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George Santayana and the Critique of Liberalism
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15658 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1989 |
6,634 Words |
| Author
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John Gray
John Gray is a professor at Jesus College, Oxford, and the
author of Liberalisms (Rutledge, 1989). |
George Santayana's thought never had a wide influence. Although the chief reason for neglect of his ideas probably lies in the circumstances of his own life, both the style and the substance of his philosophy go against the current of twentieth-century sensibility, and whatever echoes his philosophical writings had among his contemporaries have long since faded into silence.
The neglect of Santayana's work by professional philosophers and by educated opinion makers is unfortunate for many reasons. His prose style--condensed, aphoristic, and ornate at the same time--is beautiful and unique in twentieth-century philosophical writing, bearing comparison only with that of such earlier, and very different, philosophical stylists as David Hume. And though his work never formed part of any recognized tradition or school, Santayana's contributions to a range of philosophical disciplines--the theory of knowledge and skepticism, metaphysics, and ethics--still contain something from which we can learn, if only we are ready to read him with intellectual sympathy. His contributions to these subjects have been ignored, partly as a result of the vulgar academic prejudice according to which anyone who can write exquisitely must be a belletrist or prose poet rather than any sort of serious thinker, and partly because the idioms of Santayana's writings consort badly with those of the analytic schools that have dominated Anglo-American philosophy for most of our century.
It is in any case lamentable that his works are rarely seriously studied nowadays, since we are thereby deprived of his thoughts on society and government, which encompass one of the most profound and incisive critiques of liberalism ever developed. It is a symptom of the intellectual temper of our times that one of the very few systematic studies of Santayana's philosophy to be published in recent years omits altogether any consideration of his political philosophy. It is hard to resist the suspicion that Santayana's political thought is not only unknown to modern opinion, or (where it has been heard of) deeply unfashionable and thoroughly uncongenial. For this reason alone, it may well have much to teach us of the ironies and limitations of the ruling liberal worldview.
Intellectual Predisposition
The circumstances of Santayana's life were uncommon, and are more than usually relevant to the understanding of his thought. Born in Spain in 1863, Santayana retained his Spanish citizenship throughout his life (though he left Spain at the age of nine) and always regarded
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