This year marks the 60th anniversary of Canadian philosopher George Grant’s Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism, a seminal work that reshaped Canadian political discourse. Published in 1965, Grant’s critique of American cultural dominance and technological modernity challenged Canadians to reconsider their national sovereignty and identity. To mark the occasion, this summer, The Hub will feature a series of essays from big thinkers exploring the book’s enduring legacy and how its insights remain vital to understanding Canada and its relationship with the United States today.
Canada hasn’t produced many philosophers of note, and whenever Canada produces little of something, a predictable consequence is an exaggeration of the importance of the crumbs. This, it seems to me, is the main purpose of George Grant: a man to be pointed at when someone requests a “Canadian philosopher.”
Today, Grant is sometimes lazily called a “conservative” thinker, but no 21st-century Canadian conservative can find much of themselves in him. Grant’s partisan reputation owes mostly to the fact that he was a defender of the Tory prime minister John Diefenbaker, but even then, his reasons for doing so are ideologically incoherent by today’s standards.
Grant wrote his manifesto, Lament for a Nation, in the mid-1960s, a time when concepts of “liberal” and “conservative” didn’t bear much resemblance to how we think about them now. His particular brand of midcentury anti-liberalism was defined by a sentimental and snobby anti-Americanism, animated by a melange of anticapitalist, Luddite, and pacifist opinions—all of which he understood to run contrary to the technocratic managerialism of John F. Kennedy’s America.
