The Revolt of the Masses

José Ortega y Gasset

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000424423
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book, first published in 1930 and reissued in 1961, examines the Western phenomenon of the rise of the 'mass-man'. Analysing the state of society before the Second World War, acclaimed philosopher Ortega y Gasset lays bare the problems that faced the countries of Europe in a book that resonates today in the imposition of direct action over discussion.

CHAPTER XIV
Who Rules in the World?

European civilization, I have repeated more than once, has automatically brought about the rebellion of the masses. From one view-point this fact presents a most favourable aspect, as we have noted: the rebellion of the masses is one and the same thing as the fabulous increase that human existence has experienced in our times. But the reverse side of the same phenomenon is fearsome; it is none other than the radical demoralization of humanity. Let us now consider this last from new view-points.

1

The substance or character of a new historical period is the resultant of internal variations—of man and his spirit; or of external variations—formal, and as it were mechanical. Amongst these last, the most important, almost without a doubt, is the displacement of power. But this brings with it a displacement of the spirit.

Consequently, when we set about examining a period with a view to understanding it, one of our first questions ought to be: who is governing in the world at the time? It may happen that at the time humanity is scattered in different groups without any communication, forming interior, independent worlds. In the days of Miltiades, the Mediterranean world was unaware of the existence of the Far-Eastern world. In such cases we shall have to refer our question, ‘Who rules in the world?’ to each individual group. But from the sixteenth century, humanity has entered on a vast unifying process, which in our days has reached its furthest limits. There is now no portion of humanity living apart—no islands of human existence. Consequently, from that century on, it may be said that whoever rules the world does, in fact, exercise authoritative influence over the whole of it. Such has been the part played by the homogeneous group formed by European peoples during the last three centuries. Europe was the ruler, and under its unity of command the world lived in unitary fashion, or at least was progressively unified This fashion of existence is generally styled the Modern Age, a colourless, inexpressive name, under which lies hidden das reality: the epoch of European hegemony.

By ‘rule’ we are not here to understand primarily the exercise of material power, of physical coercion. We are here trying to avoid foolish notions, at least the more gross and evident ones. This stable, normal relation amongst men which is known as ‘rule’ never rests on force; on the contrary, it is because a man or group of men exercise command that they have at their disposition that social apparatus or machinery known as ‘force’. The cases in which at first sight force seems to be the basis of command, are revealed on a closer inspection as the best example to prove our thesis. Napoleon led an aggressive force against Spain, maintained his aggression for a time, but, properly speaking, never ruled in Spain for a single day. And that, although he had the force, and precisely because he had it. It is necessary to distinguish between a process of aggression and a state of rule. Rule is the normal exercise of authority, and is always based on public opinion, today as a thousand years ago, amongst the English as amongst the bushmen. Never has anyone ruled on this earth by basing his rule essentially on any other thing than public opinion.

It may be thought that the sovereignty of public opinion was an invention of the lawyer Danton, in 1789, or of Saint Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. The notion of that sovereignty may have been discovered in one place or another, at one time or another, but the fact that public opinion is the basic force which produces the phenomenon of rule in human societies is as old, and as lasting, as mankind. In Newton’s physics gravitation is the force which produces movement. And the law of public opinion is the universal law of gravitation in political history. Without it the science of history would be impossible. Hence Hume’s acute suggestion that the theme of history consists in demonstrating how the sovereignty of public opinion, far from being a Utopian aspiration, is what has actually happened everywhere and always in human societies. Even the man who attempts to rule with janissaries depends on their opinion and the opinion which the rest of the inhabitants have of them.

The truth is that there is no ruling with janissaries. As Talleyrand said to Napoleon: ‘You can do everything with bayonets, Sire, except sit on them, And to rule is not the gesture of snatching at power, but the tranquil exercise of it In a word, to rule is to sit down, be it on the throne, curule chair, front bench, or bishop’s seat. Contrary to the unsophisticated suggestions of melodrama, to rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as of the firm seat. The State is, in fine, the state of opinion, a position of equilibrium.

What happens is that at times public opinion is nonexistent. A society divided into discordant groups, with their forces of opinion cancelling one another out, leaves no room for a ruling power to be constituted. And as ‘nature abhors a vacuum’ the empty space left by the absence of public opinion is filled by brute force. At the most, then, the latter presents itself as a substitute for the former. Consequently, if we wish to express the law of public opinion as the law of historical gravitation, we shall take into consideration those cases where it is absent, and we then arrive at a formula which is the well-known, venerable, forthright commonplace: there can be no rule in opposition to public opinion.

This enables us to realize that rule signifies the predominance of an opinion, and therefore of a spirit; that rule is, when all is said and done, nothing else but a spiritual power. This is confirmed with precision by the facts of history. All primitive rule has a ‘sacred’ character, for it is based on religion and religion is the first form under which appears what is afterwards to be spirit, idea, opinion; in a word, the immaterial and ultra-physical. In the Middle Ages the same phenomenon is reproduced on a larger scale. The first State or public authority formed in Europe is the Church, with its specific, well-defined character of ‘the spiritual power’. From the Church the political power learns that it, too, in its origin, is a spiritual authority, the prevalence of certain ideas, and there is created the Holy Roman Empire. Thus arises the struggle between two powers, which, having no differentiation in substance (as they are both spirit), reach an agreement by which each limits itself to a time-category; the temporal and the eternal. Temporal power and religious power are equally spiritual, but the one is the spirit of time, public opinion, mundane and fluctuating, whilst the other is the spirit of eternity, the opinion of God, God’s view of man and his destiny. It comes to the same thing then to say: At a given period, such a man, such a people, or such a homogeneous group of peoples, are in command, as to say: At this given period there predominates in the world such a system of opinions—ideas, preferences, aspirations, purposes.

How is this predominance to be understood? The majority of men have no opinions, and these have to be pumped into them from outside, like lubricants into machinery. Hence it is necessary that some mind or other should hold and exercise authority, so that the people without opinions—the majority—can start having opinions. For without these, the common life of humanity would be chaos, a historic void, lacking in any organic structure. Consequently, without a spiritual power, without someone to command, and in proportion as this is lacking, chaos reigns over mankind. And similarly, all displacement of power, every change of authority, implies a change of opinions, and therefore nothing less than a change of historical gravitation. Let us go back again to where we started from. For several centuries the world has been ruled by Europe, a conglomerate of peoples akin in spirit. In the Middle Ages there was no such rule in temporal matters. So it has happened in all the middle ages of history. That is why they represent a relative chaos, relative barbarism, a deficit of public opinion. They are times in which men love, hate, desire, detest; all this without limit; but, on the other hand, there is no opinion. Such epochs are not without their charm. But in the great epochs, what mankind lives by is opinion, and therefore, order rules. On the further side of the Middle Ages we also find a period in which, as in the Modern Age, there is someone in command, though only over a limited portion of the world: Rome, the great director. It was she who set up order in the Mediterranean and its borders.

In these post-war times the word is beginning to go round that Europe no longer rules in the world. Is the full gravity of this diagnosis realized? By it there is announced a displacement of power. In what direction? Who is going to succeed Europe in ruling over the world? But is it so sure that anyone is going to succeed her? And if no one, what then is going to happen?

2

It is true, of course, that at any moment, and therefore actually, an infinity of things is happening in the world. Any attempt, then, to say what is happening in the world today must be taken as being conscious of its own irony. But for the very reason that we are unable to have directly complete knowledge of reality, there is nothing for us but arbitrarily to construct a reality, to suppose that things are happening after a certain fashion. This provides us with an outline, a concept or framework of concepts. With this, as through a ‘sight’, we then look at the actual reality, and it is only then that we obtain an approximate vision of it. It is in this that scientific method consists. Nay, more, in this consists all use of the intellect. When we see our friend coming up the garden path, and we say: ‘Here’s Peter’, we are committing, deliberately, ironically, an error. For Peter implies for us a complex of way of behaviour, physical and moral—what we call ‘character’—and the plain truth is that, at times, our friend Peter is not in the least like the concept ‘our friend Peter’.

Every concept, the simplest and the most technical, is framed in its own irony as the geometrically cut diamond is held in its setting of gold. The concept tells us quite seriously: ‘This thing is A, that thing is B’. But the seriousness is that of the man who is playing a joke on you, the unstable seriousness of one who is swallowing a laugh, which will burst out if he does not keep his lips tight-closed. It knows very well that this thing is not just merely A, or that thing just merely B. What the concept really thinks is a little bit different from what it says, and herein the irony lies. What it really thinks is this: I know that, strictly speaking, this thing is not A, nor that thing B; but by taking them as A and B, I come to an understanding with myself for the purposes of my practical attitude towards both of these things. This theory of rational knowledge would have displeased a Greek. For the Greek believed that he had discovered in the reason, in the concept, reality itself. We, on the contrary, believe that the concept is one of man’s household utensils, which he needs and uses in order to make clear his own position in the midst of the infinite and very problematic reality which is his life. Life is a struggle with things to maintain itself among them. Concepts are the strategic plan we form in answer to the attack. Hence, if we penetrate to the true inwardness of a concept, we find that it tells us nothing of the thing itself, but only sums up what one can do with it, or what it can do to one. This opinion, according to which the content of a concept is always vital, is always a possible activity or passivity, has not been maintained, as far as I know, by anyone before now, but it seems to me to be the inevitable outcome of the philosophical processes initiated by Kant. Hence, if by its light, we examine the whole past of philosophy up to the time of Kant, it will seem to us that, at bottom, all philosophers have said the same thing. Well, then, every philosophical discovery is nothing else than an uncovering, a bringing to the surface, of what was lying in the depths.

But this is an inordinate introduction to what I am going to say; something quite foreign to philosophical problems. I was simply going to say that what is actually happening in the world of history is this and this alone: for three centuries Europe has been the ruler in the world, and now Europe is no longer sure that she is, or will continue to be, the ruler. To reduce to such a simple formula the historic reality of the present time is doubtless, at the best, an exaggeration, and hence the need I was in of recalling that to think is, whether you want or no, to exaggerate. If you prefer not to exaggerate, you must remain silent; or, rather, you must paralyse your intellect and find some way of becoming an idiot.

I believe, then, that this is what is happening in the world at present, and that all the rest is mere consequence, condition, symptom, or incident of the first. I have not said that Europe has ceased to rule, but that in these times, Europe feels grave doubts as to whether she does rule or not, as to whether she will rule tomorrow. Corresponding to this, there is in the other peoples of the earth a related state of mind, a doubt as to whether they are at present ruled by anyone. They also are not sure of it.

There has been a lot of talk in recent years about the decadence of Europe. I would ask people not to be so simple-minded as to think of Spengler immediately the decadence of Europe or of the West is mentioned. Before his book appeared, everyone was talking of this matter, and as is well known, the success of his book was due to the fact that the suspicion was already existing in people’s minds, in ways and for reasons of the most heterogeneous.

There has been so much talk of the decadence of Europe, that many have come to take it for a fact. Not that they believe in it seriously and on proof, but that they have grown used to take it as true, though they cannot honestly recall having convinced themselves decidedly in the matter at any fixed time. Waldo Frank’s recent book The Rediscovery of America is based entirely on the supposition that Europe is at its last gasp. And yet, Frank neither analyses nor discusses, nor submits to question this enormous fact, which is to serve him as a formidable premise. Without further investigation, he starts from it as from something incontrovertible. And this ingenuousness at the very start is sufficient to make me think that Frank is not convinced of the decadence of Europe; far from it, he has never set himself the problem. He takes it as he would take a tram. Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation. And as he does, so do many others. Above all, it is done by nations, whole nations.

The world at the present day is behaving in a way which is a very model of childishness. In school, when someone gives the word that the master has left the class, the mob of youngsters breaks loose, kicks up its heels, and goes wild. Each of them experiences the delights of escaping the pressure imposed by the master’s presence; of throwing off the yoke of rule, of feeling himself the master of his fate. But as, once the plan which directed their occupations and tasks is suspended, the youthful mob has no formal occupation of its own, no task with a meaning, a continuity, and a purpose, it follows that it can only do one thing—stand on its head. The frivolous spectacle offered by the smaller nations today is deplorable. Because it is said that Europe is in decadence and has given over ruling, every tuppenny-ha’penny nation starts skipping, gesticulating, standing on its head or else struts around giving itself airs of a grown-up person who is the ruler of his own destinies. Hence the vibrionic panorama of ‘nationalisms’ that meets our view everywhere.

In previous chapters I attempted to put in his classification a new type of man who today predominates in the world: I called him the mass-man, and I observed that his main characteristic lies in that, feeling himself ‘common’, he proclaims the right to be common, and refuses to accept any order superior to himself. It was only natural that if this mentality is predominant in every people, it should be manifest also when we consider the nations as a group. There are then also relatively mass-peoples determined on rebelling against the great creative peoples, the minority of human stocks which have organized history. It is really comic to see how this or the other puny republic, from its out-of-the-way corner, stands up on tip-toe, starts rebuking Europe, and declares that she has lost her place in universal history.

What is the result? Europe had created a system of standards whose efficacy and productiveness the centuries have proved. Those standards are not the best possible, far from it. But they are, without a doubt, definite standards as long as no others exist or are visualized. Before supplanting them, it is essential to produce others. Now, the mass-peoples have decided to consider as bankrupt that system of standards which European civilization implies, but as they are incapable of creating others, they do not know what to do, and to pass the time they kick up their heels and stand on their heads. Such is the first consequence which follows when there ceases to be in the world anyone who rules; the rest, when they break into rebellion, are left without a task to perform, without a programme of life.

3

The gypsy in the story went to confession, but the cautious priest asked him if he knew the commandments of the law of God. To which the gypsy replied: ‘Well, Father, it’s this way: I was going to learn them, but I heard talk that they were going to do away with them.’

Is not this the situation in the world at present? The rumour is running round that the commandments of the law of Europe are no longer in force, and in view of this, men and peoples are taking the opportunity of living without imperatives. For the European were the only ones that existed. It is not a question— as has happened previously—of new standards springing up to displace the old, or of a new fervour absorbing in its youthful vigour the old enthusiasms of diminishing temperature. That would be the natural procedure. Furthermore, the old is proved to be old not because it is itself falling into senility, but because it has against it a new principle which, by the fact of being new, renders old the pre-existing. If we had no children, we should not be old, or should take much longer to get old. The same happens with machines. A motor-car ten years old seems older than a locomotive of twenty years ago, simply because the inventions of motor production have followed one another with greater rapidity. This decadence, which has its source in the rising-up of fresh youth, is a symptom of health.

But what is happening at present in Europe is something unhealthy and unusual. The European commandments have lost their force, though there is no sign of any others on the horizon. Europe—we are told—is ceasing to rule, and no one sees who is going to take her place. By Europe we understand primarily and probably the trinity of France, England, Germany. It is in the portion of the globe occupied by these that there has matured that mode of human existence in accordance with which the world has been organized. If, as is now announced, these three peoples are in decadence, and their programme of life has lost its validity, it is not strange that the world is becoming demoralized.

And such is the simple truth. The whole world—nations and individuals—is demoralized. For a time this demoralization rather amuses people, and even causes a vague illusion. The lower ranks think that a weight has been lined off them. Decalogues retain from the time they were written on stone or bronze their character of heaviness. The etymology of command conveys the notion of putting a load into someone’s hands. He who commands cannot help being a bore. Lower ranks the world over are tired of being ordered and commanded, and with holiday air take advantage of a period freed from burdensome imperatives. But the holiday does not last long. Without commandments, ob...