The Undiscovered Country: Essays in Canadian Intellectual Culture by Ian Angus (review)

Much of Canada’s intellectual history has found us surveying and marking our borders, within and without. Five decades on, Northrop Frye’s question of “Where is here?” still resonates, becoming increasingly urgent as Canada confronts the challenges of globalization and empire. Ian Angus has consistently been among the best investigating these contexts as a combination of philosopher, historian, and social scientist. The Undiscovered Country is a broad guide to Angus’s post-millennial thought on Canada’s identity and political philosophy. Angus may challenge the reader, but his many strengths outweigh his few flaws.

Within the text are three parts and an appendix. Part 1, “The Dominant Hegelianism of Canadian Thought,” contains five chapters. Angus argues that much of Canadian intellectual history can be characterized by a three-pronged Hegelianism: the primacy of community, a “moral” role for government, and a tolerance of plurality (first in religion and later in society as a whole). But in recent decades, an oppositional narrative based around liberal individualism has led to the emergence of dialectic, one characterized by the opposition of Hegelian community and liberal capitalism. Angus argues that this dialectic must be superseded by a critique of the power structures and empire that make the very existence of the debate possible. The reprinted essays that follow, on Canadians Charles Taylor, James Doull, C.B. Macpherson, and George Grant, examine not only how these Canadian thinkers of the 1950s and 1960s engaged with the pressures of modernity on a Canada neither fully independent nor fully of an empire but also how each Canadian philosopher failed to reconcile some of the dualities in their thought.

In part 2, Angus addresses the question, “Is Canada a nation?” This section contains four reprinted essays, an original introduction, and a new review of and prescription to revive weakened Canadian studies programs. The linking theme between each of the disparate subjects is the question of how the particular can maintain its autonomy in the face of the homogenizing pressures of globalization. From Angus’s critique of Canadian nationalists and fellow intellectuals emerges the argument that recognizing inequality does not have to lead to fragmentation but instead should function “as a springboard to ever more inclusive forms of solidarity.”

Part 3, “Locative Thought,” contains three articles in which Angus develops his own vision for Canadian identity and the nation’s relationship with empire. In them, he calls on Canadians to develop habits of “locative thought,” by finding and engaging with local or particular protests that nevertheless oppose the agenda of empire, an agenda synonymous with that of global capitalism. This conscious “inhabitation” of a particular space is to reverse an original dispossession and engage with the real enemy – the homogenizing processes that lead to empire. Angus calls for a new relationship between the particular and the universal, where the latter is arrived at, not instead of the former, but through it. Angus then settles on an “anarchist conception of federation,” where the internal autonomy of equal “sovereignties” (i.e., nations, not states) remains inviolate from any outside bodies they join. The Canadian nation would become less an idea imposed from the top down and more a voluntary association (an “us/we,” rather than “us/them”) that has decided to resist the dehumanizing forces of a techno-capitalist order.

Angus’s strengths are in his deep understanding of the political and philosophical ideas of Canadian intellectuals (particularly those of Grant), his valuable advice for Canadian studies programs to reinvent themselves with a universalist critique of power and empire, his logic and intellectual consistency, and his call for universals that are explored from the bottom up rather than imposed from the top down. Conversely, Angus’s ideas sometimes disappear behind his prose. It is also surprising that he fails to engage with the thoughts of George Woodcock, who held a similar position on an anarchist federation as he debated with left nationalists in the early 1970s. And as Angus himself notes, his solutions are utopic...