There’s been, of late, a renewal of interest in George Santayana.

Yale University Press recently released The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States (2009), edited by James Seaton.  With contributions by Seaton, Wilfred M. McClay, John Lachs, and Roger Kimball, and comprised of two seminal works by Santayana and four critical essays about Santayana, the book, however thin, seeks nothing less than a revamping of “culture.”  That’s because its subject, the enigmatic Santayana, was an aesthete par excellence and, paradoxically if not impossibly, an atheist-Catholic defender of the faith.

Most conservatives remember Santayana from Russell Kirk’s magnum opus, The Conservative Mind.  The original title to that work was The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana.  Santayana’s reputation has receded in importance since Kirk’s landmark book, in part because conservatives have drifted away from the literati while the literati have drifted away from conservatives.      Read the rest of this entry »