George Grant: Intimations of Deprival, Intimations of Beauty (Biography‪)‬

GEORGE GRANT (1918-1988) was incontestably the most important Canadian conservative thinker of the twentieth century, and it is perhaps his distinctively Canadian approach to conservatism that has made his writings less well-known in the United States. For Grant, it was a serious confusion to associate conservatism with the ideology of the free market. As he was fond of pointing out, the right to make as much money as you can is the apotheosis of liberalism, not a mark of conservatism. For Grant, conservatism was related not to one side of the modern debate between socialism and capitalism, but rather was rooted in a desire to conserve still abiding instances of an older, pre-modern relation of humanity to God and the world. This desire to conserve was connected in Grant's mind to the very being of Canada. However, the Canada George Grant had in mind was not the Canada of the last half century; rather it was the Canada that understood its distinctiveness as residing in a loyalty to the pre-modern in the face of America's revolutionary break. For English Canada, this relation to pre-modernity took the form of loyalty to British cultural and institutional forms; for French Canada it took the form of loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church. Grant saw that such loyalties were dissolving in the face of the rapid modernization that Canadians experienced after the Second World War. In his lament for a vanishing culture of higher ends, Grant shared something with America's Southern conservatives, such as Richard Weaver or M. E. Bradford.