Collected Works of George Grant: Vol. 1, 1933-1950

Peter Babiak teaches English at the University of British Columbia.

Now that “separation” and “alienation” have become common
expressions in Canadian political discourse and our policymakers are
besotted with the unimaginative rhetoric of fiscal austerity, we would
do well to remember that not long ago this country had its own visionary
public intellectual—George Grant.

This first volume includes Grant’s early writings, from a 1938 essay
on “Art and Propaganda,” written by an eloquent 19-year-old
Queen’s University student, to a dissertation on the work of a
Scottish theologian, written by a 31-year-old Oxford graduate student.
Although the thesis will mainly interest academics, Grant’s work is
marked by a clarity and purpose that appeals to all serious readers. The
earliest works in the volume may be valuable primarily for biographical
reasons, but some of them, like the columns originally printed in Food
for Thought, the magazine of the Canadian Association for Adult
Education, demonstrate Grant’s unsurpassed capacity for delivering
philosophical insight to everyday contexts.

The boldest selections in the volume are those in which Grant
philosophizes—some might even say mythologizes—Canada. In “Have We
a Canadian Nation?” he argues in the traditional vein that we are a
“conservative” nation, not because we put our faith in the magic of
the marketplace but for the fact that our refusal—both English and
French—to accept the American Revolution “laid down the character of
our country and gave us our individuality.” In “Canada—An
Introduction to a Nation” (the sort of foundational essay that would
be required reading in a less self-effacing nation than ours), Grant
offers Canadian diversity as a model “to a divided world of how people
of different origins and creeds can live together, not without friction,
but without disruption and strife.” And in “Have We a Canadian
Nation?,” a treatise that foreshadows the ideals he mourned in Lament
for a Nation, he argues that “[u]nless we have our own national way,
we will have the American way.”

We may never know whether Grant represents a vision of Canada that has
disappeared or an ideal that never existed. What we do know is that he
is an intellectual giant who has been sadly neglected by precisely the
citizens for whom he wrote so much.