Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger hold firmly entrenched places within the canon of modern philosophy. And rightly so: both are penetrating critics of liberal modernity. Yet we need to ask ourselves whether, as academics teaching these thinkers, we are doing full justice to the more disturbing aspects of their thought. They don’t simply interrogate the axioms of modern life as a subject for intellectual reflection; they have a praxis-oriented project to demolish the post-1789 moral-political dispensation that we tend to take (...) for granted and replace it with a new radically illiberal and anti-egalitarian dispensation. The task of reconsidering the perils of going too easy on these thinkers, or giving them the benefit of the doubt, is made more urgent by the apparent return of fascist or ‘fascoid’ modes of politics, and in particular, the emergence of a far-right intelligentsia all too keen to appropriate these thinkers for far-right purposes. (shrink)

George Grant’s bleak assessment of the prospects of technological civilization owed a lot to his reading of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Ellul. However, Grant understood technological development within the context of liberal theory and capitalist practice. Grant explained why liberalism is the doctrine most appropriate to the development of productive forces, or the most complete exploitation of natural and human resources. Unlike most North American conservatives, Grant was not a friend of capitalism but of civil servants who restrain capitalist accumulation (...) in the name of the common good or national community. Grant was what Gad Horowitz called a Red Tory and offered a unique perspective of how American technique has closed us off from love and contemplation, leaving us with the one-dimensional problem-solving mentality of the social engineer. (shrink)