Theorising the anti-nation: George Woodcock, anarchism, and Canadian nationalism

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 ‘70s. It argues that a ‘philosophical anarchism’ was at the heart of Woodcock’s 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 therefore was part of a strategy to repurpose nationalist rhetoric towards anti-state ends.