Question

In at least one hundred words discuss Santayana's philosophy of "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" and how it relates to literature in the Civil War period.

Answer 1

In Georges Santayana's quote, he argues that, if our society, and a much larger scale, our world, is ever going to or wants to make headway and advance, it is going to need to remember its past and see what it can learn and take from it. What Santayana most likely believes that change and progress are two entirely different things. Progress can be interpreted as taking what you have learned from previous events and building upon it, not just merely altering something to look different but keeping it the same in essence. Santayana's quote can be related back to the Civil War because similar events like this had happened before in World History, for example, The English Civil War. Because most American did not know of previous comparable conflicts such as The English Civil War, they did not recognize that they were repeating the steps of many others that led to conflict.