The Trad Marxism of George Grant, Part 2

Part 2: Global Homogenization

Find part 1 here.

The logic of this liberalism makes the distinction between judgements of fact and judgements of value. “Value judgements” are subjective … Nobody minds very much if we prefer women or dogs or boys, as long as we cause no public inconvenience. But in the public sphere, such pluralism of taste is not permitted.

~George Grant, Lament for a Nation

Traditionalist Marxism

Grant’s prescient diagnosis flowed naturally out of his unusual philosophy. Grant simultaneously believed that Marx’s telling of progressive History was true and that the end state of this Historical process was a demoralized capitalism. Grant articulated this philosophy in a series of lectures first aired on Canadian broadcast radio in 1960, titled ‘Philosophy in the Mass Age’. Grant’s sympathy to Marx was a product of thorough reflection. Like many conservatives, Grant studied Marx thoroughly. Unlike many conservatives, he was deeply sympathetic to Marx’s moral vision.

What must be insisted on, however, is that Marx's philosophy has been the most powerful of modern humanisms, for two reasons above all. First, it was a humanism of universal salvation, and secondly, it seemed very concrete and practical about the means to that salvation.

Yet Grant struggled to reconcile his philosophy with his belief in the divinity of Christ. As William Christian’s introduction to Philosophy in the Mass Age documents, Grant encountered a profound spiritual experience his early adulthood, leading him to an unwavering faith in the Christian God. One facet of Grant’s philosophical project was to articulate the theological significance of Marx’s economic history. “Marxism has failed in the West primarily because it does not allow sufficient place to the freedom of the spirit,” Grant continues.

Grant died in 1988. The dissolution he identified outlived him and only grew. It grew to afflict not just Canada, but America. Now, many National Conservatives make the same diagnosis of modern American life. It was the End of History. Western man had peace, plenty, and relative physical safety. Yet men like Grant were left disappointed by the disappearance of religious and philosophical significance to life. Throughout Philosophy in the Mass Age, Grant consistently turns to Marx to explain this acidic dissolution of meaning. In many ways, liberal democracy has solved the problems raised by traditional Marxists and egalitarians. Working conditions have improved and material prosperity reigns. The capitalist west defeated the communist east in production and efficiency, something which Marxist economic history prophesied against. But the dissatisfaction of the alienated individual continues to afflict conservative men like Grant.

Grant’s Lament for a Nation is characterized by negative historicism. Instead of imagining a utopian socialist state, Grant’s telling of economic history concludes in a global commercial culture where individuals, nations, and cultures cease to exist. In the end, there is nothing but economics and the whole of society.

[T]his society, like all others, is more than simply an expression of the relationship of man to nature; it also exemplifies a particular relationship of man to man, namely, some men's dominance over other men … The paradox indeed is this: so great is the power that society can exert against the individual that it even subjects to dominance those very elites who seem to rule. Thus at this stage of industrial civilization, rule becomes ever more impersonal, something outside the grip of any individual.

Global Homogenization