced, urban spaces were reconfigured in the service of that individual. I liked the article and I liked the premise -- which is partially why I was ultimately left a little unsatisfied.

Perhaps the greatest strength of this article is its careful exploration of the English-Canadian urban tea party. These events were no mere leisurely activities, Walden shows: they were extremely stressful labours, for the guests but especially for the hosts. Who to invite -- and in what order? What musicians should come -- and where should they be positioned? What sort of food and drink should be prepared, and how should it be served? Who should be greeted, and who ignored? What time should the party be held at? Who should receive invitations -- and what stock of paper should be used? Should men be invited? Society columns proliferated in the newspapers, offering answers to all of these questions and more.

These days, many people put less time into planning their weddings, it seems, than some of Toronto's élites did into organizing their tea parties. Many if not most, according to Walden, found tea parties a social obligation to be endured, rather than a leisure activity to be enjoyed.

But aside from simply getting a better sense of the lived experience of middle- and upper-class Torontonian women, why should these events matter to the historian?

There are actually three answers to this question in Walden's article, and none of them, unfortunately, receives the full treatment that it deserves. First, although Walden's detailed portrayal of the turn-of-the-century tea party is in and of itself a valuable contribution to social history, the shift which is most relevant to his attempt to slot the tea party into the history of liberalism is confined to a few pages at the end of the article and relatively under-developed: the ways in which tea was "dislodged from domestic settings" (p. 20) and made its way into downtown halls and commercial establishments in which entrepreneurs took the organizational load of the party off of the shoulders of the weary hostesses.

And how should that change itself be interpreted? At the beginning and end of the article, Walden alludes to Ian McKay's liberal order framework, an important reinterpretation of Canadian history which argues that the nation should be understood as a long-term revolutionary project of liberal capitalist elites, fixated upon the privileging of the free, equal, property-owning individual. In this framework, revolutionary left movements were co-opted into liberalism through the gradual but limited extending of the privileges of the "individual" to people who previously were not gifted with such esteemed status: women, non-white immigrants, Aboriginal people, etc.

It is hard to see the liberal order at work in this piece, though, not least because in his theoretical discussion of the history of liberalism Walden is actually much more interested in the work of British historian Patric Joyce (and specifically, his book The Rule of Freedom). Central to liberalism in Joyce's formulation, but not McKay's, is the concept of limited freedom made possible through "circulation": 

"the city and its streets 'were constituted in such a way as to remove all impediments' to the liberal subject. This was at the heart of liberal freedom.Paving streets, installing lighting, building sewers, laying distribution systems for water and electricity -- such measures, intended to facilitate the circulation of purying natural agents as well as traffic, 'knitted liberalism into everyday life' and allowed for the 'performance' of liberalism in the day-to-day navigation of the urban environment" (Walden, p. 6).

This conception appears most relevant to understanding the great transition in tea party organization which crops up only at the end of the article, and only briefly. The social and cultural core of the tea party -- circulation among elites -- remained intact through this transition while the individuals who organized it were liberated from the stress and the grind of actually organizing the parties.

Perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, I came away from an article on how wealthy urbanites spend their free time not feeling that I had wasted my time, and Walden is to be commended for that. At the same time, and perhaps for that very reason, I was left wanting more, especially if Walden is serious about advancing this type of analysis as a new area of analytical operations for McKay's liberal order framework.