Collected Works of George Grant. Volume 3: 1960-1969 (review)

Volume 3 of the Collected Works of George Grant is a record of Grant's life and thought from 1960 to 1969, the decade he established himself in the industrial heartland of Ontario. Grant's new life had a stormy beginning. In 1960 he arrived in Toronto to take up the post of chairman of the Philosophy Department of the newly founded York University but, as the first documents show, he was barely unpacked when he resigned his position in protest over the University of Toronto's power over York's curriculum. Later, however, he accepted the chairmanship of the Department of Religion at McMaster. Under his leadership the department became a centre for the scholarly study of religion and a headquarters for his outspoken criticism of what he discerned as a sinister alliance between academia's new ideal of 'value free' scientific knowledge and expanding corporate power. Accordingly the writings in this volume are those of a dissident and public intellectual rather than a professional philosopher. Only one article, 'Tyranny and Wisdom,' appeared first in a peer-reviewed journal. The others, such as 'The Ethics of Community,' which called upon the newly founded New Democratic party to curb the power of corporations, or his address to graduates of theological seminaries urging them to make society aware of the spiritual foundations of its freedoms, or his cbc scripts formulating the challenges to Canadian identity, and, of course, Lament for a Nation, the book that made him famous, are directed to the common reader. The career of Lament illustrates Grant's status as the academy's primary insider-outsider. This book, which was to launch a multitude of academic conferences and special editions of academic journals, was originally published by the populist Anansi Press.

The editing maintains the high standards of the early volumes. Except for a number of course lectures added at the end, the essays are arranged chronologically. There are extended headnotes to Lament for a Nation and to the essays in Technology and Empire as well as an introduction that weaves together Grant's life and thought. Arthur Davis and Henry Roper achieve the editorial ideal of thoroughness which still allows Grant to speak for himself.

The volume could be subtitled 'The Life and Times of Red Toryism.' In the 1960s , in the new world of youth revolution, emerging feminism, and war in Asia, Red Toryism seemed a uniquely Canadian response to the corporate power and unrestrained individualism of America. It combined the gravitas of European culture and an interpetation of the traditional Canadian principle of 'peace, order, and good government' which embraced the economic fairness of socialism. This volume contains several fine expositions of the tenets of Red Toryism, notably the previously mentioned 'Ethics of Community' and two cbc televison discussions between Grant and Gad Horowitz.

Today, however much we celebrate hybridity, this synthesis of conservatism and socialism seems moribund. The essays in this volume show that even at that time fissures between the socialist and the conservative, or the'Red' and the 'Tory,' began to appear. These were not because of the hyper-individualism of the conservative outlook – this appeared in the late 1970s – nor was it, as is commonly believed, because of Grant's nostalgia for the relics of feudalism that once characterized Quebec and Ontario. In these writings Grant's Red Toryism is more philosophically grounded. In essay after essay he insists that that the 'Red' aspiration for community and a society of equals could only be realized in a 'Tory' world which sustained a philosophical, cultural, and religious vision of humans as spiritual beings deserving of freedom and equality.

Grant's growing pessimism, which can be traced in these papers, arose from his perception that these elements were being torn asunder, first by the global expansion of transnational corporations which were undermining community, nation, and state (Grant was an early anti-globalist), and secondly by the dominance, since the sixteenth...