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Theorising the anti‐nation: George Woodcock, anarchism, and Canadian nationalism
Author(s) -
Adams Matthew S
Publication year - 2023
Publication title -
nations and nationalism
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.655
H-Index - 44
eISSN - 1469-8129
pISSN - 1354-5078
DOI - 10.1111/nana.12893
Subject(s) - nationalism , woodcock , rhetoric , george (robot) , sociology , politics , regionalism (politics) , state (computer science) , democracy , law , political science , gender studies , history , art history , philosophy , ecology , linguistics , algorithm , computer science , biology
George Woodcock was anarchism's most influential historian and an important public intellectual in Canada. This article focuses on his engagement with Canadian nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that a ‘philosophical anarchism’ was at the heart of his intellectual project, and this informed his reading of Canadian cultural development and subsequent political challenge to Pierre Elliott Trudeau's civic nationalism. Woodcock decoupled the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘state’ in order to develop a radically different model for Canada—the ‘anti‐nation’—defined by regionalism, federalism and direct democracy. His reading of Canada's cultural history supporting this position was therefore part of a strategy to repurpose nationalist rhetoric towards anti‐state ends.