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Jack Layton, who died in August 2011, was the leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada. In his foreword to the book under review Layton mentioned the influence that Charles Taylor (b. 1931) of McGill, C. B. Macpherson (1911-1987) of the University of Toronto, and George Grant (1918-1987) of Dalhousie and McMaster Universities had on him. (For the record, I also taught Layton when we were both at York University in Toronto.) One can draw two conclusions from Layton's observation. The first is that the world of Canadian political philosophy constitutes a very small village. The second is that, for the most part, it is located on the liberal and left side of the political spectrum.
Meynell argued that the three individuals who so influenced a prominent socialist or social-democratic politician were part of a Canadian intellectual tradition, which he called "Canadian Idealism." Members of this tradition share a vision that, he said, is "deeply indebted to the political philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel." Both Taylor and Grant have received a good deal of commentary that emphasizes their nationalism, which in Canada is reflected chiefly in a deep distrust of the United States, and Macpherson's Marxism has likewise received considerable discussion. Meynell argued, however, that the debt of the first two to Hegel has been underemphasized; in the case of Macpherson it has been "universally unrecognized."
Meynell then took thirty pages to summarize Hegel's thought, the centerpiece of which was Hegel's criticism of the Enlightenment, which Meynell identified with a "neo-Enlightenment view" exemplified by Isaiah Berlin, who appeared several times in the narrative in order to be criticized by Macpherson, Grant, and Taylor. In short, Meynell has written a "history of ideas," where "ideas" are conceived as dogmatic entities, like cars on a...