- Ortega y Gasset, José.
The Revolt of the Masses.
New York: W. W. Norton, [1930, 1932, 1964] 1993.
ISBN 0-393-31095-7.
-
This book, published more than seventy-five years ago, when the
twentieth century was only three decades old, is a simply
breathtaking diagnosis of the crises that manifested themselves
in that century and the prognosis for human civilisation. The book
was published in Spanish in 1930; this English translation,
authorised and approved by the author, by a translator who requested
to remain anonymous, first appeared in 1932 and has been in print
ever since.
I have encountered few works so short (just 190 pages), which are
so densely packed with enlightening observations and thought-provoking
ideas. When I read a book, if I encounter a paragraph that I find
striking, either in the writing or the idea it embodies, I usually
add it to my “quotes” archive for future reference. If
I did so with this book, I would find myself typing in a large portion
of the entire text. This is not an easy read, not due to the quality
of the writing and translation (which are excellent), nor the complexity of the concepts and
arguments therein, but simply due to the pure number of insights
packed in here, each of which makes you stop and ponder its
derivation and implications.
The essential theme of the argument anticipated the
crunchy/soggy
analysis of society by more than 65 years. In brief, over-achieving
self-motivated elites create liberal democracy and industrial
economies. Liberal democracy and industry lead to the emergence
of the “mass man”, self-defined as not of the elite and
hostile to existing elite groups and institutions. The mass man, by strength
of numbers and through the democratic institutions which enabled his
emergence, seizes the levers of power and begins to use the State to
gratify his immediate desires. But, unlike the elites who created the
State, the mass man does not think or plan in the long term, and is
disinclined to make the investments and sacrifices which were required to
create the civilisation in the first place, and remain necessary if it
is to survive. In this consists the crisis of civilisation, and grasping
this single concept explains much of the history of the seven decades
which followed the appearance of the book and events today. Suddenly
some otherwise puzzling things start to come into focus, such as why it is,
in a world enormously more wealthy than that of the nineteenth
century, with abundant and well-educated human resources and technological
capabilities which dwarf those of that epoch, there seems to be so little
ambition to undertake large-scale projects, and why those which are
embarked upon are so often bungled.
In a single footnote on p. 119, Ortega y Gasset explains
what the brilliant
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
spent an
entire book doing: why hereditary monarchies, whatever
their problems, are usually better stewards of the national patrimony
than democratically elected leaders. In pp. 172–186 he
explains the curious drive toward European integration which has
motivated conquerors from Napoleon through Hitler, and collectivist
bureaucratic schemes such as the late, unlamented Soviet Union and the
odious present-day European
Union. On pp. 188–190 he explains why a cult of youth
emerges in mass societies, and why they produce as citizens
people who behave like self-indulgent perpetual adolescents. In
another little single-sentence footnote on p. 175 he envisions
the disintegration of the British Empire, then at its zenith, and
the cultural fragmentation of the post-colonial states. I'm sure
that few of the author's intellectual contemporaries could have imagined
their descendants living among the achievements of Western
civilisation yet largely ignorant of its history or cultural
heritage; the author nails it in chapters 9–11, explaining
why it was inevitable and tracing the consequences for the
civilisation, then in chapter 12 he forecasts the fragmentation of
science into hyper-specialised fields and the implications of that. On pp. 184–186 he
explains the strange attraction of Soviet communism for
European intellectuals who otherwise thought themselves
individualists—recall, this is but six years after the death of Lenin. And still
there is more…and more…and more. This is a book you
can probably re-read every year for five years in a row and get something more
out of it every time.
A full-text online
edition is available, which is odd since the copyright of
the English translation was last renewed in 1960 and should still be in
effect, yet the site which hosts this edition claims that all their
content is in the public domain.
June 2006 