A Life of Learning and Other Pleasures: John Meisel's Tale

John Meisel. A Life of Learning and Other Pleasures: John Meisel's Tale. South Frontenac, ON: Wintergreen Studios Press, 2012.If John Meisel were living Japan, he would be designated as a Living National Treasure, recognition of his high mastery of his craftand the hope of aiding its transmission to future generations. In this review, I will recall briefly why he deserves such recognition, evaluate these memoirs and draw lessons for the readers of TIJ concerning some of the conditions that lead to innovation.It is fashionable these days to declare any acquaintance or shared interest with a person whose work one is reviewing. When the editor asked me to do this, I replied that I would gladly do it if she would accept that it came from someone biased favour of John Meisel. She replied Who isn't? so here I am and you are warned. Meisel was my professor at Queen's, my M.A. thesis supervisor and advisor and helper when I did my doctorate at Laval University, he recommended me for two jobs, and has been a mentor for about fifty years. Still, as my colleague Andre Blais used to tell graduate students, being critical does not only mean finding fault, it also means being able to say why you like a text or an argument, so I will try to adhere to this sense of critical.In brief, Meisel has had a career of sixty years as a professor of political science at Queen's University. He was born Vienna of Czechoslovak parents, but the years of his primary schooling were spent the Czech town of Zlin, where the Bat'a shoe company dominated economic and cultural life. In the face of the growing threat from Nazi Germany, the Bat'a company assigned his father successively to Holland, Casablanca and Haiti, before coming to Canada where he continued to work for the firm. Throw secondary school education at a residential school England, and you have a cosmopolitan and polyglot young man who went to Pickering College before attending University of Toronto the Department of Political Economy under the direction of Harold Innis.In his political science career, Meisel had many fields of research and teaching, but three stand out. He did the first national election study, on the election of 1957. In 1965, he launched and led the first survey-based national election study. Parties and elections were one of his first fields of specialization. Second, starting with an M.A. thesis on T.G. Masaryk and Czech nationalism, Meisel became interested political culture and nationalism, particularly French-English relations Canada. Third, he explored cultural policy and broadcasting, which led to his most important non-academic contribution. Never content to stay the ivory tower, he not only headed up his department at Queen's, but he presided over the Canadian Political Science Association, the Royal Society of Canada, was a research supervisor for the Laurendeau-Dunton Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, and Chairman of the Canadian Radio and Television Commission (CRTC) the early 1980s. He was the founding co-editor of the Canadian Journal of Political Science and founding editor of The International Political Science Review, which he later co-edited with Jean Laponce. He and Laponce were such pillars of the IPSA that they were known as its godfathers, and now have an annual prize named after them for the best article the IPSR. The list of honours he has received is staggering.In these memoirs, Meisel mercifully does not attempt a straightforward chronological account. He does tell us about the questions and issues that he studied and wrote about, but he tells it all as he lived it, with plenty of detail about the people he met and accompanied along the way and an anthropologist's eye for telling cultural details concerning people and places. He says near the end (361) that in the last 88 years, I managed to keep a diary on only three days! However, he did keep his annual pocket diaries or agendas since 1940 and all his passports since 1933. …

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