Even for the mid-century heyday of Canadian public intellectuals, few stand out quite like George Grant.

Figures like Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye are better remembered, but for all of his relative obscurity both at home and abroad, Grant’s influence remains unique thanks to the radicalism of his thinking and its remarkable synthesis of ideas and narratives usually considered disparate.

Taken as a whole, in fact, his intellectual corpus looks like a series of paradoxes: a Christian-Platonist committed to universalism, Grant’s most famous essay was a defence of national and cultural localism; an Anglican Tory with socially reactionary leanings, he was also a pacifist who loathed the American empire and opposed the Vietnam war on moral grounds; an intellectual conservative fascinated by ancient philosophy, he nevertheless eschewed the market fanaticism ascendent in conservative intellectual circles and developed sympathies with the socialist left.