Readers of this book are fortunate; they will be exploring the tradition of Canadian philosophical idealism. I was at least as fortunate, years ago, because my initial contact with the subject was first-hand and personal, and had a profound impact on me.
The year was 1968 – a time of bold ideas and new directions. From the Vietnam War, to student and worker demonstrations in France, to the violence of the Democratic National Convention; from the prisons of South Africa, where apartheid was being challenged by Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, to the rise of nationalism in Quebec; and from the early stirrings of environmentalism after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring to the explosion of calls for change ringing around the world in the music of the era, idealism was on the move. In Canada, New Democratic Party leader Tommy Douglas was calling for health care and pensions for all and parliament was taking steps to make both happen. Calls for “people power,” democracy, and freedom rang out. As Bob Dylan put it in one of the anthems of the age, “the times they are a changin’!”
A growing and deep questioning of the postwar military-industrial complex and the expanding materialism of the day was emerging. In a powerful contrary trend, corporate marketers were urging people to find happiness through the purchase of new products endlessly put on the market to respond to needs that consumers had not even realized they had. A new generation was greeting all this with a search for deeper meaning and freedom to engage. New ways of thinking were emerging. Those of us coming of age at that time felt we were part of a movement of change.
Against this backdrop, a couple of hundred students were noisily settling into a packed lecture hall at McGill in the fall of that year – the buzz of late-teenaged sophomores sizing each other up. Suddenly, bounding down the stairs two at a time from the back of the room, a tall and lean and very intent professor left a wake of hush settling in behind him as he took the podium. So this was Charles Taylor!
“Never mind your physics, chemistry, and math classes,” some of my friends had said. “Don’t miss this course!”
Like many of Taylor’s students before me, and many more who have followed, I was to find that the course of my life had just changed permanently and for the better.
Faced with the evident hushed enthusiasm as students squeezed to sit on the stairs because all the seats were taken, Taylor searched for some place on the ceiling as though trying to locate the spot where his memorable arching eyebrows were pointing – establishing a focus. He paused for a couple of seconds and then launched us into the realm of ideas and, as I was to discover, idealism. Within minutes I could sense that something extraordinary was happening. I picked up my pen and notepaper and started writing every word I could. My hand was cramped and my mind was racing, but reflecting on that moment now, I realize that I never looked back. I still have those notes.
In class after class, from Plato to Aristotle, Augustine to Rousseau, I became more thoroughly hooked. By the time the course ended, I had my plan. I switched mid-stream from a partially completed science degree to arts and took every opportunity to explore political philosophy and its ideas about how we could build a better world. I did as much of that exploration as possible with Charles Taylor.
Fast forward forty years: a new acquaintance, Robert Meynell, was telling me about his research and writing on the tradition of Canadian Idealism. He was focusing on the work of C.B. Macpherson, George Grant, and Charles Taylor. Our kitchen was buzzing with predictable but enthusiastic debates at an open house hosted by my wife and member of parliament, Olivia Chow, in our home near Toronto’s downtown Chinatown and Kensington Market, just next to the University of Toronto. Meynell cut through the buzz because he rekindled fond memories of my own early journey through the world of philosophy and ideas. “That’s a fascinating project,” I said and told him about my first class with Taylor. I added that I had subsequently taken every course Taylor taught, even his graduate seminar on Hegel – despite being a lowly undergraduate – at the time when he was writing his definitive book on the German Idealist philosopher. “I wanted to continue my studies and do a Masters degree with Taylor at McGill,” I told Meynell, “but when I asked for his advice, Taylor gave me a rather abrupt ‘No!’” With a wave of his hand he pointed west, toward the Ontario border and Highway 401: “Go to Toronto. Study with C.B. Macpherson and his students.”
I dutifully rented a U-haul and headed down the 401, taking up studies at York University where many of Macpherson’s students were teaching in the Political Science Department and where I could attend some of his lectures. James Laxer was lecturing there and he steered me toward George Grant’s Lament for a Nation. I was by then fully immersed in the thinking of the Canadian Idealists analysed so carefully in Meynell’s text.
Like many of Taylor’s students, I followed his work over the subsequent years. I quoted him in papers, passed on his ideas in my own classes, studied his articles and books. I told Meynell what an honour it had been, decades later, to have Charles Taylor, by now a world-renowned thinker, at my side in Montreal. He helped me in my present role as leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada at the kick-off to a campaign to successfully elect the first NDP member of parliament in Quebec in a general election – Thomas Mulcair in Outremont.
As Meynell outlined his project to explore the role of the idealist political theorists, I observed that I considered the work of these pivotal Canadian thinkers on the philosophy of freedom to be crucial. I now welcome Meynell’s invitation to contribute a few opening words, hoping to capture some of the practical influence that the Canadian Idealist tradition has had on at least this particular student. The idealists discussed in this important analysis informed my thinking at crucial stages.
