This file is a single-author review essay in seven sections. Schütz reads Santayana’s Dominations and Powers as a late tractatus ethico-politicus: not a policy book, but a philosophical anthropology of how society and government arise from human beings living among powers, necessities, and institutions. The opening frames it as a work of old age—aphoristic, allusive, and deliberately remote from practical reform.
This framing lets Schütz defend Santayana against topical objections. Liberalism, fascism, Soviet politics, or American leadership are not the book’s real objects; they are examples within a more abstract science of politics, linked by Schütz to Aristotle and to the Thomistic contrast of dominatio and potestas. The title names not institutions first of all, but moral relations of command, dependence, and unavoidable circumstance.
Für Santayana ist die Unterscheidung zwischen Herrschaften und Gewalten eine sittliche Unterscheidung, keine physische.
English translation: For Santayana, the distinction between dominions and powers is a moral distinction, not a physical one.
Santayana’s naturalism and materialism are precise rather than crude. They begin from animal faith, the taken-for-granted world of bodies, tools, others, inherited facts, needs, feelings, and dreams. Spirit is real, but it awakens within embodied life rather than causing the world. Schütz connects this starting point to the Lebenswelt tradition, Scheler’s anthropology, and Weberian ideal-typical construction.
The book’s architecture is the triad of generative, militant, and rational orders. The generative order is family, growth, custom, inheritance, and tradition. The militant order appears when conscious associations—armies, parties, sects, enterprises—interrupt or dominate inherited forms. The rational order seeks coordination through skills, law, institutions, and adjustment to circumstances. These are analytic constructs, not historical stages.
Die Konstruktion dieser drei Ordnungen ist nur ein methodologisches Hilfsmittel, das genommen wurde, um innerhalb dieser Ordnungen Gewalten und Herrschaften untersuchen zu können und um die Herrschaft bestimmen zu können, die jede einzelne Ordnung über die anderen ausübt.
English translation: The construction of these three orders is merely a methodological device, adopted in order to investigate powers and dominions within these orders and to determine the dominion which each single order exerts over the others.
In the generative order, Santayana traces freedom from the infant’s cry and movement to the primary will. Yet action succeeds only by conforming to nature, parents, language, custom, and other wills. Freedom is not indifference; it becomes vital within embodied limits. Service first means dependence on body and world, then on society. Technology extends the will through tools but can enslave it by making means into autonomous powers. Government is organized coercion, sometimes useful but never innocent.
Herrschaft ist ein besonderes Organ der Gesellschaft, sie hat ihr eigenes Leben, sie ist immer böse und manchmal gut, wie der Krieg.
English translation: Government is a special organ of society; it has its own life, it is always evil and sometimes good, like war.
The militant order generalizes this logic. War is not only armed conflict but any will to impose itself: in parties, sects, families, propaganda, commerce, bureaucracy, and sophistical knowledge. Schütz highlights Santayana’s modern force here: propaganda controls ideas; commerce turns craft into money-making and means into ends; bureaucracy becomes a self-preserving organism that overlays natural duties to home and kin with artificial duties to nation, office, and regime. The essay remains relevant as a theory of technological, commercial, and bureaucratic domination.
The rational order is ambivalent. Reason belongs to spirit but cannot escape nature; political rationality means adapting action to circumstances, though circumstances include other persons who cannot be fully known as objects. Democracy therefore rests on a tension: the people are both governed object and supposed governing subject, while representation is moral before it is official. Parliament can mitigate tyranny, but elected officials waver between reproducing voters’ opinions and discerning their real welfare.
Regierung ist eine rationale Kunst, Konflikte der primären irrationalen Willenseinheiten untereinander und mit den Kräften der Natur zu minimieren.
English translation: Government is a rational art of minimizing conflicts among the primary irrational units of will with one another and with the forces of nature.
Schütz ends with admiration and critique. He praises Santayana’s dramatic account of will, soul, spirit, freedom, necessity, and service, but argues that the system gives unwarranted metaphysical priority to the generative order and treats arts not tied to nourishment as parasitic, even when they are essential to happiness.
Es scheint mir, daß die Wurzel dieses Mangels in der metaphysischen Annahme liegt, die generative Ordnung der Gesellschaft sei die ausgezeichnete soziale Wirklichkeit, auf der alle anderen Ordnungen gegründet sind.
English translation: It seems to me that the root of this deficiency lies in the metaphysical assumption that the generative order of society is the paramount social reality upon which all other orders are grounded.
The essay’s core move is double: Schütz preserves Santayana’s wisdom about dominion and power while redirecting it toward phenomenological social theory, where human reality cannot be derived from physical nature alone.
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