Character and Opinion in the United States was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1920, after Santayana had left America permanently. It is his settled assessment of the country where he spent the first fifty years of his life — a book written with the combination of intimacy and detachment that only a permanent resident alien could achieve.
The book is structured around portraits of American philosophical types: the “genteel tradition” (the exhausted idealism of New England Protestantism), William James (whose pragmatism represented America’s attempt to break free of that tradition), and Josiah Royce (whose absolute idealism represented its last philosophical defense). But the real subject is the American character itself — what Santayana identifies as a fundamental split between America’s material energy and its moral innocence.
Americans, Santayana argues, are idealists in philosophy and materialists in practice — they believe in the perfectibility of the world while devoting their practical energies to money, technology, and expansion. The “genteel tradition” is the official philosophy of this culture: a thin veneer of moral idealism stretched over a vigorous commercial civilization that pays no attention to it. James and Royce represent two responses to this split: James accepts it and tries to make philosophy serve practical life; Royce refuses it and retreats into an abstract system that has no connection to American reality.
The book’s influence on American self-understanding has been considerable. Santayana’s concept of “the genteel tradition” became a standard critical tool for analyzing American culture, and his portrait of the American character — vigorous, innocent, simultaneously materialist and idealist — remains recognizable a century later.
Collecting Character and Opinion in the United States
First edition (Scribner’s, New York, 1920): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $60–$150
- Without jacket: $15–$35