A Review of The Revolt of the Masses by Jose Ortega y Gasset

My reading list appears externally rather random, and my choices impulsive and unconsidered. Topically, the books that intrigue me do seem to be rather unrelated on the surface. Why I start reading a particular book and carry through to the end, or give up and guiltily re-shelf a book (Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being being the most recent example) is probably a mostly irrational decision or at least predicated on internal laziness and unwillingness to put in the effort to actually understand an author’s thoughts. I’d imagine that this experience is probably similar for most people. Each book is as a separate world with its own message, assumptions, principles, and logical structure. Each attracts us for reasons higher or lower, academic or leisurely, and where there is consistency in what we desire to read (or more generally, study), it is because of topical overlaps, as with my own long stretch of reading World War I history last Fall.

But looking back over the last two years in full, it feels like I’ve been the target of a conspiracy by the content below the surface, the worldview of the author that gets them to their conclusions and not merely just the conclusions themselves. Just about everything I have read feels like a dance of ideas swirling around some deeper revelations about being, reality, truth, freedom and human nature more generally. Perhaps it's not a conspiracy. Perhaps I’m merely picking out the underlying principles of authors’ thoughts that interest me and ignoring the rest. Perhaps because reality is unified, even books seemingly far removed from each other will have some point of intersection, and that point, not yet clearly seen, is what draws me. But I prefer the conspiratorial explanation. Authors from centuries apart have obviously been planting particular ideas as cameos in their works solely to play tricks on me.

The Revolt of the Masses is no exception and was a major step forward towards clarifying the subjects of interest that have been grabbing my attention all along. It was on a shelf in a library near another book that I had picked up, and I remembered hearing this name somewhere, so I picked it up also. It’s ostensibly a book for a particular era long superseded, although echoes of that era and its particular problems do seem to be coming around again. Its particular message is quite simple, Europe in the 1930s needs a new vision and new principles for the future, and without one, demoralized, the people, the masses rule, and this populism will lead to ill-advised and destructive policies for the governments ruled by the general people and not by a more educated and wise elite. You can find the main thesis of the book summed up well on pages 195 or 201. Author Jose Ortega y Gasset’s prognostications and fears from Spain in 1930 were correct and mostly born out in the next decade. And you don’t even need to read the whole book to understand his conclusions, which feel like the simple application of the thought of earlier political philosophers to the issues of his day in 20th-century interwar Europe. Oswald Spengler, Alexis de Tocqueville, or even Aristotle give you most of what you would need to reach similar conclusions about the state of the world at the time this book was written. In sum, the rule of the wise and virtuous is good, it is good to be ruled by good ideas, and mobs don’t typically have collective virtue or many good ideas, and bad things often happen when the mob rules.

In this light, the primary interest of this book for today would seem to lie mostly in analogies between the world of the 2020s and the 1920s. I think there are many comparisons to draw, and it is quite imaginable for someone to write a similar book on European or American politics today with a similar message to this book, but what really grabbed my attention in this book is the underlying principles that appear in Ortega y Gasset’s work often only as passing references. The Revolt of the Masses is most relevant for today not in its primary message, but in the hidden illuminations it offers on the way there. Too often while reading, I would bemoan that Ortega y Gasset was expressing more clearly some idea or relationship that I thought I had previously invented on my own.

This then will not be a summary of the book. It can be done effectively in two words, de Tocqueville’s “democratic despotism” or in a sentence or two as above. This will instead be some thoughts on ideas that were not the focus but intrigued me regarding the eternal questions of how human nature and ideas intertwine in the formation of societies and states.

First off is the relationship between force, power, and ideas. I’ve until recently mostly held the opinion that force and violence and the fear of said violence are the ultimate root of political power, as with the idiom, invented by Mao, that “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” or as military theorist von Clausewitz put it: “War is a continuation of politics by other means.” But having just read Stephen Kotkin's Armageddon Averted on the collapse of the Soviet Union, I realized that until we have self-actuating and self-repairing armies of robot soldiers, the barrel of a gun requires someone willing to fire it. Power, political power in particular, and every particular law of a regime is rooted in willingness, and that willingness comes from the ideas in people’s heads. Ortega y Gasset confirms the supremacy of ideas as the root of power, and of power to exert force, saying: “the stable normal relation amongst men which is known as “rule” never rests on force” (138).  For him, a regime exists in a position of equilibrium, based on the ideas in the heads of the leaders and of the citizenry. Change these, and you will get a different society. Now, force can spread and instill ideas in people, but the typical causal relationship is the reverse; force is used to spread a totalitarian idea like Communism because true believers already possess and are pleased with the idea and get motivation from it to use force to spread it.

Furthermore, for Ortega y Gasset, these ideas at the root of political organization are not retrospective or for the present, but future-oriented and living. In his conception societies or regimes are unified by offering people hopes and dreams of a common project and common improvement for the future, a purpose that is the cause of common actions now, acting in many ways analogous to that by which the formal cause of a substance is both a principle of unity and action. On the basis of this project, a compromise that we could term the general will, societies regardless of their particular political structure, reflect the ideas of their people. Each society, age, or regime is headed somewhere on the basis of these ideas, towards a “plenitude of the times” which is the fulfillment of the ideals and aspirations towards which its people had unified themselves towards that common project. But once this “plenitude” is reached, a society must either find itself a new goal or fall apart on the basis of inevitable errors or contradictions with regard to its last set of ideals. 

Ortega y Gasset is not unique here, German philosopher Oswald Spengler had in 1918 expressed similar views in his The Decline of the West. But Ortega y Gasset’s scheme has the imagination playing a critical role in the evolution of ideas, and thereby societies. Political and social organization is limited not primarily by the possible, but by the imaginable. As he claims, “Imagination is the liberating power possessed by man” (168). This is probably generally true and interesting with regard to all human actions—especially the individual—and I find this statement the springboard to many interesting connections to Edith Stein’s phenomenological works on the human self. But it is also of practical importance for present political affairs. Just as a universal empire like that founded by Julius Caesar was not possible until he imagined it or the unique political structures and parliamentary system pioneered in England were not possible without the historically unprecendented and unique imagination and actions of the 13th century Simon de Montfort, whatever might follow for us politically in the future might be a system that most of us, except for one individual of exceptional imagination, cannot conceive.

The most far-reaching and controversial message of The Revolt of the Masses follows from this account of the evolution of societies through evolving ideas. Merely opposing a new and negative ideology without offering a clear path forward will not actually eliminate the problem you are trying to oppose. The current state of your society and the ideas that embody it were the conditions that led to the creation of the new and negative ideology that you oppose. Attempting only to be anti-communist, for example, will in Ortega y Gasset’s views, only bring you back to the society which produced communism as the social conditions of the previous society were conducive to its formation. Using an anti-ideology to oppose a certain ideology is thus not a strategy, it merely returns you to the state before the ideology that you dislike arose, a state which produced that ideology and will produce it again. It is not clearly stated anywhere in the book, but the reason for this seems Spenglerian, every system of ideas that proves the basis for a society has something attractive and workable in it, which is why it was adopted, but also some sort of internal contradictions, which will slowly unveil themselves over time, and eventually destroy the system and prompt counter-ideologies to arise in diametric opposition. To truly oppose an evil evolution in society you must, in his view, propose and/or accelerate the growth of something better. A conservative in America today cannot merely work to bring back the 1950s, because the 1950s contained the seeds of the societal denigration we are dealing with now. Rather, in order to move society in a certain direction, we must propose ideas for society different from both the past and the present.

I see some tension between this conclusion and the author’s conception above of the imagination as a liberating power with regard to possible political futures, but the resolution of the two seems discernible through two other underlying principles of his thought. The first, which I will term a swirl of forces theory of history (not explained clearly in any one particular part of the book, the closest is on page 86), and the second is a Kantian and Nietzchean-inspired view of knowledge, elsewhere termed perspectivism. I came to basically these same two ideas independently through my own thought over the last two years, so excitedly re-discovered them in this book, and they give clarity to Ortega y Gasset’s model. The swirl of forces theory for history implies a cross between the two popular “trends and forces” view and the “great man” theory of history. History in this view is indeterminate in outcome and caused by both free decisions of individuals and by ideas and the forces they have called into action impinging upon the outlook and actions individuals. Almost no single individual in this view ever brings an idea into existence on his own out of nothingness or completely causes a historical trend. Rather, everyone contributes to the acceleration or deceleration of trends and ideas already in existence. Individuals interact, ideas interact through individuals, and through crowds of those individuals, and agency can thus be ascribed both to individuals and to ideas, trends, and forces. The world is a swirl of possibilities and there are positive and negative feedback loops that can accelerate or decelerate the trends acted upon by individuals. Adding this conception to that of Ortega y Gasset’s perspectivism, the view that reality is perceived mediatedly, or filtered through limitations in our understanding, implies that man’s vision for what is possible, his imagination of future possibilities is limited at each moment by his rational model of the world at present. Taken together, while man can act in history, and act freely, he is constrained by his model of the world and the existing momentum of forces out there in history  (e.g. the firm existing convictions for action of individuals in your society). The imagination is for certain men in political affairs the tool of liberation of the new, bringing about the sprouting of seeds implicit in the present, yet only visible to the discerning one whose world model allows him to see clearly and distinctly what others cannot see or are too weak to affect. The great man, the man of destiny, the man gifted can on the basis of his better understanding and better imagination bring about new ideas, new structures, new political realities by accelerating the seeds of possibility that exist at the current moment, manifesting one possible future into being from the current range of possibilities.

This might all seem too qualified and paradoxical to constitute a helpful advance in understanding history, politics, and the future, so let’s concretize this message. Conservative political effort, taking in all the lessons of this book, ought to be truly future-focused, and can only do so by focusing on the trends of the present moment, not those of the 1950s, and bringing about the best possible future of those which are possible given the trends of the moment. It is not likely that we are going back politically towards monarchy or communism in the ways they used to exist. Our range of present possibilities seems to include strong doses of corporatism, surveillance, demographic decline, and Nietzscheanism amidst more hopeful trends with existing momentum like decentralization, Catholic traditionalism, and the like. We can’t realistically custom design a future, but must work towards the best possible future of current possibilities.

Since we have only the present to act in, but in Ortega y Gasset’s vision, must be headed somewhere, and cannot remain in the present, we have to first perceive the future possibilities, or follow a leader who can perceive them, and work towards the best possible out of them, knowing that the new paradigm will have its own failings, and perhaps even knowing that the counter-ideologies that will sprout out to oppose it will in the end be better. Working “towards” can start with something as simple as just spreading or manifesting an idea into the consciousness of others. If an idea spreads into others imaginations as a possibility and has an appealing nature, not being merely a dead proposal to return to the past, it will have on this very basis alone, if Ortega y Gasset is correct, an enlivening, inspiriting power, giving it an increased potential for becoming reality . It’s a small stretch, but the full import of this book is that we can almost think the future into reality.

More on this later, but that future is, or will soon be named Muskism, and will, if it succeeds in beating out the worse possibilities for our future of trans-corporatism leftism or Nietzschean-evolutionism, be opposed in its turn by Kaczynskite-Puritanicalism. Perhaps the names will be different, but I have at least a small hope that these coming ideologies will use the names I want to give them. Hey, I went through the effort and risk of naming them, and can conceivably think I was the first to try to do so.

Jose Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses, could, arguably, have been crucial to bringing about the European Union. He saw it as a possibility where others at that early year before World War II did not see it, and this book played a real part in helping bring it about; by stating throughout that he saw it as a true possibility it became more of one in reality. Ideas, it has been said, have consequences, and even as the specific thesis of Ortega y Gasset’s book is in some sense out of date, the implicit ideas it is built on continue to have consequences. At least they made me pick it up and spend ten hours reading it. And those ten hours had some consequences… Read the book for the underlying themes, but only if you have the background study to pull out these themes from their sometimes subtle and implicit presence within the book and think about them in light of present politics and societal trends. In other words, after a lot of thinking about history and current political trends, or after listening to a lot of Charles Haywood.