Eugene A Forsey: An Intellectual Biography

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

These days, Eugene Forsey is best known as a former Liberal senator who
spent a good deal of time writing sharp, insightful, and often funny
letters to the editor, usually of The Globe and Mail. And yet as
Milligan makes clear, Forsey’s influence extended far beyond the pages
of Canada’s newspapers. Over the course of his long career, he became
involved in a series of organizations, including the United Church’s
Committee on Social and Economic Research, the League for Social
Reconstruction, and the Canadian Congress of Labour. He was also friends
with many individuals both in an out of academia, possibly the most
surprising of whom was Arthur Meighen.

Eugene A. Forsey, originally a Ph.D. thesis, sets out to determine what
tied all of this together. Consisting of nine chapters, the book
examines Forsey’s formative years. He was raised by a single mother, a
devoted Christian like her son later became. His thinking was shaped by
his education at McGill where he majored in political science,
economics, and English, and then at Oxford where he went as a Rhodes
scholar. According to Milligan, John Macmurray “was the most important
intellectual influence on Forsey during his years at Oxford and is
arguably the most important intellectual influence in Forsey’s entire
life.”

Milligan spells out Forsey’s reaction to the Great Depression, his
defence of civil liberties, and his vision of the planned society.
Unfortunately, his analysis peters out around the time Forsey became a
Liberal senator, so his book can hardly be called a complete
intellectual biography and it will be of less use to those interested in
Forsey’s thinking during the last 30 years of his long life.

In researching his book, Milligan relied on a huge number of primary
and secondary sources and interviewed Forsey himself on several
occasions. For those prepared to wade though some turgid prose, Eugene
A. Forsey will probably throw some light on the ancient battles and
organizations that Forsey was engaged in.