Alfred Schütz’s review essay, first published in 1952 and republished in 1964, interprets Santayana’s Dominations and Powers as a philosophical account of social dependence, liberty, and political order. Schütz admires its insight into human agency while questioning its elevation of biological existence into the foundation of social reality.
The opening situates Santayana’s contemplative and aphoristic manner within a theoretical undertaking indebted to Aristotle’s political science. Judging the book solely by its contemporary political opinions would obscure its purpose, though Schütz also identifies historical and economic weaknesses. Political philosophy here seeks orientation rather than a program:
Not a system of ends, or of means for their practical realization, has to be established by the thinker, but a theoretical system which, widely used, may teach the politician – any politician – where he comes from and where he is going.
Schütz reconstructs the celestial hierarchy behind Santayana’s title. This theological vocabulary serves an account in which powers sustain or enable life, whereas dominations constrain and frustrate its interests. The distinction depends on the relation between circumstances and the beings affected by them, rather than on an invariably beneficent or oppressive character of particular institutions.
Santayana’s naturalism grounds this relation in embodied existence. Spirit emerges from natural conditions; the psyche’s needs and passions supply the impulses of political action.
To be a naturalist means to him to recognize that mankind is a race of animals living in a material world, that fellow-men exist, that reported historical facts exist, that, briefly, man has an "animal faith" in the physical theater of life.
Schütz recognizes affinities between this starting point and philosophies that begin from human involvement in an already existing world:
Thinkers so different as Heidegger and Whitehead start their interpretation of the universe from men's living within the world, the world of matter and of things at hand, the world surrounding and including our physical and mental existence.
Yet acknowledging that involvement does not establish the metaphysical primacy of material nature. This distinction prepares Schütz’s criticism of Santayana’s social theory.
The exposition turns on three interwoven orders: generative, militant, and rational. Schütz treats them as ideal-typical constructions rather than successive historical stages. The generative order encompasses growth, family, custom, and inherited arrangements. Militancy arises when deliberate projects intervene in these arrangements and attempt to impose alternatives. The rational order coordinates activities toward human fulfillment. Despite their interdependence, the generative order retains a foundational status that becomes the central issue of the review.
Within the generative order, spontaneous activity encounters bodily limitations, other people, and customary authority. Santayana distinguishes vacant liberty, imagined as freedom from constraints, from logical contingency and vital liberty, the effective realization of embodied capacities. Dependence thus both limits freedom and makes its exercise possible. Education equips people for action through conformity, while tools expand their capacities at the risk of imposing new necessities.
The militant order includes much more than warfare. Religious factions, propaganda, commerce, and bureaucracy can all seek to reorganize or dominate life. Schütz highlights the difference between the natural circulation of ideas and propaganda directed by extraneous interests. Commercial instruments may become ends in themselves, and officialdom may pursue corporate interests at odds with its ostensible purposes. These analyses expose how enabling powers turn into dominations.
In the rational order, reason harmonizes vital forces rather than operating independently of them. Government must accommodate circumstances and conflicting wills without assuming that society possesses a single mind. Representation remains precarious: judgment exercised for the governed can be displaced by party loyalty and professional interests. Discussion, compromise, and acquiescence moderate this danger without removing it.
Schütz’s concluding objection concerns the priority assigned to the generative order. That premise weakens Santayana’s treatment of activities beyond subsistence and encourages an inadequate account of modern economic life. The review separates a powerful analysis of situated agency from its restrictive naturalistic foundation. Its closing appeal to government informed by knowledge of the governed’s real opportunities preserves Santayana’s philosophical ambition while leaving open how human goods can be understood without reducing them to either expressed wishes or biological necessities.
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