SOURCE: "Scholarship and the Later Innis," in Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d'études canadiennes, Vol. 12, No. 5, Winter, 1977, pp. 32-44.

In the following essay, Pal explores Innis's later work within the context of his changing ideas.

The early Innis—the Innis of fish and fur—is fairly well known; the later Innis—the Innis of print and paper—less so. Part of the fault lies with Innis himself. His economic studies were never models of clarity but they seemed lucid next to the elliptical arguments, acrane terminology, and obscure conclusions of his communications works.

The list of his stylistic and substantive sins is a long one. But some of the fault also lies with the way that the later Innis has been analyzed and interpreted.

The later Innis, for example, has been almost universally interpreted as a communications theorist.¹ Marshall McLuhan, in search perhaps for the basis of...