The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings

The United States as Leader (1951)

The United States as Leader Dominations and Powers: Reflections on Liberty, Society, and Government. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1951, 456–61. Volume nineteen of the critical edition of The Works of George Santayana. In this selection, which appeared as Chapter 45 of Book Third in Dominations and Powers , Santayana considered how the United States might be best-suited to lead a universal government that directed material conditions and left the various peoples of the world to manage their own moral affairs. But despite his sanguine view of the United States as leader, he recognized inherent difficulties. In a letter he wrote, “my chief divergence from American views lies in that I am not a dogmatist in morals or politics and do not think that the same form of government can be good for everybody; except in those matters where everybody is subject to the same influence and has identical interests. . . . But where the interests of people are moral and imaginative they ought to be free to govern themselves. . . . the universal authority ought to manage only economic, hygienic, and maritime affairs. . . . Now the Americans’ . . . way of talking is doctrinaire, as if they were out to save souls and not to rationalize commerce. And the respect for majorities instead of for wisdom is out of place in any matter of ultimate importance. . . . It cuts off all possibility of a liberal civilization” ( LGS, 8:294–95). There is a point in political theory in which events have confirmed the position adopted above. A universal government would have to be a particular government , rooted in the generative order of history, and not an alliance of sovereign states or a universal parliament. The League of Nations was still-born; and when it had been buried, almost the same group of victorious powers that had blindly set it up set up the Organisation of United Nations on the same blind principles. They even introduced the old Polish system of an individual right of veto for each of the Great Powers, as if to make executive impotence not only constitutional but expressly intended and prized. Yet this impotence had a vital nerve in it. A decision cannot be universally satisfying unless it is unanimous. And Russia had already established at home the ideal of unanimity and the practice of autocratic government to impose that unanimity by education and training or, failing that, by terror. Russia too had been the most brilliant of the victors in this second war; and Stalin at once adopted the policy of vetoing everything that did not conduce to the extension of communist domination. Here, then, is one living and powerful government, strongly national in its central seat and in its leading members, but theoretically liberal in the treatment of other nationalities and languages. At the same time there is a militant thirst for the political assimilation of all peoples to the social regimen of Russia, which in that claim forfeits all rational authority. Rational authority, according to my analysis, can accrue to governments only in so far as they represent the 471 The United States as Leader inescapable authority of things, that is to say, of the material conditions of free life and free action. In the Marxist theory this almost seems to be involved in its materialistic character; yet in Russian practice it is not the authority of things but nominally the material class interests and militant Will of the proletariat and really the ambition of the self-appointed inner circle of the Communist party that not only rule absolutely but intend to keep the whole world unanimous by “liquidating” all dissentients. And half by the wonderful power of propaganda and mass-suggestion and half by systematic extermination of all other ways of thinking, this artificial unanimity has actually seemed to cover vast regions of Europe and Asia like a blanket of Siberian snow. The depth of it is unknown, but the silence is impressive. It is not, then, by the authority of universal physical conditions of existence that the Russian government would exercise control over all nations in military and economic matters; it would be rather by a revolutionary conspiracy fomented everywhere that it would usurp a moral and intellectual domination over all human societies. Such baseless pretensions cancel the right which economic science might have to guide a universal material economy. What fitness have the United States, which have now come forward as a rival, to become the secular arm of Reason...