John Ralston Saul CC 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 of individualism, citizenship and the public good; the failures of manager-led societies;[1] the confusion between leadership and managerialism; military strategy, in particular irregular warfare; the role of freedom of speech and culture; and critiques of the prevailing economic paradigm.

He left the foreign service to attend King's College London, where he wrote his thesis on the modernization of France under Charles de Gaulle, and earned his PhD in 1972.

After helping to set up the national oil company Petro-Canada in 1976, as assistant to its first chair, Maurice F. Strong, Saul published his first novel, The Birds of Prey, in 1977.

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 of PEN International.

He was the first Canadian to be elected to that position, which had previously been held by John Galsworthy, Arthur Miller, Heinrich Böll, Mario Vargas Llosa and Homero Aridjis.

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.

It includes Baraka, or The Lives, Fortunes and Sacred Honor of Anthony Smith (1983), The Next Best Thing (1986), and The Paradise Eater (1988), which won the Premio Letterario Internazionale in Italy.

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 caused by this, and what else our society might do.

In an article written for Harper's magazine's March 2004 issue, titled The Collapse of Globalism and the Rebirth of Nationalism, he argued that the globalist ideology was under attack by counter-movements.

Far from being an inevitable force, Saul argued that globalization is already breaking down in the face of widespread public opposition and that the world was seeing a rise in nationalism.

Saul's contribution to Penguin Canada's Extraordinary Canadians series, of which he serves as general editor, is a double biography of Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin.

The two leaders of Lower and Upper Canada, respectively, worked together after the 1841 Union to lead a reformist movement for responsible government run by elected citizens instead of a colonial governor.

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 2015 Shaughnessy 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.

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.