Paul Wesley Fox (1921 – 2007)

Peter H. Russell

In October, the Department lost one of its finest – Paul Fox. Paul was a marvellous teacher, a great scholar and a wonderful colleague and friend.

Paul’s ties to the University of Toronto go back 67 years to 1940, when he enrolled in the Department of Economics and Political Science’s premier honours course. He graduated in 1944 with the Gold Medal and Victoria College’s Senior Stick, and immediately went off to military service as a Lieutenant in the Canadian Life Infantry.

After the war, as an MA student, he taught in the Department, first as a TA and then as an Instructor, before going to London in 1946 to pursue a doctorate at the LSE. In 1948, he took up his first full time position at Carleton University, where he taught political science until moving to Toronto in 1956 to join the Department of Political Economy. For 33 years, Paul anchored our Department’s teaching, graduate and undergraduate, in Canadian government and politics. He spent his final ten years at U of T as Principal of Erindale College in Mississauga.

Those are the bare bones of Paul Fox’s academic career. But it is the warm and generous personality of the man who lived that career that so many of us will treasure. It was always a pleasure to run into Paul in the Department’s corridors. He enjoyed the theatre of politics and loved talking about the never-ending stream of characters that came across the national and international stage. Even in his final days, those of us who visited him found him full of lively interest in all that was going on. His good humour, wit arid lively conversation will be sorely missed.

For me, arriving in the Department in 1958, Paul was a model teacher. Of course, he did his writing and scholarship, but for Paul, teaching came first. His courses were carefully laid out, every topic supported by relevant, up-to-date and available readings, many writing assignments, sparkling lectures, a well-instructed core of TAs to conduct the tutorials, and lots of time for students to drop in and talk with him. Those were the days when our feet weren’t being held to the fires of tenure and promotion committees!

Paul was a model in another way: he gave generously of his time and talent to his profession, and his country. He served as co-editor of the Canadian Journal of Political Science in the Journal’s early years and was the first member of our Department to be elected President of the Canadian Political Science Association.

His many editions of Politics Canada and his organization of McGraw-Hill Ryerson’s series of political science texts provided the indispensable literature for a generation of Canadian political science students and teachers. His fluency in French and deep concern for the survival of our federation both motivated and enabled him to make major contributions to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, the Bilingual District Boards and Ontario’s Advisory Committee on Confederation. And he did not confine his teaching to the classroom. His lucid explanations of the politics of the day frequently graced the air-waves and his vibrant image of political commentator was often projected on our television screens.

It was Paul’s excellence at teaching that was the key to his becoming Principal of Erindale. As the Principal of Innis College, I happened to be a member of the search committee that selected Paul. After considering a number of leading candidates for the position, a student member of the committee spoke up and said that the best professor she had had at the university was Paul Fox. She suggested that we should consider him for the Erindale position. I think Paul, who had never held administrative office at the university, was somewhat surprised when he was approached by the committee chair. But he agreed to meet with the committee, and it didn’t take us long to realize that Paul had all the qualities we were looking for in an academic leader. By all accounts Paul did much for Erindale. Among other things, he turned out to be a gifted diplomat for the College, cementing its ties to the City of Mississauga and its dynamic mayor.

For those who know Paul as a leading scholar of Canadian politics, it is a surprise to learn that his PhD thesis at LSE was on the political thought of Louis XIV, the great seventeenth-century French monarch. I have not been able to obtain a copy of the dissertation but the central themes of his analysis are set out in an article he published in the Journal of Economics and Political Science in 1960. There he argues that what distinguished Louis XIV from both his contemporaries and his predecessors was his emphasis on personal rule. Paul says that Louis was an “autocrat” more than an “absolutist”, less than a complete despot and not a tyrant: “His overlay of Christian culture….led to self-imposed restraints.

The thesis on Louis XIV led Paul into the general study of political leadership. It was a subject that deeply interested him throughout his life. The study of political leadership was the theme of his 1980 presidential address to the Canadian Political Science Association. In that address Paul drew his colleagues’ attention to how little systematic study had been applied to the study of political leadership. He was particularly interested in the two-way relationship between effective leaders and those they lead. Paul coined a new word for the study of the kind of leadership he thought was most needed in our democratic age: hegetology. This word he derived from the Greek word, hegetes – a ‘leader who is an instructor, a teacher who shows the way. Reading that speech today and reflecting on Paul’s life and work, one cannot help thinking – despite Paul’s modesty – that hegetes fits him very well.

Those of us who attended the service of thanksgiving at Victoria College for the life of Paul Fox encountered a part of Paul that, though fundamental to his life was not something he often spoke about. Because Paul knew months before that his disease could not be arrested, he was able to plan his memorial service. There would be no eulogy. As his dear wife Joan said to me “Paul could be fiercely proud about his modesty.” The service was Paul’s selection of passages from scripture, prayers and hymns from both Christian and Jewish sources, and reflecting the broad and deep nature of his faith. Through those words we could hear the spiritual side of Paul speak and perhaps no more so than in the verse of Hebrews that asks “What is faith?” and answers “Faith gives substance to our hopes, and makes us certain of realities we do not see.”