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George Grant (1918-1988) is widely regarded as one of Canada's most influential philosophers and political theorists. His best-known work, Lament for a Nation (1965), presented a radical reinterpretation of Canadian history and inspired a surge of nationalist sentiment across the country. Along with Grant's other books, it addressed the major cultural shifts and dilemmas of our age, and introduced several generations of students to the basic questions of political philosophy. This study aims to guide the reader toward a clearer understanding of Grant's thought. Focusing on his six short books and some of his most significant articles and speeches, Hugh Donald Forbes provides both an introduction to and an overview of Grant's career and his many contributions to the fields of political science, philosophy, religion, and Canadian studies. Throughout Forbes sheds light on some of Grant's more contradictory and complex ideas, and provides an assessment of his impact on the Canadian political and cultural landscape. Forbes also relates Grant's work to that of three disparate and controversial European thinkers - Martin Heidegger, Leo Strauss, and Simone Weil - providing contexts and comparisons outside of the strictly Canadian framework in which he is normally situated. Comprehensive and lucidly written, George Grant: A Guide to His Thought is an invaluable resource for students, general readers, and academic specialists alike.

George Grant's mystique as a public philosopher is due in part to the seemingly contradictory political stances he took through the years. His opposition to the Vietnam war and his linking of liberalism with technological progress and imperialism brought him favour among the political left during the 1960s. Then, in the following decade, his opposition to abortion earned him allies on the political right, despite his rejection of limitless capitalist growth and free trade with the US. This collection of original essays reveals the complex philosophic, artistic, and religious sources underlying Grant's public positions of nationalism, pacifism, and conservatism. The collection begins with Grant's previously unpublished writing on Céline. This is a bold and vigorous Grant, writing on a topic about which he is passionate and deeply informed. Grant's own work is followed by two pieces that explore his devotion to Céline, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Weil, and Strauss also receive special attention here. Many of the essays draw on manuscripts and notes left unpublished by Grant, thus contributing new perspectives to the ongoing discussion of his work. The focus of this book is the unknown George Grant, namely, the philosophic, religious, and artistic inspiration behind his well-known public positions. Here we discover the great modern thinkers who animated Grant, and whose writings occupied him for much of his life.

George Grant was one of Canada's foremost political and religious thinkers. In his published writings, Grant was a careful and guarded writer, but in his letters he was frank and spontaneous, expressing ideas and opinions that he hesitated to convey in print. Grant's letters are remarkable for their continuity - about twelve hundred letters survive from 1923 to his death in 1988 - and for their quality. For more than fifty years, he favoured his correspondents with his observations about international relations, Canadian politics, religion, literature, and philosophy. William Christian has selected some three hundred letters, postcards, telegrams, and journal entries which reveal much about Grant - both the troubled man and the daring thinker. His correspondence begins with the letters from his early years at Upper Canada College and his undergraduate days at Queen's University, followed by letters from London during the Second World War, when he struggled with the conflict between his pacifism and his sense of duty. The middle section includes letters that describe his life at Dalhousie in the 1950s, his resignation from York University, and his hopes to create in the department of religion at McMaster University a kind of fifth column that would preserve a university within the multiversities he thought had taken over higher education in Canada. The later letters feature his remorseless attacks on what he felt were the perfidies of Trudeau during his long tenure as prime minister.

Beneath the philosophical, social, political, ethical, national, and moral issues that Grant tackled throughout his career was a fundamental concern with theodicy ? the problem of faith in God in a world of conflict, suffering, and tragedy.

George Grant's Lament for a Nation and Technology and Empire inspired a generation of Canadians. This readable biography revels in the life of a fascinating religious and political thinker, warts, gossip and all.