John Ralston Saul | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Saul delivering a lecture at theUniversity of Alberta in 2006 | |
| Born | (1947-06-19)19 June 1947 (age 78) |
| Alma mater | |
| Occupations |
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| Spouse | |
| President of PEN International | |
| In office October 2009 – October 2015 | |
| Preceded by | Jiří Gruša |
| Succeeded by | Jennifer Clement |
| 53rdViceregal consort of Canada | |
| In office c. 1999 – September 27, 2005 | |
| Governor General | Adrienne Clarkson |
| Preceded by | Diana Fowler LeBlanc |
| Succeeded by | Jean-Daniel Lafond |
John Ralston SaulCC OOnt (born June 19, 1947) is a Canadian writer,political philosopher, and public intellectual. Saul is most widely known for his writings on the nature ofindividualism,citizenship and thepublic good; the failures of manager-led societies;[1] the confusion betweenleadership andmanagerialism;military strategy, in particularirregular warfare; the role offreedom of speech and culture; and critiques of the prevailing economicparadigm. He is a champion of freedom of expression and was the International President ofPEN International, an association of writers. Saul is the co-founder and co-chair of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, a national charity promoting the inclusion of new citizens. He is also the co-founder and co-chair of 6 Degrees,[2] the global forum for inclusion. Saul is also the husband to the former governor generalAdrienne Clarkson, making him theViceregal consort of Canada during most of her service (1999–2005).
His work is known for being thought-provoking and ahead of its time, leading him to be called a "prophet" byTime[3] and to be included inUtne Reader's list of the world's leading thinkers and visionaries.[4] His works have been translated into 25 languages in 36 countries.[5]
Saul is the son of William Saul, an army officer, and a British mother whose family had a long tradition of military service.[6] He was born in Ottawa, but raised in Alberta and Manitoba before graduating fromOakville Trafalgar High School inOakville, Ontario.[7][8] At a young age, he became fluent in both national languages, French and English. By the time he started university atMcGill University, Montreal, his father was in Paris and Brussels, working as a military adviser to the Canadian ambassador to NATO.
After completing his undergraduate degree, Saul was accepted into the foreign service, but the death of his father in 1968 changed Saul's career plans. He left the foreign service to attendKing's College London, where he wrote his thesis on the modernization of France underCharles de Gaulle, and earned hisPhD in 1972. His doctoral thesis,The Evolution of Civil–Military Relations in France after the Algerian War,[citation needed] led him to France for research. There he began to write his first novel,Mort d'un général, a romanticized version of his thesis on de Gaulle's chief of staff. He supported himself by running the French subsidiary of a British investment company.
After helping to set up the national oil companyPetro-Canada in 1976, as assistant to its first chair,Maurice F. Strong, Saul published his first novel,The Birds of Prey, in 1977. Strong described Saul as "an invaluable, though unconventional, member of my personal staff."[6]
Through the late 1970s into the 1980s, Saul travelled extensively and regularly spent time with guerrilla armies, spending a great deal of time in North Africa and South East Asia. Out of this time came his novels,The Field Trilogy. It was during those extended periods in Northwest Africa and Southeast Asia where he witnessed fellow writers there suffering government suppression of freedom of expression, which caused him to become interested in the work ofPEN International.[9] Between the years of 1990 and 1992, Saul acted as the president of the Canadian centre of PEN International. In 2009, he was elected president of PEN and re-elected for a second and last term in 2012, remaining International President until October 2015.
Saul is co-chair of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, which encourages new Canadians to become active citizens. He is patron and former president of the Canadian Centre ofPEN International and of theCanadian Academy of Independent Scholars. He is also founder and honorary chair of French for the Future, which encourages bilingual French-English education, chair of the advisory board for theLaFontaine-Baldwin Symposium lecture series, and a patron of Planned Lifetime Advocacy Network. From 1999 until 2006, his wifeAdrienne Clarkson wasGovernor General of Canada, making him Canada'sviceregal consort. During this period he devoted much of his time to issues of freedom of expression, poverty, public education and bilingualism.
Saul was elected as the international president ofPEN International for a three-year term at its Annual Congress in Linz, Austria in October 2009. He was the first Canadian to be elected to that position, which had previously been held byJohn Galsworthy,Arthur Miller,Heinrich Böll,Mario Vargas Llosa and Homero Aridjis.[6] He campaigned on the need to pay attention to smaller and endangered languages and cultures, arguing that the ultimate removal of freedom of expression was the loss of a language. He put a specific emphasis on endangered indigenous languages. He called for a further decentralization of PEN, which has 144 centres in 102 countries. He argues that literature and freedom of expression are the same thing; that you cannot have one without the other. Saul has testified before the European Parliament Human Rights Commission on the loss of freedom of expression in Tunisia, has spoken before European Council on Refugees in Exile, and has published an essay on writers in exile, which has been translated into several languages.
Saul founded, and currently co-chairs, the Institute for Canadian Citizenship (ICC) withAdrienne Clarkson. The ICC is a national, non-profit charity that helps accelerate new citizens' integration into Canadian life through original programs, collaborations and unique volunteer opportunities. While its focus is on encouraging new citizens to take their rightful place in Canada, the ICC aims to encourage all citizens – new or not – to embrace active citizenship in their daily life.
In addition to his selection as the 1995 Massey lecturer, Saul has delivered other notable lectures. He gave the Harold Innis Lecture in 1994. In 2000 he gave the inauguralLaFontaine-Baldwin SymposiumLecture. Saul delivered the J.D. Young Memorial Lecture "A New Era of Irregular Warfare?" at theRoyal Military College of Canada inKingston, Ontario on February 4, 2004.[10] He gave the 2005 IDEAS lecture in Brisbane, Australia, the 2007 Captive Mind Lecture in Kraków, Poland, and in 2008 gave the 33rd Sir Winston Scott Memorial Lecture in Barbados. He also delivered the 2009McGill Law Journal's Annual Lecture at the McGill Faculty of Law in Montreal on February 3, 2009.[11] Saul also spoke at theSydney Opera House on August 26, 2012, on the subject "It's Broke: How do we fix it?"[12]
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The Birds of Prey (1977) is a political novel based inGaullist France. Between 1983 and 1988 Saul then publishedThe Field Trilogy, which deals with the crisis of modern power and its clash with the individual. It includesBaraka, or The Lives, Fortunes and Sacred Honor of Anthony Smith (1983),The Next Best Thing (1986), andThe Paradise Eater (1988), which won thePremio Letterario Internazionale in Italy.
De si bons Américains (1994) is apicaresque novel in which he observes the lives of America'snouveaux riches. A vastly reworked and expanded version was published in 2012 asDark Diversions, Saul's first novel in over fifteen years.
Saul's non-fiction began with the trilogy comprising the bestsellerVoltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (1992), the polemic philosophical dictionaryThe Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense (1994), and the book that grew out of his 1995Massey Lectures,The Unconscious Civilization (1995). The last won the1996 Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction Literature.
These books deal with themes such as the dictatorship ofreason unbalanced by other human qualities, how it can be used for any ends especially in a directionless state that rewards the pursuit of power for power's sake. He argues that this leads to deformations of thought such asideology promoted astruth; the rational but anti-democratic structures ofcorporatism, by which he means the worship of small groups; and the use of language andexpertise to mask a practical understanding of the harm caused by this, and what else our society might do. He argues that the rise of individualism with no regard for the role of society has not created greater individual autonomy and self-determination, as was once hoped, but isolation and alienation. He calls for a pursuit of a morehumanist ideal in which reason is balanced with other human mental capacities such ascommon sense,ethics,intuition, creativity, and memory, for the sake of the common good, and he discusses the importance of unfettered language and practical democracy. These attributes are elaborated upon in his 2001 bookOn Equilibrium.
He expanded on these themes as they relate to Canada andits history andculture inReflections of a Siamese Twin (1998). In this book, he proposed the idea of Canada being a "soft" country, meaning not that the nation is weak, but that it has a flexible and complex identity, as opposed to the unyielding or monolithic identities of other states.
He argues that Canada's complex national identity is made up of the "triangular reality" of the three nations that compose it:First Peoples,francophones, andanglophones. He emphasizes the willingness of these Canadian nations to compromise with one another, as opposed to resorting to open confrontations. In the same vein, he criticizes both those in theQuebec separatist Montreal School for emphasizing the conflicts in Canadian history and theOrange Order and theClear Grits traditionally seeking clear definitions of Canadian-ness and loyalty.
Saul's next book,On Equilibrium (2001), is effectively a fourth, concluding volume to his philosophical quartet. He identifies six qualities as common to all people: common sense, ethics, imagination, intuition, memory, and reason. He describes how these inner forces can be used to balance each other, and what happens when they are unbalanced, for example in the case of a "Dictatorship of Reason".
In an article written forHarper's magazine's March 2004 issue, titledThe Collapse of Globalism and the Rebirth of Nationalism, he argued that theglobalist ideology was under attack by counter-movements. Saul rethought and developed this argument inThe Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World (2005). Far from being an inevitable force, Saul argued thatglobalization is already breaking down in the face of widespread public opposition and that the world was seeing a rise innationalism. Following theGreat Recession he had predicted,The Collapse of Globalism was re-issued in 2009 with a new epilogue that addressed theeconomic crisis.
A Fair Country (2008) is Saul's second major work on Canada. It is organized into four subsections.
Saul's contribution toPenguin Canada'sExtraordinary Canadians series, of which he serves as general editor, is a double biography ofLouis-Hippolyte Lafontaine andRobert Baldwin. In it, he argues that Canada did not begin in1867, but that in fact its foundations were laid by LaFontaine and Baldwin much earlier. The two leaders ofLower andUpper Canada, respectively, worked together after the1841 Union to lead a reformist movement forresponsible government run by elected citizens instead of a colonial governor. But it was during the "Great Ministry" of 1848–51 that the two politicians implemented laws that Saul argues created a more equitable country. They revamped judicial institutions, created a public education system, made bilingualism official, designed a network of public roads, began a public postal system, and reformed municipal governance. Faced with opposition, and even violence, Saul contends that the two men united behind a set of principles and programs that formed modern Canada.
His most recent work,The Comeback: How Aboriginals Are Reclaiming Power and Influence (2014) was a shortlisted nominee for the 2015Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.[15] The "comeback" that Saul identifies in this new book emphasizes the strides that Aboriginal people have made in reversing years of population decline and "cultural oppression". As recently as seventy years ago it was widely assumed that Indians were disappearing, the victims of disease, starvation and their own ineptitude for modern civilization. Canada's Aboriginal population is growing in numbers and its cultural and political self-confidence seems boundless. In Saul's view, this observation, while obvious to anyone who studies the history, nonetheless needs hammering home. We are far more used to hearing about the dismal lives of Aboriginal people—their family dysfunction, their crime rates, their impoverished communities—than we are to being told they are a success story. Today's Aboriginal population, for all the problems that afflict it, has overcome incredible disadvantages to achieve what Saul calls "a position of power, influence and civilizational creativity" in Canadian society.[16]
Saul was made aCompanion of the Order of Canada (CC) in 1999.[17] He is also achevalier of theOrdre des Arts et des Lettres of France (1996).[18] His 21 honorary degrees range fromMcGill University and theUniversity of Ottawa toHerzen University inSaint Petersburg, Russia. On October 16, 2019, he received his latest honorary degree fromKing's College London.[5][19]
Ribbon bars of John Ralston Saul_ribbon_bar.svg)
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| Country | Date | Appointment | Post-nominal letters |
|---|---|---|---|
 Canada | 28 September 1999 | Companion of the Order of Canada | CC[20] |
| Canada | 1999 | Knight of Justice of the Order of St John | [21] |
| Canada | 2014 | Order of Ontario | OOnt[22] |
| Canada | 6 February 2002 | Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal (Canadian Version) | [23] |
| Canada | 6 February 2012 | Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal (Canadian Version) | [24] |
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| Country | Date | Decoration | Post-nominal letters |
|---|---|---|---|
 France | 1996 | Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres | |
 Germany | 2021 | Officer's Cross, Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany |
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| Location | Date | School | Degree |
|---|---|---|---|
 Quebec | 1969 | McGill University | Bachelor of Arts (BA) inPolitical Science andHistory |
 England | 1972 | King's College London | Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) |
| Location | Date | School | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
 Ontario | 2015 – 2019 | Ryerson University | Distinguished Visiting Professor (Faculty of Arts) |
| England | King's College London | Visiting Professor[25] |
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There is a John Ralston Saulfonds atLibrary and Archives Canada.[46]
| Non-profit organization positions | ||
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| Preceded by | International President ofPEN International 2009–2015 | Succeeded by |
| Honorary titles | ||
| Preceded by | Viceregal Consort of Canada 1999–2005 | Succeeded by |
