By the mid-nineteenth-century, 'public opinion' emerged as a new form of authority in Upper Canada. Contemporaries came to believe that the best answer to common questions arose from deliberation among private individuals. Older conceptions of government, sociability and the relationship between knowledge and power were jettisoned for a new image of Upper Canada as a deliberative democracy. The Capacity to Judge asks what made widespread public debate about common issues possible; why it came to be seen as desirable, even essential; and how it was integrated into Upper Canada's constitutional and social self-image. Drawing on an international body of literature indebted to Jürgen Habermas and based on extensive research in period newspapers, Jeffrey L. McNairn argues that voluntary associations and the press created a reading public capable of reasoning on matters of state, and that the dynamics of political conflict invested that public with final authority. He traces how contemporaries grappled with the consequences as they scrutinized parliamentary, republican and radical options for institutionalizing public opinion. The Capacity to Judge concludes with a case study of deliberative democracy in action that serves as a sustained defense of the type of intellectual history the book as a whole exemplifies.

When American Methodist preachers first arrived in Upper Canada in the 1790s, they brought with them more than an alluring religious faith. They also brought saddlebags stuffed with books published by the New York Methodist Book Concern – North America’s first denominational publisher – to sell along their preaching circuits. Pulpit, Press, and Politics traces the expansion of this remarkable transnational market from its earliest days to the mid-nineteenth century, a period of intense religious struggle in Upper Canada marked by fiery revivals, political betrayals, and bitter church schisms. The Methodist Book Concern occupied a central place in all this conflict as it powerfully shaped and subverted the religious and political identities of Canadian Methodists, particularly in the wake of the American Revolution. The Concern bankrolled the bulk of Canadian Methodist preaching and missionary activities, enabled and constrained evangelistic efforts among the colony’s Native groups, and clouded Methodist dealings with the British Wesleyans and other religious competitors north of the border. Even more importantly, as Methodists went on to assume a preeminent place in Upper Canada’s religious, cultural, and educational life, their ongoing reliance on the Methodist Book Concern played a crucial role in opening the way for the lasting acceptance and widespread use of American books and periodicals across the region.

Showing that the past is often written into present concerns, and that many groups in Ontario, both powerful and disempowered, have invoked the experience of the Loyalists, Knowles significantly revises earlier interpretations of the Loyalist tradition.