Eric W. Sager – författare

In Inequality in Canada Eric Sager considers one of the defining – but hardest to define – ideas of our era and traces its different meanings and contexts across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Sager shows how the idea of inequality arose in the long evolution in Britain and the United States from classical economics to the emerging welfare economics of the twentieth century. Within this transatlantic frame, inequality took a distinct form in Canada: different iterations of the idea appear in Protestant critiques of wealth, labour movements, farmer-progressive politics, the social gospel, social Catholicism in Quebec, English-Canadian political economy, and political and intellectual justifications of the social security state. A tradition of idealist thought persisted in the twentieth century, sustaining the idea of inequality despite deep silences among Canadian economists. Sager argues that inequality goes beyond the distribution of income and wealth: it is the idea that there are wide gaps between rich and poor, that the gaps are both an economic problem and a social injustice, and that when inequality appears, it is as a problem that can be either eliminated or reduced.It is precisely because inequality appears in different contexts, and because it changes, Sager reasons, that we can begin to perceive the contours and cleavages of inequality in our time. In our century, a political solution to inequality may rest on the recovery of an ethical ideal and egalitarian politics that have long preoccupied the history of Canadian thought.

The Canadian census taken in 1901 has surprising things to say about the family as a social grouping and cultural construct at the turn of the twentieth century. Although the nuclear-family household was the most frequent type of household, family was not a singular form or structure at all; rather, it was a fluid micro-social community through which people lived and moved. There was no one "traditional" family, but rather many types of families and households, each with its own history.In Household Counts, editors Eric W. Sager and Peter Baskerville bring together an impressive array of scholars to explore the demographic context of families in Canada using the 1901 census. Split into five sections, the collection covers such topics as family demography, urban families, the young and old, family and social history, and smaller groups as well. The remarkable plasticity of family and household that Household Counts reveals is of critical importance to our understanding of nation-building in Canada. This collection not only makes an important contribution to family history, but also to the widening intellectual exploration of historical censuses.

What is history? What are historians doing, when we create our histories? The need for answers is more urgent than ever. We live in an era when history is often rejected or ignored, and when all teachers of history confront formidable challenges. In the culture of screen capitalism and social media, historical knowledge is evaded in an expanding present-minded consciousness. How can history be defended, and what is it that we are defending?This book argues that history is a mode of thinking, a form of imaginative reasoning with its own informal logic. In non-technical language and using examples from important works of history, the book defines core elements in historical thinking. These include contingency, complexity, temporality, parts and wholes, consilience, perspectives, analogy, and abduction. These elements are subsumed into the concept of imaginative reasoning. The overall argument echoes the work of hermeneutic philosophers. History is a disciplined imagination, tempered and empowered by its forms of reasoning. It embraces ethical imperatives that the historian has a duty to declare. Equipped with such understanding, historians may answer the many rejections of history and secure its place in our shared futures.Winner of this year's Choice’s Outstanding Academic Titles: www.choice360.org/choice-pick/outstanding-academic-titles-2025