General

Are we a Metis Nation?

Ever since he burst onto the philosophical scene in 1992 with Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, a somewhat overdramatic look at the evolution of the western mind, John Ralston Saul has been engaged in two quixotic intellectual projects: bashing the Enlightenment and trying to make sense of Canada. The conceit that buckles these two projects together is the notion that the search for the Canadian identity will come to an end only when we come to see that what justifies Canada, the reason Canada makes any sense at all, is that it is an experiment in counter-modernity…

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That’s the opening to my review of John Ralston  Saul’s A Fair Country, in the current issue of the LRC. You should probably subscribe the the Review, but if you don’t they’ve put my review online here.

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