Measuring the Mosaic: An Intellectual Biography of John Porter

Rick Helms-Hayes Measuring the Mosaic: An Intellectual Biography of John Porter Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010Reviewed by Howard A. DoughtyIn 1977, when he was young doctoral student at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada Rick Helmes-Hayes turned down an invitation to meet John Porter (1921-1979). The occasion was the presentation of an Honorary Doctorate to Professor Porter, permanent fixture at Carleton University in Ottawa. The event was to be private reception after the ceremony. At the time, Helms-Hayes considered the most famous sociologist in Canadian history to be a liberal apologist for the system (Langlois, 2011: 229). He later acknowledged that his decision to snub Porter had been idiotic, and he appears to have been making up for that missed opportunity ever since. By the time he wrote his intellectual of the great man, Helms-Hayes was able confidently to say: know more about John Porter than probably anybody in the world, including members of his own family (Helmes-Hayes, 2010). He was probably right. Still, he never did meet his main subject and primary research interest in person.Helmes-Hayes has taken on formidable task. It's hard enough to write good biography but, in Measuring the Mosaic, he not only analyses Porter's thought and work, but he also takes some time to discuss and to assess Porter's personal background, his intimate relationships and the consequences of both for an undoubtedly troubling and yet an exceptionally fruitful academic life. And even then he wasn't done.In the end, Helmes-Hayes has contributed substantial inquiry into Porter the man, Porter the sociologist, the history of sociology in Canada and Porter's place in it. These are difficult balls to keep in the air. Some have suggested that they are too many for Helmes-Hayes to have handled deftly (Tough, 2012, October). I will refrain from judgement on that matter. Indeed, apart few brief comments on John Porter's childhood (he grew up in challenging economic circumstances), unusual career (he became the Canadian sociologist of his time, yet Bachelor of Arts was the only earned degree on his academic resume), and personal emotional travails and career disappointments (he coveted university presidency, but he was thwarted), I am going to skirt around those issues and try to focus on what Helmes-Hayes has to say about Porter as sociologist and about the evolution of the discipline in Canada.Helmes-Hayes reports that Porter's background of economic deprivation prompted his interest in social inequality, but his persistent inability to achieve his highest goals produced level of frustration which, some speculate, may have contributed to his early death from heart attack at the age of fifty-eight. Porter's personal issues, however, did not affect just his private life. Driven to succeed personally, he rejected what he perceived as Marxist determinism and strove both to document and to advocate the emergence of meritocracy in which inequality would remain, but success and the rewards that accompanied it would be more equitably allocated-not on the basis of inherited wealth or social connections, but on personal ability and character. In the end, John Porter would have endorsed Barack Obama's oftrepeated campaign wisdom on the topic of social class: Everybody should have fair shot. From the outset, Porter rejected the notion that dominant, impenetrable or detectably structural ruling class even existed. As far as North America was concerned, Porter bought into the prevailing pluralist paradigm.John Porter also learned the lessons of Mosca, Michels and Pareto. He firmly declared that the robust liberal dream of an engaged and well-informed citizenry was obsolete. He joined the revisionists and realists among democratic theorists and considered any sort of participatory democratic model to be absurd in view of the frequency with which that theory has been empirically refuted (Porter, 1965, 556). …

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