A Question of Influence

Back in the 1940s, the Canadian historian Frank Underhill lamented: “It is a remarkable fact that in the great debate of our generation about the fundamental values of liberalism and democracy we Canadians have taken very little part … Our thinking is still derivative.” That would seem to be much less true today. The writings of Pierre Trudeau, Charles Taylor, Will Kymlicka, James Tully and others have helped to rectify this, and themes such as individual and collective rights, multiculturalism, multinational federalism and aboriginal identities are ones to which Canadian academics have made important international contributions.

What about the relationship between political philosophy in its broad historical sense—from the Greeks to modernity— and the study of Canada? How well has this fared? One could not expect too much in this vein when Canada was still a frontier society; nor would things change rapidly in the period between the wars. But over the past four or five decades, with Canadian universities broadening and deepening the subject areas that they cover, we have seen the beginnings of what one can describe as the study of Canadian political thought.

There has been the odd seminal article or book that has marked this emerging sub-field, for example Gad Horowitz’s Canadian Journal of Political Science article of the mid 1960s on “Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism in Canada,” with its evocation of the “red Tory,” or George Grant’s mid 1960s Lament for a Nation. There have been important studies of major thinkers, e.g., Charles Taylor’s Hegel of 1975. There have been attempts, by Janet Ajzenstat in particular, to rethink Canada’s founding constitutional debates or to argue Canada’s Lockean foundations. And there have been a number of collections that sought to break new theoretical ground in reflecting on Canada, e.g., Canadian Political Philosophy: Contemporary Reflections edited by Ron Beiner and Wayne Norman or Freedom, Equality, Community: The Political Philosophy of Six Influential Canadians edited by James Bickerton, Stephen Brooks and Alain-G. Gagnon.

In this context, Robert Sibley’s Northern Spirits: John Watson, George Grant and Charles Taylor — Appropriations of Hegelian Political Thought represents a useful addition. It is a serious attempt to grapple with three important Canadian thinkers—John Watson, George Grant and Charles Taylor—and to link them to the larger philosophical legacy that derives from Hegel—the German philosopher of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. According to Sibley, “their respective readings of Hegel … are testament to the continual presence of the Hegelian spirit on the northern part of the North American continent.” Among key Hegelian themes that Sibley highlights are the relationship between the state and the individual; between freedom and community and, perhaps most importantly, the attempt to reconcile the disorders of modern life—social, political and spiritual. In more ways than meet the eye, most of these are also eminently Canadian dilemmas.

A small part of the book is taken up with a presentation of some of Hegel’s key ideas in a way that the lay reader will probably find understandable. (It is an open secret that Hegel is not an easy read, which may well have enhanced his appeal to intellectuals over the years!) Most of the book, as is entirely appropriate, is taken up with outlining the views of the three Canadian figures Sibley sees as having been most marked by Hegelian influences, with a concluding section where he tries to draw together various strands of the overall argument.

Of the three “Hegelians” in his account, the least well known to contemporary readers is undoubtedly John Watson. He was a Canadian philosopher of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who published a number of books, including the influential The State in Peace and War in 1919. What drew Watson to Hegel was his own desire to wed the individual and community together in a more fruitful way than seemed to be the case at the turn of the 20th century. Watson also sought, in a liberal version of the British empire, an antidote to the excessive appeal of the nation-state. At the centre of his political philosophy was the idea of a moral community grounded in the universality of human reason—a quintessentially Hegelian idea.

George Grant is an altogether different kettle of fish. At first blush, he would hardly seem to fit the category of a Hegelian. We think of him as someone beholden to Plato, to Christianity, to Jacques Ellul or Simone Weil, but not particularly to Hegel. Sibley makes the case that Grant in a number of ways was strongly influenced by Hegel, especially where his views of both history and modernity were concerned. Grant’s lament for the passing of a certain vision of Canada was a result of his accepting a thoroughly Hegelian reading of modernity, the technological imperative and the end of history. True, Grant sought consolation in the Platonic view of the good or in the theology of the cross, refusing the rationalism, historicism and instrumentalism that modernity had wrought, but his very refusal was influenced by a Hegelian-inspired reading of those same phenomena.

I have some problems with Sibley’s attempt to situate Grant within a Hegelian framework. I am less certain than he seems to be that his is an ultimately Hegelian reading of modernity—although there is evidence of Grant’s interest in Hegel in an earlier phase of his life. But why exaggerate the seemingly philosophical foundations of what was in part a temperamental reaction to the waning of an older, familiar Canada with its links to the British empire. I recall a CBC Ideas program on “The Roots of Canadian Conservatism” produced by David Cayley where Grant, interviewed shortly before his death, explained just how much the blood bath of World War One had served as the moment of truth for an earlier generation of Canadians, marking the demise of many of the very Loyalists who had propagated a British imperial vision of this country. Does one really need Hegel to make sense of Grant’s intuitive reaction, in the period of the Cold War and American hegemony on this continent, to the implications of America as a new Rome and as the fountainhead of technological and instrumental reasoning in the modern era?

Where Charles Taylor is concerned, Sibley has his work cut out for him. The author of a full-length study of Hegel in 1975, Taylor has made frequent references to Hegel’s metaphor of the master-slave relationship and more forcefully still to the theme of recognition in his politically oriented writing. His view of the importance of community over atomistic individualism, as he likes to call it, is rooted in a reading of Hegel, and the same may be true of his claim for deep diversity as a way to resolving the Canada-Quebec conundrum and to approaching multiculturalism in our increasingly heterogeneous western societies.

Sibley, correctly in my opinion, highlights other influences on Taylor’s thinking—in particular Rousseau’s romantic expressivism and the German philosopher Herder’s work on language and cultural identity. Where he falls short, however, is in not giving enough weight to Taylor’s Catholic faith, which has important implications for his rejection of a purely secular project of modernity (the theme of Taylor’s latest book, A Secular Age). One could argue, with good reason, that Catholicism (and behind it Thomism, Augustine and Aristotle) is at least as important to Taylor as his Hegelianism, and that it would bear interesting comparison with the role that his Protestant faith played for Grant.

Sibley is not overly friendly to Taylor’s interpretation of Hegel. He sees Taylor as placing far too much weight on communitarian elements in Hegel’s philosophy and too little on his defence of individualism (something that John Watson had better understood). He is also quite unhappy with Taylor’s political stance—his espousing of deep diversity and his seemingly no-holds-barred embrace of multiculturalism. He emphasizes illiberal strains in Taylor’s thought and feels that Taylor’s defence of group rights, such as where the French language in Quebec is concerned, comes at the expense of individual rights.

In some of his criticisms, Sibley is bang on. This is especially true of Taylor’s less than fulsome defence of Salman Rushdie at the time of the fatwa against him in 1989. It is also true that deep diversity, which is Taylor’s philosophical gloss on asymmetrical federalism, is much easier to advance in theory than to implement in practice. (One need but recall the failure of the Meech and Charlottetown accords—much more limited attempts to move in this direction.) On the other hand, where language is concerned, Taylor is infinitely more sensitive to the fault line that language represents in this country than Sibley seems to be. Without Bill 101, as Graham Fraser for one has noted, Quebec independence might well have carried the day. It may be illiberal to deny access to Quebec’s English-language schools to immigrants or to insist on the primacy of French on all public signs in Quebec. But it is a realistic response to the concern about collective identity that most Quebec francophones have. Failure to acknowledge this—as Taylor understands, Grant implicitly understood and Sibley blithely ignores—is a recipe for unmitigated disaster.

Overall, I find a lack of balance in Sibley’s sharp critique of Taylor as compared to his much gentler treatment of Watson and Grant. And I also think that Sibley’s interpretation of Hegel leans far too heavily in a liberal direction than is justified by the complexities and divergent strands in Hegel’s writings. Let me deal with this latter point first.

There are many Hegels, and citing his works is not unlike the exercise of citing scripture to suit one’s argument. Thus, for Sibley, Hegel’s notion of community “is not primarily about individual identity, but about individual freedom.” And he castigates Taylor’s more communitarian reading as excessive. I wonder. One of the most striking references in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is to Antigone and Creon—the dutiful sister, faithful to the ancestral code that the dead deserve burial, pitted against her stern uncle, the new ruler of Thebes, who has decreed that her brother, who died attacking the city, must remain unburied. The sympathy of the liberally minded reader—indeed of audiences and readers of Sophocles through the ages—lies overwhelmingly with Antigone. Yet Hegel makes the case that Antigone speaks for the values of family and hearth, while Creon is the incarnation of another no less legitimate order, that of the state. Hardly a straightforward argument by Hegel in favour of individual conscience against unjust authority.

Of greater concern to me than a quarrel over Hegel’s true meaning is the question of balance in Sibley’s assessment of the three figures who are the subjects of his book. Taylor is certainly not above reproach, but what about the two others?

For many of us, Watson may seem to be a throwback to a world that is gone and his support for the British empire an anachronistic position. But that is not the way Sibley would have us see him. He refers to the call by Robert Conquest and others for an alliance of the English-speaking countries as a force for good in the world. He seems to embrace Michael Ignatieff ’s endorsement of the American empire—empire lite—at the time of the 2003 Iraq war as a sign that forces in favour of empire as a cause for good are alive and well in Canada today. And he believes that we have entered an era of American ascendancy in the world.

Has imperial power been as benign a force in contemporary or earlier world history as Sibley seems to suggest? The Dutch in Indonesia? The French in Algeria? The Belgians in the Congo? The British at Amritsar or in Malaya? And is it the case that the United States, in the aftermath of the Iraq war and the subprime meltdown, will be able to continue to play the role of superpower in a polycentric world? The recent failures of American foreign policy, coupled with the impasse in which NATO troops now find themselves in Afghanistan, would lead me to think otherwise.

Where Grant is concerned, Sibley clearly has a soft spot for the well-known, avuncular figure whose Lament struck a deep chord when it was first published in 1965 and continues to evoke commentary and debate today. Yet we need to ask ourselves a simple question: was Grant’s prophecy of the inevitable demise of Canada in the era of American hegemony an accurate one or not? One might have thought so with the coming of the free trade agreement—I confess to having believed it at the time. In truth, Canada has not become more beholden to the United States over the last 40-plus years. One thinks of Jean Chrétien’s refusal to have Canada participate in the Iraq war alongside the U.S. and its British and Australian allies—Sibley’s beloved Anglosphere. One thinks of growing evidence that in social policy, on key value questions such as abortion, gun control or gay marriages, and more significantly still on the place of religion in our public life, we differ profoundly from the United States. Lament for a nation? Or Grant as a fallible prophet, who deserves much tougher criticism by the intellectual community in this country than he has received? (To his credit, Michael Byers in his recent Intent for a Nation has begun to do just this.)

What Grant doesn’t need is the mindless flattery that creeps into Sibley’s book. In one of his copious footnotes, Sibley goes so far as to compare Grant to Virgil and his Lament to Virgil’s Aeneid. Friendly as I may be to classical allusions, I find this a case of rhetorical overkill in defence of a philosopher whose work should be judged on its merits, and its merits alone. Whatever else Grant may have been, he was no Virgil. Nor, to invoke another one of Sibley’s dubious comparisons, was he a King Lear. Give me a break!

Let me end this review on a more positive note. I welcome Sibley’s book as an important, albeit flawed, contribution to the study of Canadian political thought. I think his use of Hegel as a lens through which to read three quite different Canadian political philosophers is a creative one—despite my continuing misgivings about Grant’s place within this troika. And I agree with Sibley that Hegelian influence on Canadian political thought may be greater than imagined. Frank Underhill, were he alive today, would have less reason to lament the absence of any Canadian engagement with deeper philosophical thought