Collected Works of George Grant: Volume 1

by George Parkin Grant, Arthur Davis (Editor), Peter C. Emberley (Editor)

More than a decade after his death, George Grant continues to stimulate, challenge, and inspire. During his lifetime he influenced a broad cross-section of Canadians, urging them to think more deeply about matters of social justice and individual responsibility. He wrote on subjects as diverse as technology, abortion, Canadian politics and nationalism, and the war in Vietnam, and was claimed equally by rightist and leftist causes.

Grant's legacy includes six books and more than two hundred articles, as well as numerous broadcast transcripts, extensive correspondence, and a wealth of unpublished lectures, essays, and notes. In this projected eight-volume series, Grant's published and unpublished writings, including his complete correspondence, will be brought together for the first time. The texts are annotated, and each volume includes an introduction to the period that it covers. The series will not only make it possible to see the whole pattern of Grant's thought, but will also invite a reconsideration of the nature and importance of his work.

Volume I covers Grant's intellectual development through his student years. Included are his early reviews, a brief journal written as he recovered from tuberculosis in 1942, and his earliest social and political writings about Canadian and international affairs. The most important of Grant's formative years were those spent at Oxford after the war, culminating in the writing of his DPhil thesis on the Scottish philosopher John Oman. In this dissertation, published here in full, we see the main themes of Grant's thought worked out for the first time.

496 pages, Hardcover

First published March 18, 2000

About the author

George Parkin Grant was a Canadian philosopher, professor, and political commentator. He is best known for his Canadian nationalism, political conservatism, and his views on technology, pacifism and Christian faith. He is often seen as one of Canada's most original thinkers.

Academically, his writings express a complex meditation on the great books, and confrontation with the great thinkers, of Western Civilization. His influences include the "ancients" such as Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine of Hippo, as well as "moderns" like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Leo Strauss, James Doull, Simone Weil, and Jacques Ellul.

Although he is considered the main theoretician of Red Toryism, he expressed dislike of the term when applied to his deeper philosophical interests, which he saw as his primary work as a thinker. Recent research on Grant uncovers his debt to a neo-Hegelian idealist tradition, Canadian idealism, that had a major influence on many Canadian scholars and Canadian political culture more broadly.