Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 23 Fall 2005

              Santayana on Public Opinion
Santayana's criticism of American culture and accompanying reticence towards
democracy and liberalism is only one of the many themes we can pull from his
rich and contradictory body of work. A good portion of his work undeniably
speaks of a yearning for an ideal society In which any individual interested in the
arts and spiritual matters could live without having to resort to an "interior exile" to
survive.1
He lived in an era of change: in economics, commercialism evolved into
industrialism; in politics, direct democracy turned into representative democracy; and
in culture, a mass culture emerged. The criteria of efficiency and quantity married by
these changes sat poorly with the aesthetic, hedonist and contemplative values of
Santayana's latin identity. The Spanish philosopher falls squarely within what
Habermas calls the second evolutionary phase of bourgeois publicity: a period during
which citizens once considered part of the privileged aristocratic class began to
participate in public life. Jorge Santayana, like other great thinkers of the 19th century
such as Stuart Mill or Alexis de Tocqueville, questioned the feasibility that under such
conditions a competent government could arise independent of these powerful new
demagogues.
Santayana was concerned with the repercussions on political and moral order as
well on aesthetic order. The term "public opinion" appears often in his work to
connote the gagging of free expression for thinkers and aesthetes, and an imposition of
Philistine values. Santayana conceives broadly of public opinion as an irrational entity
having the principal function of social control, as opposed to the political and rational
concept dominant from the 18th century. For Santayana, the extension of democracy to
the masses represented the death of an Enlightenment concept of public opinion in
which only a small number of well-informed citizens would participate in public
deliberations. In its place appeared a concept of public opinion as social control
irrelevant to the quality of the debate. The cohesion and consensus necessary for
society to advance would be achieved regardless of what was considered correct at any
given time.
As Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann affirms in her classic work The Spiral of Silence,
the concept of public opinion as social control carries implicitly a radically different
interpretation of the term "public" from that of the Enlightenment. On the one hand,
its influence spreads much wider than the theater of Individual debate of democratic
theory and, on the other hand, involves a series of topics beyond politics, including
culture, Santayana wrote two essays on the subject of public opinion. The first of
those, titled "On Public Opinion," was unpublished and dated by his secretary and
executor Daniel M. Cory at between 1937 and 1952 (the essay was first published in
1968 in BR); the second, "Public Opinion," was published in his 1951 book
Dominations and Powers. The aim of both is to question the constraints which the
existence of a public opinion imposes on individual liberty, as well as its legitimacy
and operating capacity in public affairs.
Despite Santayana's feeling of "being from another era," his thinking was not
only timely. It pulled directly or indirectly from theories on public opinion of
influential political thinkers such as de Tocqueville, James Bryce and Abbot Lawrence
1 This paper is a translated adaptation of a chapter of the doctoral dissertation. Public Opinion
and Press in the United States: Vision, Description and Analysis of Spanish Intellectuals
between 1885 and 1936, Universidad Complutense, Madrid, Spain, 2005.