An End to Finite Hope?

Abstract

Radical Tories. By Charles Taylor. Afterward Rudyard Griffiths. Toronto: House of Anansi, 2006. 237 pp. $18.95 (paper). ISBN 0-88784-754-4. Lament for a Nation. By George Grant. Introduction Andrew Potter. Carleton Library Series. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005. 99+lxxxv pp. $19.95 (paper). ISBN 0-7735-3010-x. Ignatieff's World. By Denis Smith. Toronto: James Lorimer, 2006. 168 pp. $19.95 (paper). ISBN 1-55028-962-6. Into Hurricane: Attacking Socialism and NDP. By John Boyko. Winnipeg: Shillingford Publishing, 2006. 199p.; paper $22.95; 1-897289-09-x The republication of Charles Taylor's Radical Tories serves both as a welcome reminder of a distinctive Canadian tradition of political thought and as a grim message that that tradition has all but disappeared today. Taylor begins by referring to malaise of Canadian politics in 1970s and early 1980s, which he lays directly at feet of the rhetoric of a dominant liberal ideology which placed few limits on man's [sic] freedom to shape his future, and which envisaged unprecedented technological achievement and material abundance (2006, 7). His engaging and personal search proceeds by reading work and interviewing authors whom he considers foremost thinkers of Canadian conservatism. His list contains many expected names (Leacock, Creighton, Morton, Grant) but also some surprises (Purdy, Forsey) that he wishes to rescue from their inclusion in a liberal or canon. The carefully structured pilgrimage gathers central aspects of conservative thought along way: importance of history and tradition, national sovereignty, place and environment (this is how he ropes in Purdy), a sense of wonder, and, most important, a conception of society as an whole. The philosophical core of conservatism is an organic whole that goes even beyond society to include humans within nature and to reconcile them ultimately with a transcendent God. Taylor's pilgrimage is given urgency by a persistent worry: is conservatism more than a defence of power and privilege? He eventually puts this worry to rest, but it is tempting to wonder what he would have made of John Boyko's careful documentation in chapter 4 of Into Hurricane of relentless distortion of NDP as Communist totalitarians by Conservative Party and deployment of illegal police surveillance by Conservative Ontario Premier Drew (2006, 101). So successfully is this worry put to rest that Taylor claims that conservatism is not bound by ideology, citing its socialist use of public industry (113) and arguing that it incorporates a defence of human rights normally associated with liberalism (71, 189). Taylor's conservatism is not neo-liberal conservatism of free enterprise, rugged individualism, and anti-welfare spending that characterizes conservative revival, which was in its infancy when Taylor was writing, but an indigenous Canadian tradition that has been called Tory. It is no wonder, then, that book reaches its apogee in chapter on George Grant, since term Red Tory was coined by Gad Horowitz in his writing about Grant (2006, 114). (The denouement in two succeeding chapters is devoted to a pillorying of liberalism and hope that conservatism might become politically effective through efforts of Stanfield and Crombie.) Grant's role in Canadian political thought is to have combined a philosophical account of conservatism with an explanation of inevitable decline of a genuine political conservatism in modern society. He adopted from Leo Strauss appellation the universal and homogeneous state to refer to essential features of modern society that follow from its devotion to domination of nature by science and technology. Contemporary society becomes more centralized, homogeneous, and bureaucratic through uprooting of all pre-modern traditions and attachments to place and particularity. …