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English-Speaking Justice
George Grant's searching exploration of the meaning of justice in a society dominated by technology was first delivered as the Josiah Wood Lectures at Mount Allison University.Grant's magnificent four-part meditation on justice sums up much that is central to his own thought, including a critique of modern liberalism, an analysis of John Rawls's Theory of Justice, and insights into the larger Western philosophical tradition.Admirer's of Grant's landmark works Lament for a Nation, Technology and Empire, and Philosophy in the Mass Age, will welcome this new edition of English-Speaking Justice, containing a new introduction by Grant scholar Robin Lathangue of the University of New Brunswick. Newcomers to Grant's thought will discover Canada's most influential philosopher and social commentator.[From the back cover]
104 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1985
11 people are currently reading
74 people want to read
About the author
George Parkin Grant
17 books24 followersGeorge 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 17, 2023
English-Speaking Justice is so rich and penetrating that I should go back and make detailed notes.
Given as lectures in 1974, Grant analyses both Rawls' A Theory of Justice (published 1971) and Roe v. Wade (1973), showing their place within liberalism and how they reveal the ultimate inconsistencies of that ideology. He gives a helpful account of the liberalism of the English-speaking world (what we might now term the Anglosphere) in contradistinction to that of Europe; an analysis of how it interacts with our technological and capitalist age. For a slim volume, this is a great deal to cover, and he does so brilliantly, showing how liberalism unavoidably relies on the moral structures it has inherited from Christian civilization - moral structures it can no longer support or justify. Liberalism is an incoherent system that cannot support itself.
Grant occasionally indulges in wonderful little epigrams: for example, Grant defines ideology as "surrogate religion masquerading as philosophy", a definition which is perhaps even more helpful in our increasingly post-Christian era.
Given as lectures in 1974, Grant analyses both Rawls' A Theory of Justice (published 1971) and Roe v. Wade (1973), showing their place within liberalism and how they reveal the ultimate inconsistencies of that ideology. He gives a helpful account of the liberalism of the English-speaking world (what we might now term the Anglosphere) in contradistinction to that of Europe; an analysis of how it interacts with our technological and capitalist age. For a slim volume, this is a great deal to cover, and he does so brilliantly, showing how liberalism unavoidably relies on the moral structures it has inherited from Christian civilization - moral structures it can no longer support or justify. Liberalism is an incoherent system that cannot support itself.
Grant occasionally indulges in wonderful little epigrams: for example, Grant defines ideology as "surrogate religion masquerading as philosophy", a definition which is perhaps even more helpful in our increasingly post-Christian era.
June 5, 2022
"It may be argued that I have made too much of one academic book, [A Theory of Justice]". Bro, you have no idea what's coming.
August 5, 2019
George Grant's message in this book is pretty clear, and I would add compelling. Liberalism was in a dialectic relationship with Protestantism especially in English speaking countries, originally in a pragmatic alliance especially by Calvinists. As time passed, Protestantism was influenced by liberalism to the point of total compromise. But liberalism until now has depended on Protestantism to provide it for a basis for justice that it could not itself provide. The realization of liberalism's moral bankruptcy has been along time coming, delayed by Kant, as Nietzsche observed. But now there is a terrifying abyss at our fee, one in which liberalism cannot justify its most cherished beliefs in human rights, being cut off from the Protestant transcendental basis for justice.
In pages 32-35, Grant points out that John Rawls' account of the 'person' in A Theory of Justice, which is a quintessential modern liberal text, does not provide a basis for the equality he promotes, if he is held to his terms. The concept of the person is rooted in the metaphysical, which he professes elsewhere to dispense with:
"His writing is typical of much modern liberal thought in that the word 'person' is brought in mysteriously (one might say sentimentally) to cover up the inability to state clearly what it is about human beings which makes them worthy of high political respect. Where Kant is clear concerning this, Rawls is not." pg. 33
I am reminded of Darwin's discussion of 'lower races' in The Descent of Man and his remark that in nature they would be killed by the "master race" to prevent the weakening by interbreeding. Darwin said it was unthinkable to act on this, but along came Nietzsche and pushed aside the English "milksoppiness." Rawls, like Darwin, affirms a virtue but undercuts its affirmation at the same time. "Rawls affirms a contractarian as against a utilitarian account of justice, but wishes to free the contractarian teaching from the metaphysical assumptions upon which it was founded in the thought of the great exponents.
Chantal Delsol makes a similar point in her book Unjust Justice where she writes, "Contemporary European culture does not want to abandon the Pauline idea of the unity of the human race, but it does want to detach it from its underlying ontology. The idea is therefore radicalized by the exorbitant desire for its complete realization in the historical world."
Section on Calvinism (pg. 58-68)
-The English free church tradition feared established Christianity and any close connection between church and state. Calvinists had only just gained political control for a very short period of time. They saw in the secularization of the state a means to freedom against established religion.
Grant also says this was also intensified by the Calvinists' account of the meeting between God and his creatures which intensified individualism and was at home with a politics essentially defined in terms of individual right.
-There was an intimate relation between the development of modern positive science and the positivist account of revelation in Calvinism.
-Protestantism in the United States was of a more unflinching, more immoderate and less thoughtful sort that in England. Puritan seekers after a new world were escaping the public demands of Anglicanism.
-"Puritan interpretation of the Bible produced more of a driving will to righteousness than a hunger and thirst for it. As it became secularized in America, that will became the will of self-righteousness, and produced its own incarnation of Emerson." pg. 60
-Protestantism gave a firmer and more unyielding account of justice to it's country's constitutionalism than would have been forthcoming from any contractual account.
-Grant holds that American Protestantism has been a less thoughtful species of religion, which had the effect of intellectually insulating it against modernity. He said of it in his day that it was above all pietist. This pietism has little intellectual bite, compared to the Calvinism it replaced, so that its direct practical effect on the control of technology is generally minimal.
Some good quotes:
"Locke follows Hobbes in substituting the state of nature for the createdness of nature as the primal truth. From this truth his understanding of politics is derived. In short, Locke's belief in contractual constitutionalism as the best regime is founded on a new primal teaching about nature which is radically distinguished from that which had been traditional wo western Europe." (English-Speaking Justice, pgs. 16-17)
"Thought is steadfast attention to the whole. The darkness is fearful, because what is at stake is whether anything is good. In the pretechnological era, the central western account of justice clarified the claim that justice is what we are fitted for. It clarified why justice is to render each human being their due, and why what was due to all human beings was 'beyond all bargains and without and alternative.'…The disadvantage is that we have been so long disinterested or even contemptuous of that very thought about the whole which is now required. No other great western tradition has shown such lack of interest in thought, and in the institutions necessary to its possibility. We now pay the price for our long tradition of taking the goods of practical confidence and competence as self-sufficiently the highest goods….Analytical logistics plus historical scholarship plus even rigorous science do not when added up equal philosophy. When added together they are not capable of producing that thought which is required if justice is to be taken out of the darkness which surrounds it in the technological era. This lack of tradition of thought is one reason why it is improbable that the transcendence of justice over technology will be lived among English-speaking people."
-George Parkin Grant, English-Speaking Justice, pg. 87,89
In pages 32-35, Grant points out that John Rawls' account of the 'person' in A Theory of Justice, which is a quintessential modern liberal text, does not provide a basis for the equality he promotes, if he is held to his terms. The concept of the person is rooted in the metaphysical, which he professes elsewhere to dispense with:
"His writing is typical of much modern liberal thought in that the word 'person' is brought in mysteriously (one might say sentimentally) to cover up the inability to state clearly what it is about human beings which makes them worthy of high political respect. Where Kant is clear concerning this, Rawls is not." pg. 33
I am reminded of Darwin's discussion of 'lower races' in The Descent of Man and his remark that in nature they would be killed by the "master race" to prevent the weakening by interbreeding. Darwin said it was unthinkable to act on this, but along came Nietzsche and pushed aside the English "milksoppiness." Rawls, like Darwin, affirms a virtue but undercuts its affirmation at the same time. "Rawls affirms a contractarian as against a utilitarian account of justice, but wishes to free the contractarian teaching from the metaphysical assumptions upon which it was founded in the thought of the great exponents.
Chantal Delsol makes a similar point in her book Unjust Justice where she writes, "Contemporary European culture does not want to abandon the Pauline idea of the unity of the human race, but it does want to detach it from its underlying ontology. The idea is therefore radicalized by the exorbitant desire for its complete realization in the historical world."
Section on Calvinism (pg. 58-68)
-The English free church tradition feared established Christianity and any close connection between church and state. Calvinists had only just gained political control for a very short period of time. They saw in the secularization of the state a means to freedom against established religion.
Grant also says this was also intensified by the Calvinists' account of the meeting between God and his creatures which intensified individualism and was at home with a politics essentially defined in terms of individual right.
-There was an intimate relation between the development of modern positive science and the positivist account of revelation in Calvinism.
-Protestantism in the United States was of a more unflinching, more immoderate and less thoughtful sort that in England. Puritan seekers after a new world were escaping the public demands of Anglicanism.
-"Puritan interpretation of the Bible produced more of a driving will to righteousness than a hunger and thirst for it. As it became secularized in America, that will became the will of self-righteousness, and produced its own incarnation of Emerson." pg. 60
-Protestantism gave a firmer and more unyielding account of justice to it's country's constitutionalism than would have been forthcoming from any contractual account.
-Grant holds that American Protestantism has been a less thoughtful species of religion, which had the effect of intellectually insulating it against modernity. He said of it in his day that it was above all pietist. This pietism has little intellectual bite, compared to the Calvinism it replaced, so that its direct practical effect on the control of technology is generally minimal.
Some good quotes:
"Locke follows Hobbes in substituting the state of nature for the createdness of nature as the primal truth. From this truth his understanding of politics is derived. In short, Locke's belief in contractual constitutionalism as the best regime is founded on a new primal teaching about nature which is radically distinguished from that which had been traditional wo western Europe." (English-Speaking Justice, pgs. 16-17)
"Thought is steadfast attention to the whole. The darkness is fearful, because what is at stake is whether anything is good. In the pretechnological era, the central western account of justice clarified the claim that justice is what we are fitted for. It clarified why justice is to render each human being their due, and why what was due to all human beings was 'beyond all bargains and without and alternative.'…The disadvantage is that we have been so long disinterested or even contemptuous of that very thought about the whole which is now required. No other great western tradition has shown such lack of interest in thought, and in the institutions necessary to its possibility. We now pay the price for our long tradition of taking the goods of practical confidence and competence as self-sufficiently the highest goods….Analytical logistics plus historical scholarship plus even rigorous science do not when added up equal philosophy. When added together they are not capable of producing that thought which is required if justice is to be taken out of the darkness which surrounds it in the technological era. This lack of tradition of thought is one reason why it is improbable that the transcendence of justice over technology will be lived among English-speaking people."
-George Parkin Grant, English-Speaking Justice, pg. 87,89
March 16, 2018
Grant, the golden boy of political liberalism, being related to some of the most important liberal politicians of his day, had a conversion to Christianity where he realized God is there and "we are not our own." This changed the young mind to pursue political philosophy from the stand point that the tenets of liberalism and modernity itself had failed. In this book, he brings his significant philosophical acumen to critique liberalism in 89 brief but powerful pages.
The core of the book is a close reading of Rawls' Theory of Justice set within the liberal tradition. Rawls' genius is to move the liberal tradition from rights based on the metaphysics of nature to rights based on pure assertion of calculative reasoning. Grant's concern is that to establish the social contract on human calculative reasoning is self-defeating. An account of liberty without the good will not produce justice. If the goal is increased liberty, why engage in social contracts? Why give more than you get? Liberalism, for Grant, as no metaphysical basis and no account of the good to ensure freedom.
Thus, Grant is increasingly concerned that if the political goal is merely freedom to everyone, in a technological society, this will inevitably result in more power to corporations. He sees this increasingly in American capitalism and its fierce version of liberalism coming into Canada.
Perhaps one reason why Grant is no longer widely read is that for him the victory of abortion showed the incoherence of liberalism. The ideal of freedom of the individual, paired with technology, has allowed for the judgment on what is a person and what is not, dismissing the unborn from personhood in a way that Grant saw as unjustifiable. The liberal pursuit for individual freedom inevitably results in the denial of the freedom of others, and in this case, their very lives and personhood.
Unfortunately Grant is more of a prophet than a constructive theorist here. He laments liberalism' failure to produce a solid account of the good and he remarks that these values cannot be the product of our wills but from the ancient religious discourses like the Bible, however, he also understands that we cannot simply go back to a pre-technology, pre-modern world. We cannot simply "get back to the Bible" like fundamentalists desire. It is not that simple. Thus the mode of lament: can't go back to the ancient world but can't move forward. And for that reason, we live, in Grant's view, in the darkness of Plato's cave, only the darkness is modernity and our failure to think through it.
July 19, 2025
A good critique of liberalism by an underrated Canadian philosopher. It came out just three years after Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971) - several years before similar critiques of liberalism by MacIntyre, Sandel et al. (and it has a few unique points that should be explored further).
November 8, 2020
I’ve read Lament, and Technology and Empire. I enjoyed both but this is my favourite Grant work. He gets to the core tension between technology and the modern conception of Justice (contractualism).
October 13, 2022
Prescient, incisive, and somewhat disturbing. Grant clearly saw the challenges and dangers that a liberal society faced and urged a course we would have been better off to take.
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