The Cheapest Police

Abstract

Current debates within librarianship around intellectual freedom echo debates in broader society around free speech, cancel culture, and "culture war". This thesis argues that, far from being a transcendental value or purely intellectual concept, intellectual freedom is deeply implicated in political struggles over class, race, gender, and sexuality. Taking two recent controversies over the exclusion of trans and Indigenous people from Canadian libraries, this thesis links library policy and practice with longstanding tendencies within Canadian politics itself, in particular the hegemonic use of a form of communitarianism known as the politics of recognition. Once a pragmatic strategy to manage Canadian cultural and political demands of marginalized groups, in the 1990s the politics of recognition became a sophisticated political theory, one which informs Canadian politics (including the politics of libraries) to the present day. Applying a conjunctural analysis of the media, moral panics, and hegemony drawn from the work of Stuart Hall, this thesis offers a critique of Canadian politics and libraries as political institutions that focuses on three main areas: liberal individualism, bourgeois hegemony, and the politics of recognition which liberalism developed to neutralize the threat of radical difference. These interlocking strands paint a picture of Canadian libraries not as politically neutral organizations fostering individual freedom and unconstrained intellectual development, but as playing a specific role in the construction and maintenance of liberal hegemony which demonizes particular Others - like trans and Indigenous peoples - as part of a broader political strategy: the maintenance and survival of the liberal Canadian state itself. The concept of intellectual freedom in librarianship, in particular, can then more clearly be seen as a pragmatic tool in the service of the Canadian state's hegemonic strategy, rather than as a pure, timeless, apolitical concept.