Early in 1951 (perhaps initiated already in 1950) McLuhan and Harold Innis exchanged letters in which an “interesting pamphlet on communication”¹ by Karl Deutsch² is mentioned. Apparently it had been obtained by McLuhan and then shared with Innis — Innis calls it “your pamphlet”. If both McLuhan and Innis had read the “pamphlet” by February 1951, it is evident that McLuhan must have acquired it in 1950 or, less probably, very early in 1951.

In his March 28, 1951, letter to Norbert Wiener (in the Wiener papers at MIT), McLuhan — apparently referring to the same paper — writes of his “recent encounter with Professor Deutsch’s discussion of communication and education”.

A note to McLuhan’s letter to Innis by the editors of his Letters³ inexplicably identifies this document as Deutsch’s ‘Communication in Self-Governing Organizations: Notes on Autonomy, Freedom and Authority in the Growth of Social Groups’, which he presented at a conference in September 1951 and first published in 1953.⁴ But this could not have been the Deutsch paper McLuhan and Innis were reading at the start of 1951 — the dates clearly don’t match up. But in this case, just what “pamphlet” was it that McLuhan shared with Innis?

McLuhan’s library at the University of Toronto contains two early articles by Deutsch: ‘Mechanism, Organism, and Society: Some Models in Natural and Social Science’, published in 1951⁵ and ‘Communication Theory and Social Science’ published in 1952⁶. The second could not have been in “pamphlet” (reprint?) form at the end of 1950, but it is just possible that the first was. However, a footnote to ‘Mechanism, Organism, and Society’ reads:

The substance of this paper was presented to the joint meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science at New York on December 30, 1949, and some passages have appeared in Goals for American Education, New York, Harper Brothers, 1950. (230n)

This note points to the most likely candidate for the pamphlet — Deutsch’s paper in Goals for American Education⁷, ‘Higher Education and the Unity of Knowledge: An Operational Approach to the History of Thought’.  This was a 1948 seminar presentation which was published in 1950. A reprint of this paper, from which passages were lifted for ‘Mechanism, Organism, and Society’ in 1951⁸, could well have been in McLuhan’s hands at the end of 1950 and its title certainly accords with McLuhan’s description of it to Wiener as “Deutsch’s discussion of communication and education”. Furthermore, just such a reprint exists to this day in the Sigfried Giedion papers archived in the Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur (gta) in Zurich. 

Now Giedion and McLuhan had been in friendly correspondence since 1943 when they met in St Louis. In 1948 Giedion published Mechanization Takes Command, a book which decisively influenced McLuhan for the rest of his career and which he reviewed in The Hudson Review in 1949.⁹ Moreover, at just this time, Giedion was in touch with Deutsch and Wiener at MIT and would teach there with them in 1951. It therefore seems likely that McLuhan was sent a reprint of ”Higher Education and the Unity of Knowledge’, either directly by Giedion himself or through his agency, sometime in 1950. 

Another (perhaps complementary) possibility is that McLuhan may have been alerted to Deutsch’s work by his closest friend at this time, Bernard Muller-Thym.  Muller-Thym was a “leading business analyst” (GG 140) in New York with great interest in automation and corporate communications¹⁰, who later himself taught at MIT (from 1955 to 1966).¹¹

A footnote (249n24) to Deutsch’s 1951 ‘Mechanism, Organism, and Society’ reads:

On the importance of flow patterns of information and decision in economic or political organization, see K. W. Deutsch, “Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and the Learning Process,” in Change and the Entrepreneur, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1949, p.29; and “A Note on the History of Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Decision-Making,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, Vol. I., n.5, May 1949, pp. 12–16.

Deutsch’s work on “flow patterns of information” and entrepreneurship would certainly have caught the interested attention of Muller-Thym and his colleagues at McKinsey and Company. But few of them would have had the sort of background — as Muller-Thym did — to understand the wider context of Deutsch’s work. Indeed, Muller-Thym may even have known one of Deutsch’s first papers, ‘Medieval Unity and the Economic Conditions for an International Civilization’ (1944) which was printed, strangely enough, given Muller-Thym’s Toronto PhD in medieval studies, in The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science (10:1, 18-35). This was a periodical that was published in Toronto and that Harold Innis had helped to found in 1935 — just when Muller-Thym was doing his graduate work there.¹² Futher, ‘medieval unity’ and ‘international civilization’ were important implications of Muller-Thym’s PhD thesis (which he was writing in 1935), On The Establishment of the University of Being.