The John J. Wintermeyer Lecture on Religion and Politics: "The Just Society: Just a Slogan?"
The Just Society: Just a Slogan?
In 1968, Pierre Trudeau ran for office promising a “Just Society.” Was it just an election slogan? For a society supposedly secularizing in the swinging sixties, descriptors like “Just Society” and “Peaceable Kingdom” had remarkably religious overtones. This lecture looks at how the promise of the sixties melded with Canadian identity formation and imprinted baby boomers with a particular understanding of national values that would long withstand the rise of neoliberalism.
Paul Litt
Paul Litt, PhD
Paul Litt is an associate professor in the Department of History and the School of
Canadian Studies at Carleton University, and director of the MA in Public History
program. He has worked for the Ontario Heritage Foundation and been a policy
advisor at the Ontario Ministry of Culture. Dr. Litt’s research interests center on the intersection of culture, nationalism and the mass media in 20th-century Canada. His most recent book, Elusive Destiny: The Political Vocation of John Napier Turner, is a political biography of the leading English Canadian Liberal of the 1970s and 1980s.
This lecture is endowed by a special fund created by family and friends in memory of the Honourable John J. Wintermeyer.