[RonPrice]

Part 1:

In 1965 George Grant published his influential treatise in Canadian political philosophy, Lament for a Nation. The book, a little less than 100 pages, continues to receive the accolade of “masterpiece;” it also makes regular appearances on lists of the most essential Canadian reading. Grant passed away over 25 years ago now, and the list of Canadian political philosophers as well as philosophers in general has grown exponentially since the publication of Lament for a Nation.

Lament for a Nation is divided into seven chapters that move from the particular historical contexts of its composition: the rise and fall of John Diefenbaker’s government from 1957 to 1963, and the Bomarc missile crisis, to a more general argument that Canada would eventually cease to exist as a nation and become absorbed into a vast continental Americanism, commercialism and consumerism. Grant made this point back in the mid-1960s. It was impossible for conservatism to exist in our era, Grant argued, and impossible for Canada itself to exist.

Part 2:

Grant argued that his version of conservatism—a British-derived preference for public control and tradition with the Canadian inflection of small town populism embodied by Diefenbaker—had been the shaping force of Canadian nationalism since the beginnings of settler society. From Grant’s perspective, the demise of conservatism in the twentieth century is due in some measure to the rise of socialism but, much more critically, it is liberalism’s faith in progress and technology that will lead the nation into a universal and homogenous state indistinct from America.

In 1963 George Grant was one of my professors in a first year B.A. program at McMaster University in southern Ontario. In 1965, the year Lament for a Nation was published, I completed my second year in a double-major, history and philosophy, and switched to the study of sociology in year three. Grant's book was not on my agenda in those middle years of the 1960s, or even as the 1960s became the 1970s. In 1970 a revised edition of Grant's book was published. At the time I was getting ready to move to Australia. I was also recovering from several years of mood disorder which were labeled "a mild schizo-affective state" . My disorder was relabeled bipolar disorder in 1980, and then relabeled again, bipolar I disorder in 2012.

Part 3:

A 40th anniversary edition of Grant’s Lament for a Nation argues for the work’s ongoing relevance to contemporary questions about “Canadian identity, sovereignty, and national unity” to a “new generation” of readers. A lengthy new introduction by Andrew Potter provides historical, political, and philosophical contexts that will be valuable to students in need of general background.

Potter lists the common criticisms of Lament for a Nation in the Introduction, yet he concludes that it is “more than just a period piece, and it remains vital reading for even the most casual student of Canada.” I would argue that these two points are not mutually exclusive, that in fact Lament for a Nation is very much a “period piece” exemplary of a particular moment in the life of the nation and one of its most revered public intellectuals. Its period specificity is precisely the reason students and scholars should read it, and read it critically.1-Ron Price with thanks to Candida Rifkind, "Liberalism and Its Discontents" a review of George P. Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism, McGill-Queen's University Press, and Ian McKay, Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada's Left History: Between the Lines, in Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review, Winter 2013.

Part 4:

I grew-up in one of those little towns,
George, where that conservatism you
wrote about existed and everyone was
part of that complacent trinity of Jew,
Catholic and Protestant. I never saw a
black person, an Indian, knew nothing
about homosexuals or transvestites, &
never heard about child abuse. It was a
very simple world back then, George...

I remember, too, your lectures back in
1963-4 when I was just starting-out on
my life in academia...It has been a long
road these last 50 years for liberalism,
for socialism, conservatism.....for just
about all isms and wasms, and for me
too as I now head into my 70s in these
years, 2014 to 2024, and my 80s, 2024
to 2034........if I last that long, George.

I really did not know what you were
writing about back then, immersed as
I was in just getting through a young
life: my studies, my life-narrative as a
single man, then marriage, a career, &
a new religion with its internationalism,
spiritual inclusiveness, its non-partisan1
politics which took me far away from
Diefenbaker's2 conservatism, from any
of the socialisms or liberalisms that a
Daniel Bell said had come to an end as3
I was going through formal education.

1 The Baha'i Faith. I joined this religion in 1959 as Bell was about to publish his The End of Ideology.
2 John Diefenbaker became Canada's Prime Minister from June 21, 1957 to April 22, 1963, my last year of primary school and all my years of high school.

3 Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties is a collection of essays published in 1960. Bell described himself as a "socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture". He suggested that the older, grand-humanistic ideologies derived from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been exhausted, and that new ideologies would soon arise. He argued that political ideology has become irrelevant among "sensible" people, and that the polity of the future would be driven by piecemeal technological adjustments of the extant system. Greeted on its publication as one of the most provocative works of the era, The End of Ideology was in 1995 chosen as one of the 100 most influential books since the second world war by the Times Literary Supplement.

Ron Price
31/7/'14 to 18/1/'15.