Born in Ottawa, Saul studied at McGill University in Montreal and at King's College London where he wrote his thesis on the modernization of France under Charles de Gaulle, and earned his Ph.D in 1972. After helping to set up the national oil company Petro-Canada in 1976, as Assistant to its first Chair, Maurice F. Strong, he published his first novel
The Birds of Prey in 1977. Through the late 1970s and 1980s, he travelled regularly 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 that he witnessed fellow writers there suffering government suppression of freedom of expression, which caused him to become interested in the work of International PEN[1]. In 2009 he was elected president of International PEN, only the second North American to hold the position since its creation in 1921, the other being Arthur Miller.
As a novelist
The Birds of Prey, a political novel based in Gaullist France, was an international best seller. He then published
The Field Trilogy, which deals with the crisis of modern power and its clash with the individual. It includes
Baraka or The Lives, Fortunes and Sacred Honor of Anthony Smith, The Next Best Thing, and
The Paradise Eater, which won the
Premio Letterario Internazionale in Italy.
De Si Bons Americains is a picaresque novel in which he observes the life of modern nouveaux riches Americans.
As an essayist
Voltaire's Bastards, The Doubter's Companion and The Unconscious Civilization
His philosophical essays began with the trilogy made up of the bestseller
Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, the polemic philosophical dictionary
The Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense, and the book that grew out of his 1995 Massey Lectures,
The Unconscious Civilization. The last won the 1996 Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction Literature.
These books deal with themes such as the dictatorship of reason 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 as ideology promoted as truth; the rational but anti-democratic structures of corporatism, by which he means the worship of small groups; and the use of language and expertise to mask a practical understanding of the harm this causes, 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 more humanist ideal in which reason is balanced with other human mental capacities such as common sense, ethics, intuition, creativity, and memory, for the sake of the common good, and he discusses the importance of unfettered language and practical democracy.
Reflections of a Siamese Twin
He expanded on these themes as they relate to Canada and its history and culture in
Reflections of a Siamese Twin. In this book, he coined the idea of Canada being a "soft" country, meaning not that the nation is weak, but that it is 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 three nations that compose it: First Peoples, francophones, and anglophones. 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 the Quebec separatist Montreal School for emphasizing the conflicts in Canadian history and the Orange Order and the Clear Grits traditionally seeking clear definitions of Canadian-ness and loyalty.
On Equilibrium
Saul's next book,
On Equilibrium (2001), is effectively the conclusion to his philosophical trilogy. 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".
The Collapse of Globalism
In an article written for
Harper's magazine and published in the magazine's March 2004 issue under the title
The Collapse of Globalism and the Rebirth of Nationalism, he argued that the globalist ideology was under attack by counter-movements. Saul rethought and developed this argument in
The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World (2005). Far from being an inevitable force, Saul argued that globalization is already breaking up into contradictory pieces and that citizens are reasserting their national interests in both positive and destructive ways. Following the economic collapse he had predicted,
The Collapse of Globalism was re-issued in 2009 with a new epilogue that addressed the current crisis.
A Fair Country
A Fair Country (2008) is Saul's second major work on Canada. It is organized into four subsections.
- "A Métis Civilization": This section picks up on the argument that Saul makes in Reflections of a Siamese Twin about the 'triangular reality of Canada'. Drawing on the work of scholars like Harold Innis and Gerald Friesen, Saul argues that contemporary Canada has been deeply influenced and shaped by Aboriginal ideas and the experience of both Francophone and Anglophone immigrants over the 250 years, from 1600 on, during which Aboriginals were either the dominant force in Canada, or equal partners. He argues that Aboriginals are making a rapid “comeback”, and that their fundamental influence needs to be recognized in order for non-Aboriginal Canadians to understand themselves.
- "Peace, Fairness, and Good Government": In this section Saul argues that instead of the phrase "peace, order, and good government", which appears in and has become a touchstone of the 1867 Canadian Constitution, the phrase that dominated previous Canadian documents was "peace, welfare, and good government". Saul suggests that the ensuing emphasis on "order" has not truly represented Canadian origins.
- "The Castrati": This sections echoes Saul's more general critiques of technocratic and bureaucratic regimes. He also suggests that while current Canadian elites reflect a "disturbing mediocrity" this was not always the case.
- "An Intentional Civilization": Saul uses the final section of the book to argue for a return to an understanding of Canada as a unique response to particular historical circumstances.
