A Canadian rejoinder: Sociology north and south of the border

In response to the recent The American Sociologist special issue on Canadian sociology, this rejoinder dialogues with some of the perspectives offered there on the discipline north of the border with an eye towards lessons that American sociologists might learn from the Canadian experience. My reflections build on a larger analytic piece entitled “Canada’s Impossible Science: The Historical and Institutional Origins of the Coming Crisis of Anglo-Canadian Sociology” to be published soon in The Canadian Journal Sociology. Particular attention is paid to the different institutional arrangements of higher education in Canada and the United States, Anglo-Canadian reliance on the particularly English “weakness as strength” strategy for sociology, tensions between the cultural values of populism, egalitarianism, and excellence, and the trade-offs between professional and public intellectual work. A critique is offered of the “origin myth” of Canadian sociology as a particularly vibrant “critical sociology,” with discussion of Dorothy Smith's influence on sociology in Canada.