Society as Aristocratic: Towards a Clarification of the Meaning of “Society” in Ortega’s The Revolt of the Masses

Abstract

It is an understatement to say of The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset, as did Geoffrey Clive, that “it is hard to think of a book written in the last fifty years [or so] that was more propitiously launched and more ideally matched in terms of subject matter to the prevailing ambience … .”¹ Paradoxically, the book’s extraordinary international fame/infamy rests upon a misreading because of general ignorance of its historical context. As succinctly put by Ortega’s leading disciple, Julián Marías: “The Revolt of the Masses, written in one (historical] ‘climate,’ was read in another, from a politicized viewpoint, that took it for a book about politics [rather than a study of society], even though its author had said expressedly the contrary. … If the enormous diffusion of the book [especially through translations] had occurred a few years previously, its interpretation would have been more correct and its effects more profound.”² That is to say, a historical shift of “generations” occurred only one year after its publication such that Europe began to be defined by a vastly greater degree of politicization than had characterized the previous generational period of 1919–1931.³ As a result, the overt theme of the study, “the revolt of the masses,” took on solely political overtones — overtones that muddled the underlying, and more philosophically important, theme of the nature of society, of any society, as aristocratic.