ABSTRACT
The thought of George Santayana has never had a wide influence. 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. Santayana's intellectual temperament, aloof, ironical and poetic, had little in common with that which, then as now, dominated American culture, and he became increasingly disaffected with American life. Santayana's conception of a post-liberal regime, which has great strengths as well as disabling weaknesses, has been criticized from a variety of standpoints, some more vulgar than others. The criticism of Santayana's post-liberal vision as proto-Fascist is indefensible, if only because there are unequivocal evidences in his writings of his repudiation of Fascist doctrine and practice. The final insight of Santayana's critique of liberalism is not that liberal society is inherently a transitional state of things.
