George Dunn at Compact Magazine:
George Parkin Grant, who died in 1988 at the age of 69, was world-famous in Canada—at least, that was the jest frequently made at the philosopher’s expense. The joke reflected his status as a public intellectual who made frequent appearances on Canadian Broadcast Corporation radio programs but never attracted much attention south of the 49th parallel. There are many reasons for his obscurity outside his home country, but one cause was surely his intense Canadian nationalism, coupled with his outspoken criticism of the form of liberalism he saw embodied in the hegemon to the south.
Next year will mark the 60th anniversary of one of Grant’s most influential works, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. In it, he rebuked Canada’s political establishment for bowing to pressure from the Kennedy administration to accept nuclear missiles on Canadian soil. This capitulation to Washington, he prophesied, heralded the demise of Canadian sovereignty and ensured its absorption into its southern neighbor as a “branch-plant satellite” of the emerging universal empire helmed by the United States. But the loss of Canadian sovereignty was only a local episode in a broader process that was erasing cultural particularity across the globe. Liberals trumpet diversity, but Grant argued that our global civilization would permit pluralism only in private pursuits.
more here. (h/t Cynthia Haven)
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