Lived Fictions is a welcome addition to works that provide a philosophical approach to the enduring problems in Canadian politics. Philosophical works on Canada are no longer as rare as they once were, as is evident from such recent collections as The Development of Political Thought in Canada, edited by Katherine Fierlbeck (2005) or Canadian Political Philosophy, edited by Ronald Beiner and Wayne Norman (2001). To these thoughtful collections can be added George Grant's Lament for a Nation (1965), Will Kymlicka's Multicultural Citizenship (1995) and other books. What makes John Grant's Lived Fictions important is that it adopts and applies to Canada the critical theory perspective of the early Frankfurt School. Theory, in this view, becomes critical only when it exposes oppression and pathologies of reason in the pursuit of emancipatory aims and intentions.

The Frankfurt School focused much of its attention on the rise of Fascism in early twentieth-century Europe and the failure of the Enlightenment project which it regarded as symptomatic of a deeper failure of Western civilization. Promises of enlightenment and liberation had ended in domination, exploitation and exclusion, not only in Hitler's Germany but also in liberal or capitalist America. With respect to Canada, Lived Fictions critically examines what John Grant takes to be “the promises of Canadian politics” (12) and concludes that it is necessary “to rethink our typical commitments” (239) because “Canada is more unequal, less collectively committed, and less hopeful now than in the past” (240). The conclusion is based on the author's detailed account, in separate chapters, of the multiple and ongoing failures of the Canadian state with respect to Canadian democracy, the Canadian welfare state, Canadian multiculturalism and Indigenous peoples in Canada. The central promises of Canadian politics turn out to be “lived fictions bound up with the state's support for decidedly exclusionary forms of inclusion” (211).

Lived Fictions also significantly expands on the early Frankfurt School by providing a detailed program of action and explicitly engaging Lenin's famous question: What is to be done? One transformational reform is to turn Canada's Senate into a Citizen's Assembly (220), another is that Canada should implement workplace democracy, guaranteed annual income and a maximum 5:1 wage ratio (221, 231). It is also necessary to abandon Crown sovereignty with respect to Indigenous peoples and radically diminish state sovereignty so that multiversity and a democratic imaginary can take root. Thus, one of the key objectives of Lived Fictions is to correct past failures and, in particular, “to elaborate the kinds of changes—in both our institutions and our thinking—that would radically alter and improve Canadian democracy and society and Western liberal democracies in general” (15).

To radically improve Canada and Western democracies is a worthy objective. It also recognizes the importance of Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach about philosophers changing the world. A counter to Marx's eleventh thesis was provocatively expressed by Hobbes. In the concluding paragraph of Part Two of Leviathan, Hobbes wondered in a moment of self-doubt if his own labours might be “as uselesse, as the Common-weath of Plato.” Philosophers do not just disagree about how to change the world. They also disagree about how to interpret and understand it.

If there is a significant fault in Lived Fictions, it is that it devotes too little attention to questions about interpreting and understanding Canada, on which there is an important philosophical and historical literature. One example is the author's discussion of the “missing” chapter on Quebec. Lived Fictions, he writes, has a chapter on Indigenous peoples, but not on Quebec: “largely because of the present circumstances of Indigenous peoples, which constitutes an urgent matter of justice that eclipses the claims of the Québécois: the former are dying; the latter are not” (13).

John Grant rightly highlights the urgent and just claims of Indigenous peoples, but it is not evident why acknowledging those claims requires relegating Quebec and French Canadians to an obscure corner, especially in a work on “unity and exclusion in Canadian politics.” One of Charles Taylor's philosophical books on Canada, written shortly after the failure of the Meech Lake Accord, is about “reconciling the solitudes.” The Supreme Court, in cases involving Aboriginal rights and other matters, has similarly reminded all Canadians to work together for reconciliation. Lived Fictions is untimely, John Grant writes, because it challenges the view of present-day Canada “as a bright light in troubling times” (15). Based on critical theory, he also sketches an attractive alternative vision of Canada. But in imagining transformational new beginnings, virtually all philosophers—liberals, conservatives, feminists, critical theorists and others—must sooner or later grapple with Canada's baffling complexity. Where they sometimes stumble is with respect to Canada as a multicultural, multinational and federal polity composed of groups with different ways of life, competing conceptions of the good and even conflicting visions of utopia.