Can Canada keep its independence? The country’s greatest thinker foretold its failure — and ours

A classic work of political philosophy celebrated its 60th anniversary this year. Published in 1965, George Grant’s Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism is exactly what the title suggests: an essay, sometimes angry, often elegiac, at times lyrical, mourning the wreck of the hope that once animated the Canadian experiment. Grant thought the possibility of building, alongside the United States — a more restrained and ordered society that ranked the common good above individual autonomy — had faded. But the book is also much more.

Grant wrote Lament for a Nation in anger at the fall of Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, who was defeated in his re-election bid due to backlash over his refusal to accept US nuclear warheads on Canadian soil. According to Grant, Diefenbaker’s “actions turned the ruling class into a pack howling for his blood.” It was no ordinary political defeat, in Grant’s view. He believed that it signaled the end of Canada as a distinct political and moral project.   

But the lasting significance of Lament for a Nation rests not with its analysis of the forces that orchestrated Diefenbaker’s downfall — “the concentrated wrath of the established classes” — nor even with the author’s prognosis that Canada was fated to disappear, if not formally annexed by its neighbor, then so culturally and economically integrated with the United States as to lose its distinct identity. What has caused it to retain its relevance for more than half a century is what emerges in its later chapters, as it shifts gears from parliamentary drama to political philosophy and Canada’s fate becomes a case study in a much larger story about the modern world’s direction of travel.

Born in Toronto in 1918, Grant was destined to become one of Canada’s best-known philosophers, his reputation built largely on the fame of Lament for a Nation. He was educated at Oxford and served as an air-raid warden during World War II. Reeling from the horrors of war, he was led to Christianity by a profound religious experience in the English countryside. After earning his doctorate, he returned to Canada to begin his academic career as a self-described Christian Platonist, persuaded that it was the task of philosophy to analyze modern civilization from the perspective of the eternal moral order that our modern dynamism obscured.

When the Diefenbaker debacle unfolded in the summer of 1963, Grant was teaching philosophy and religion at McMaster University in Ontario. He was in the midst of research on the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, about whom he planned to write a book. Grant was so incensed by how the “wealthy and clever” Canadian elites had capitulated to American pressure that he put aside that never-completed Weil book to turn his full attention to writing Lament for a Nation. But one of the central themes of Weil’s mature thought became the pivot of his argument.

For Weil, a clear-eyed view of the world must recognize the distance between necessity and the good. Even if certain historical events are necessary, she argued, that doesn’t make them good. Grant took this to repudiate a crucial tenet of modern progressivism: the belief that the forces driving history — including those forces driving Canada ever more tightly into the orbit of the United States — inevitably carry civilization toward higher stages of development. “If history is the final court of appeal,” Grant wrote, “force is the final argument.”

This point mattered to Grant because he believed the Diefenbaker affair had revealed the necessity of Canada’s disappearance, due to “the impossibility of building a conservative nation in the age of progress, on a continent we share with the most dynamic nation on earth.” Yet widening his gaze beyond the particularities of Canadian politics to examine the deeper currents of Western civilization, Grant concluded that Canada’s fate was sealed by the inner logic of modernity itself.

Around the time of Diefenbaker’s defeat, Grant wrote a major essay on the then-recent debate between the philosophers Leo Strauss and Alexander Kojève on ancient and modern tyranny. Strauss’s argument was another major philosophical influence on Lament for a Nation. Strauss dreaded the advent of what he took to be the ultimate modern tyranny, which he, borrowing Kojève’s language, called the universal and homogeneous state. This term names what Grant took to be the true end of modern politics, in both its Marxist and liberal guises.

This state is universal because it aims at a single, unified global order that renders international conflict impossible. It is homogeneous because all people enjoy formal equality, are essentially interchangeable, and serve a common purpose: the limitless expansion of human power over nature, including human nature. In Lament for a Nation, Grant argued that this state is the highest object of striving for the modern project. The United States occupies a central place in his analysis. As the nation most committed to open-ended progress, it is the “spearhead” of the universal and homogeneous state.

Western capitalism, in Grant’s view, was much more “progressive” than Marxism, since the followers of Marx still assume that human flourishing has a determinate shape that technological progress ought to serve. Liberal capitalism, in contrast, tolerates no checks on technological dynamism, which is why Grant anticipated the eventual victory of the West in the Cold War. Since liberalism holds the human essence to be our freedom to remake both the world and ourselves, any doctrine that imposes limits is rejected.

The universal and homogeneous state promises to deliver us from suffering, scarcity, and grueling toil through technological science. Yet its promise is double-edged, warns Grant, for a civilization whose highest purpose is technological mastery must culminate in global tyranny.

Local communities are among the first casualties. “Liberalism,” he observed, “is the ideological means whereby indigenous cultures are homogenized.” Along with these cultures goes the possibility of genuine excellence. Authentic nobility, he believed, can flourish only in societies shaped by traditions that orient us toward something higher than ourselves, but liberalism recognizes nothing higher than the human will.

Even so, the much-vaunted freedom liberalism promises can be exercised by most of us only in the private sphere. “Nobody minds very much if we prefer women or dogs or boys,” Grant wrote, “as long as we cause no public inconvenience.” But permissiveness in private is coupled with coercive uniformity in public, as politics in the classical sense disappears and debate over competing goods gives way to impersonal administration. Questions that once required political judgment are reclassified as technical problems to be solved by experts.

Grant couldn’t have known the particulars, but the logic is familiar to us from the Covid lockdowns. Genuinely political questions — such as how to weigh the protection of the vulnerable against the harm done to school children, community life, and people’s livelihoods — were displaced by the injunction to “listen to the science.” Disagreement was pathologized, debate was suppressed, and administration triumphed over politics.

Grant also foresaw that the project of mastery would inevitably turn inward, as modern science no longer confines itself to the transformation of non-human nature. It seeks control of heredity, psychology, and social life itself. Advances in biochemistry and the behavioral sciences give administrators a “prodigious power to universalize and homogenize.”

Long before the term “transhumanism” became fashionable, Grant foresaw a world in which human nature becomes raw material, as we “transcend ordinary humanity and produce creatures half flesh and half metal.” His argument dovetails with C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, another work that influenced him: the conquest of nature ends in the conquest of some human beings by others and ultimately in the abolition of the human.

Grant’s conclusion was bleak: conservatism is impossible in the modern age. Conservatism once meant guarding goods not subject to perpetual change — virtue, tradition, and a stable account of human nature. But technological civilization depends on continuous upheaval. Those who call themselves conservatives cannot govern without allying themselves with the very forces that dissolve what they claim to defend. Any hope they may have of political influence requires them to genuflect before a technological project that “produces such a dynamic society that it is impossible to conserve anything for long.”

Given Grant’s somber pronouncement of the death of Canada, it’s ironic that the publication of Lament for a Nation in 1965 sparked an intense revival of nationalist sentiment. For a while, he became a darling of these new nationalists. Yet Grant disclaimed such a motive for his book. He insisted that it was not a political tract, but a work of philosophy, an attempt to understand the present in the light of truths that our present moment occludes. He later expressed regret that it “was written too much from anger and too little from irony.”

That Lament for a Nation still unsettles readers 60 years on is a measure of Grant’s prescience about the society he saw taking shape even then. The specific quarrels he anatomized have faded from memory, but the logic he uncovered has only intensified. The universal and homogeneous state is no longer merely a philosophical hypothesis. We encounter evidence of its coming to be at every turn.

Grant’s diagnosis is uncannily contemporary. In an era of global platforms, algorithmic governance, transhumanist visions, and a polarized but uniformly liberal political class, his account clarifies why our debates feel increasingly superficial. We conduct our arguments within a horizon that treats technological expansion as destiny, expert administration as neutral, and dissent as irrational. Lament for a Nation endures because the world it diagnosed has only become more fully realized in the intervening decades.

Yet Grant no longer stands quite as alone as he did in 1965. As the modern project he described becomes more fully realized, its costs become harder to ignore. There are signs of a renewed unease with a world that recognizes no goods beyond limitless technological expansion and the libertine possibilities it enables. There are revolts in the name of what has been lost.

Ironically, as the United States grows more nationalistic, Canada has moved the other way, its political identity defined by loyalty to the globalist order that Washington now challenges. Does that mean that the United States has ceased to be, in Grant’s phrase, the “spearhead” of the progressive modern project? Or has that project merely changed its institutional form, as the universal and homogeneous state now advances through the private power of corporate interests, based in the United States but with transnational reach, shaping speech, commerce, and social life with minimal public accountability?

No longer can the questions that Lament for a Nation presses upon us be dismissed as reactionary grumblings from a grumpy philosopher nostalgic for a vanished past. They articulate the disquiet felt by growing numbers of us as we survey the world around us.

 

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