ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how George Santayana and Michael Oakeshott illuminated the lines on which the task of reconstructing our humanist and political ideals might proceed. Oakeshott, who was born in 1901 and died in 1990, is increasingly recognised as one of the great political thinkers of the twentieth century, perhaps even the greatest. Oakeshott was a true-born Englishman; Santayana was Spanish by birth, but spent much of his life in America. In order to appreciate Santayana's achievement, it is necessary to begin by recalling the most striking feature of twentieth-century intellectual life. At the risk of overem-phasis, the reason for de Tocqueville's concern about the fate of modern democracy may be restated in slightly different terms. In stressing the importance of laughter, Santayana stands in a distinguished line of thinkers who include Aristophanes in the ancient world and Cervantes and Rabelais in the modern.
