José Ortega y Gasset's "The Revolt of the Masses" and the Crisis of Liberalism

[Liberté]

The interwar period of the 20th century is possibly the most singularly important of that century with respect to its literary output. The ruinous conflict in Europe destroyed much of the educated worlds faith in the dual powers of human progress and reason, and led many intellectuals of the day to despair for the future of mankind. Those few who thought that civilization could be salvaged rejected the liberal individualism that had earlier taken root in Germany and found solace in the collectivism of both the Left and Right. And fewer of the great ponderers of the day had considered the possibility that, out of the ashes of Europe, a new order would arise: one in which the public was politicized within an increasingly narrow spectrum of thought, shirking the radicalism of earlier days in favor of a tightly-controlled, managed democratic system which called a truce between the constant conflict between 'the private' and 'the public'.

One of those few who foresaw this shift in the political situation was a Spaniard, the object of our consideration. Born into a middle-class liberal family in Madrid in 1883, José Ortega y Gasset's life was similar to those of other existentialist authors of the 20th century: despite his education in a religious institution (in his case a Jesuitical school), y Gasset came to increasingly resent the Spanish monarchy, considering its support for the falangist dictatorship of Jose Primo de Rivera at loggerheads with his own personal individualism. He thus chose to abdicate his tenure as professor at the Royal Spanish Academy over continued allegiance to a government he did not support. It was in the period immediately following his retirement from teaching, and largely in reaction to the political circumstances surrounding its becoming necessary, that he wrote the book for which he is most well-known: La rebelión de las masas (The Revolt of the Masses).

[Liberté]

I.


The text of The Revolt of the Masses is largely a meditation upon the the famous first paragraph with which it opens:

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This initial paragraph, so bluntly and succinctly antidemocratic, seems to violate everything the Western world holds dear to. It also seems to conflict with the basic biographical details I outlined above: why should so essentially liberal a man, a teacher so outraged with the brutalities of a fascist regime that he left his post rather than swear fealty to the State, come out militantly against 'the masses'?

y Gasset clarifies his meaning in the same paragraph.  "Public life is not", he says, "solely political, but equally, and even primarily, intellectual, moral, economic, religious; it comprises all our collective habits, including our fashions both of dress and of amusement." This said, we see that, unlike the narrow republicanism of the post-war age, y Gasset is considering democratic life in its aggregate: those activities which occur outside of and beyond the sphere of politics proper. In an era when the old New Left expression that "the personal is political" has become the mantra and motto of political organizations on both sides of the great divide, y Gasset writes for an epoch in which politics had yet to become as personalized and commodified as any product in the marketplace of ideas.

The author thus intends to examine what we consider to be 'public life' in total. He continues in this fashion after having posited the initial question:

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What y Ortega refers to is well-known among those of us in the Anglosphere: in England it is the sentiment which David Cameron and the Conservatives targeted so long ago in a now-forgotten campaign calling for the 'Big Society'. In America the idea is less politicized, but still lies at the essential core of identity politics in this nation. It is called the 'American dream'.

But what could objection could a Spanish philosopher have towards that particular feeling of community which lay outside political life? ya Gasset begins by contextualizing his statements

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The immediate context of that 'democratization' of society which y Gasset  here mentions is that process which David Brooks called a movement "from an aristocratic political economy to a democratic, industrial one" in a recent piece, waxing lugubriously on the differences between American and British political life (and which pretends that a similar transition is being made by the Cameron government today). A profound change overtook Europe in the years between the World Wars, and that change was not limited by any means to the rise of socialism and nationalism in the political sphere. The industrial revolution of an earlier age had found its counterpart in the social revolution of the Normalcy.

It is this context that shapes and focuses y Gasset's critique of contemporary society. He continues:

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The sentiment y Gasset makes public here seems, at first glance, to be even more highly reactionary than those expressed in the opening paragraph. The 'publicization' of the mass correlates, to him, with the first great rush of multiculturalism in the modern world. This deeply 'conservative' feeling seems bolstered by his Wagnerian metaphor of the chorus: suddenly, the liberal mind is sent reeling, calling up images of moonlit marches by torchlight and the operatic nature of anti-multicultural politics. But y Gasset's mind is too nimble for such base conservatism.

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The point of y Gasset's complaint about the modern world is, thus, not about the conglomeration of mere national or ethnic or religious minorities into 'the mass', into a conglomerate. y Gasset is not a conservative. His overriding concern is with the man in the main: the man who, while he may not be qualitatively superior to any other of his peers, is nevertheless lessened further when he is combined with them.

The point is made. Now the author must define the terms which he is using, and he does so:

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We today are well aware of those to whom y Gasset refers; they have multiplied in their number since his time. These are they of whom Nietzsche wrote: "He who thinks a great deal is not suited to be a party man: he thinks his way through the party and out the other side too soon." Or, rather, those who try to "think (their) way through" to the other side and fail. The only point of contact they share with their fellows is the conformity of a narrow non-conformity.

y Gasset does not find the "mass man" much superior. They are, in his consideration, worse:

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We know this kind, too, especially in America, where they have been thoroughly politicized. "The mass" is the man who knows he is "mass"; what's more, he wants you to be "mass", too, and will go to great lengths to ensure that you will be "mass".

But y Gasset is aware that he may sound like a 'Babbit', a man who wants to think himself better than his neighbor because he wants to belong to the "mass" which actually is better. He denies this:

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y Ortega will make this point time and again in The Revolt of the Masses: that many who feel themselves as being validated by the holding of an opinion not held by the rest of men, or of being of unique characteristics and thus 'better than' their fellow men, fall into a trap more subtle but no less damning than those in which the more common form of the "mass man" sets for himself.

y Ortega has made his diagnosis of society. What in it does he find objectionable?

[Liberté]

II.

y Ortega introduces a new term into political discourse: he calls it "hyperdemocracy". His definition of the word is contextualized as follows:

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The immediate meaning of y Ortega's use of the term is made obvious by reference to "force of law born in the cafes". What he refers to is the 'café couture' most often associated with Paris after the war and the public interaction with the philosophies of Camus and Sartre, but which, even in the time he wrote, had already germinated in the Weimar Republic and which had spread throughout Europe. The source of his complaint is the lumpenintellectual, whom those of us who observe American politics see referred to derogatorily as the 'latte-liberal' and its culture as 'the hipster'. Both are commonly taken to be obnoxious twits, 'elitists' who are no more actually elite than the man who buys a vintage Cadillac with his welfare check. He is the very embodiment of those who are "unqualified, unqualifiable, and, by their very mental texture, disqualified."

However, y Gasset recognizes that such men are not the primary form of "the mass". There is another group on the other side of the social continuum that is far more threatening in its behavior:

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To this author's mind, this first chapter of José Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses has captured perfectly the interplay of forces at work in the context of American social policy: a "mass" minority party, which feels itself superior to and hence capable of setting policy for the "mass" mass party, has aggravated and aggrieved that other "mass". The "mass" mass, motivated by no little amount of social envy and jealousy by mostly by the inertia that comes with total contentedness, are no longer content with this sort of elitism; they, too, must feel themselves 'elite', but by appealing to their commonness (and hence purity of character) rather than their difference (which would indicate their purity of thought). So arrayed, the two parties are engaged in a state of constant civil war.

y Gasset realized this, and set out attempting to lay down a basic history of the mass man in the second chapter of his book:

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What was true of the last great era of the masses is true both in y Gasset's time and in our own. The Spaniard wrote in the year before the then-tallest building of the world was under construction in New York City; the current tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa, was completed the year before I sat down to write this. Government has reached a size unprecedented in the democratic age in the eighty-one years between the publication of The Revolt of the Masses. So, too, has economic centralization in the hands of business. The only thing that shrinks with every passing year is the world.

Religion, too, is becoming 'bigger', not only in the sense that it is becoming more homogenized with every passing year but in a more literal, spatial sense, as well: tiny denominations find themselves incapable of competing with the death of mainline Protestantism in the United States and the emergence of enormous and unifying monochurches. Their architectural preference for the large, the open, and the democratic is readily apparent as well, as anyone observant of trends in church building will note.

 In religion, in politics, in government, in industry: the old order has been annihilated; man has become 'larger'. But y Gasset does not call for the re-establishment of the old order. History is not, for him, 'aristocratic' in a narrow sense.

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And what, in society, does the author quarrel with? y Ortega reveals the depths of both his political lucidity and his prowess with the pen in one of the most riveting sections of the book:

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The problem, to wit, is this: in the 'age of liberalism', rights were granted as a concession to all of 'the people', and 'the people' were treated as a collective, as a fundamental unit, a building-block of society, the total and organic gestalt of civilization which cannot in any sense be reduced into its component pieces. 'Democracy' was given to the total: they are now beginning to act out upon it. And the results are not to the liking of the democrats of the Earth.


Conclusion.

I do not mean to go into a consideration of solutions for this problem. y Ortega offers none. I simply intend to report upon what he tells us. There is no reason to doubt his word; he has proven himself prescient in understanding our modern crisis better than some of us who are alive do. But I recommend that anyone concerned with the rise of an illiberal majoritarianism, fueled by the identity politics of the 'minority' but applied to the 'majority', at least consider the arguments y Gasset presents in his book.