Santayana on Society and Government

Abstract

After some thirty years of strenuous work Santayana, at the age of 88, has published Dominations and Powers, which, as its subtitle indicates, contains his “Reflections on Liberty, Society and Government.” This book is a kind of last will and testament of a man who may rightly contend that he has lived in the truest sense of the word a philosophic life. At its end he reverts to problems discussed by him some forty years ago in the second volume of the Life of Reason, but now these problems reappear in an entirely changed atmosphere. They are placed in the general setting of an elaborate and closely interconnected system of thought, detached from the vantage point of the “judicial moralist,” which, in the author’s own words, prevailed in the earlier work. His present “tractatus ethico-politicus” will be analyzed in the following pages without any reference to other writings of this great thinker. This procedure, imposed by limitations of space, is obviously not meant to involve any unfairness to the work under scrutiny and its author. On the contrary, it is believed that this book is one of the few by this philosopher which furnish their own scheme of interpretation.