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Introduction: George Parkin Grant's English-Speaking Justice
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10677 |
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BOOK WORLD
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1 / 1986 |
439 Words |
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About George Parkin Grant's writings on moral and political theory two things need to be said at the outset. They are among the most interesting North American work in that area to be produced since 1945, and they are almost entirely unknown in the United States. Partly this is because of our philistine parochialism which steadfastly refuses to acknowledge either the diversity or the interdependence of the various North American cultures, so that Mexican as well as Canadian voices go unheard. And partly it is because Grant himself has consistently directed what he has to say to the contemporary concerns of his own political and cultural milieu, that of English-speaking Canadians.
It is no accident that an unusually high proportion of his writings originated as speech: most notably his Massey Lectures for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, published in 1969 as Time as History, but also in lectures to audiences at conferences, at universities, and at the Royal Society of Canada. Grant exhibits, as few recent writers on moral and political theory do, a consistent attempt to speak immediately to the peculiar needs of time and place. This gives to his work a flavor that is very different from that of most academic writing, one that likens his style to the content of his preoccupations.
Two of those preoccupations are important for readers of English-Speaking Justice. In his most widely read book Lament for a Nation: the Defeat of Canadian Nationalism, first published in 1965, Grant combined an explanation of the particular failures of Diefenbaker's conservative administration with an analysis of the way in which the forces of liberalism and modern technology had subverted the possibility of genuine national community in Canada, so that Canada suffered the more general American fate.
In the period since then Grant has drawn upon Nietzsche and Heidegger to develop a systematic critique of modernity, one that makes it urgent to identify what resources from the past are left to us which will enable us to preserve traditions of justice and civility in dark times. It is to this task that English-Speaking Justice is devoted. First published in 1978 by Mount Allison University at Sackville, New Brunswick, it is the written version of the Josiah Wood Lectures delivered at the university in 1974.
Grant's judgments may perhaps sometimes strike members of the academic community in the United States as harsh and even peremptory. It is important to remember that he is speaking politically and practically and out of a deep loyalty to a
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