Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 26 Fall 2008

              Santayana and America
Santayana and America: Values, Liberty, Responsibility
By Krzysztof Piotr Skowronski
Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007
Santayana and America makes a strong case for the contemporary relevance of
George Santayana as a cultural critic. The strength of Krzysztof Skowronski's
argument will surprise the many who, when they think of Santayana at all,
associate him with a narrowly aristocratic outlook rendered thoroughly outmoded by
the world wars of the first half of the twentieth century, the end of the colonial empires
in the second half, and the terrorism (and the response to terrorism) of the twenty-first.
Santayana's polished, elegant, style and non-technical vocabulary have not always
worked in his favor, either. The author of "The Genteel Tradition in American
Philosophy" has been too often dismissed as himself representative of a genteel
tradition of literary attitudinizing now hopelessly out-of-date.
Professor Skowronski, however, suggests that Santayana's point of view is
characterized by "in-betweenness," a perspective that allowed him to view American
culture without committing himself to either a wholesale endorsement or—more
common among European intellectuals—blanket condemnation. Santayana's writings
provide an example of a non-American able to appreciate the positive aspects of
American culture without losing touch with his or her "own distinct traditions and
cultural specificity" (27). In a world permeated by American culture, the ability to
maintain a measured critical perspective, to analyze without demonizing, is no mean
achievement, and Skowronski persuasively argues that Santayana's example of calm,
intellectually serious criticism is more relevant than ever.
Santayana himself, despite having living in the United States for thirty years,
always retained a distinctive point of view that was in most ways at odds with the
dominant currents in American culture, a point Skowronski rightly and repeatedly
emphasizes. If Santayana did not condemn democracy as a form of government, he
nevertheless did not celebrate it as "an end in itself, but rather a means to an end, to the
full realization of vital liberties" (113). Though Santayana acknowledged that all
members of all religions were legally free to practice their faith in the United States, he
noted that American culture had no room "for those religions that want to keep their
orthodox vital liberties, their original traditions, and their incommensurable customs"
(118). Santayana was skeptical about the supposed progress resulting from on "the
unlimited exploration of nature's resources for the benefit of man," suggesting instead
that people of any place or time could find the sort of happiness available to human
beings by achieving "wisdom about the world and about one's role in it" (96). All the
more significant, then, that, Santayana's criticisms of American society are balanced
judgments rather than denunciations. Rejecting the claims that the United States had
achieved some sort of unique national moral purity, Santayana nevertheless concluded
that, in Skowronski's words, "American democracy is not an imperialistic system that
indiscriminately crushes other countries, like innumerable regimes of the past" (112).
If the philosopher saw a gap between the legal freedoms available to Americans and
the homogeneity of their culture, Skowronski notes that he "never referred to any other
modern country in which there was more room for vital liberties" (122-3).
In surveying and summarizing Santayana's thought, Skowronski has chosen to
focus on themes rather than on the analysis of particular works.   In doing so he