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Collected Works of George Grant: Volume 4, 1970-1988
by Arthur Davis et al. (eds.)
Toronto, ON: U of T Press
1110 pp. $215

Famed for his incendiary booklet, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (1965), that ignited English-Canadian nationalism and fuelled Vietnam War protests, the late, great Canadian philosopher George Grant (1918-88) seems to fuse Bob Dylan’s mystic verses with Malcolm X’s fiery truths. He is a thinker as inescapable for us as is Marshall McLuhan.

Starting in the ‘Thousands,’ the University of Toronto Press has now issued, in excellent cloth, all of Grant’s writings, spanning his earliest jottings from the 1930s up to his last books, interviews, book reviews, articles, and lectures, which are compiled in Collected Works of George Grant: Volume 4, 1970-1988.

Edited and introduced finely by Arthur Davis of York University and Henry Roper, once of the University of King’s College, this 1110-page, final volume in the series is a magnificent tribute to Grant’s protean thought. It illuminates the consistency of the philosopher, who retired in 1984 from Dalhousie University, where he taught religion and analyzed politics, always with a classicist, Christian, and conservative bias.

The essence of Grant’s argument is, once Western philosophy turned from religion to reason, from a belief in eternity (God) to a belief in history (progress), and from seeing humans as souls to seeing us as an evolutionary accident, we freed ourselves to pursue our pleasure and scientific innovation – all without limits. Our faith in ‘can-do’ and ‘know-how’ and ‘willpower’ enables us to perform engineering wonders, but also to liquidate nations, abort fetuses, and abuse human rights.

Grant is a superb writer, at times, too. He brands one university “a knowledge whorehouse,” and he pens this proverb: “Love and hate are necessary to each other except among the saints.”

Some views are wrong. Grant says that technology disables populism. What about the Internet? And if President Kennedy started the Vietnam War, didn’t President Nixon expand it? Grant can be curmudgeonly, but his core thought seems correct. As he said we must do with French author Céline, “Tolle, lege”: Take up and read!

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