We live in a difficult time. A technological system organized by a market economy rules the world triumphant; local cultures and communities are subordinated and extinguished except to the extent that they become consumer fodder for this very system. No wonder that contemporary philosophy strives to articulate a genuine concept of difference as a remedy for the indifference or despair that confront those who cannot lose themselves in consumer ecstasy. If the technological regime can be repoliticized – and thereby mitigated, subordinated, or replaced – such politicization will need to draw its resources from the survivals and extensions of the local cultures...

If English Canada is haunted by its constitution by empire, its social and political thought is no less constituted by a critique of imperial assumptions. This is expressed philosophically as the suspicion that established universals hide, through their very universality, the suppression of particularities through which they were constituted. Insofar as universals emerge by suppressing particularities, they contain a falseness that opens the possibility of critique. In its turn, such critique implies an anticipation of further, perhaps future, universals. Such implication is not finished but underway – a process that I distinguish by the term ‘universalization.’ Thus, a defence of particularity...

English-Canadian culture has come upon a moment of decision. It can no longer assume that it stands for Canada as a whole. Canada must be understood not as a nation-state (in the singular) but as a nations-state in which, at the very least, Quebec and First Nations also have constitutive roles. It is this moment that requires us to focus on English Canada itself as a form of identity and thus pose clearly and radically the question of its relation to the other constituent parts. Moreover, one can also no longer assume that the historically constituted, distinctive identity of English...

Contemporary extension of the critique of empire based in English-Canadian social and political thought has allowed an articulation of the good for humans as local sustainability. This in no way negates a relationship between localities, but rather argues that a universalization must emerge from such relationship instead of being imposed by the a-local, undifferentiated pseudo-universals of empire. Since such an emergent universality repudiates the homogenization of diversity, it must incorporate a positive sense of cultural diversity. I will argue in this chapter that this can be achieved by replacing the model of citizenship confined to the nation-state with a conception...

The foregoing chapters have made an argument about the legitimacy of a political order. The argument has been made partly in historical terms and partly in analytical ones. This is because it is an immanent critique of the English-Canadian philosophical and political tradition. An immanent critique supposes that analytical and ethical arguments are only meaningful within a historical situation. Traditions can be altered; they can even be represented as a totality with regard to a given theme when they are confronted with another tradition, but they cannot be leapt over entirely for a supposedly self-grounding discourse of logic or ethics....