Questionable cultural assumptions inform the works of Hugh MacLennan, Robertson Davies, and Margaret Atwood. These authors are proponents of a liberal ideology that relegates all social evils to individual psychology; this is what Russell Jacoby has termed "psychologism." While the authors in question criticize the existing social order, they cannot seem to envisage a world other than the current Western order of liberal capitalism. MacLennan's novels tend to diminish the entire socio/political sphere to a kind of mass Oedipal complex. Davies does not even examine the arguable notion of the primacy of individual psychology in society--his novels simply presume it. Atwood's novels demonstrably bear the imprint of psychologism and the rhetorical devices that it engenders. Political activism in her novels is invariably contiguous with psychological inertia.
