Ortega y Gasset and the hombre-masa

A newspaper serial in a collapsing dictatorship

The chapters arrived a few at a time. Through 1929 the Madrid daily El Sol printed La rebelión de las masas in instalments, while the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera ran out of credit and collapsed the following January. The book came in 1930. An authorised English translation, The Revolt of the Masses, followed in 1932, and its translator asked not to be named.

Ortega wasn't writing from a distance. In February 1931 he signed a manifesto with the physician Gregorio Marañón and the novelist Ramón Pérez de Ayala, proposing a republic as the road past the blind alleys of Communism and Fascism. That June he won a seat in the Constituent Cortes for León. He lasted a year. In October 1932 he wound up the group he had helped found, the Agrupación al Servicio de la República, and in August 1936, six weeks into the civil war, he left Spain.

"Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia." José Ortega y Gasset, Meditaciones del Quijote, 1914

Who the hombre-masa actually is

The decisive fact of the age, as Ortega saw it, was that the masses had come into full social power. This needs care. He doesn't mean the poor, the industrial working class, or the crowd outside a stadium. Mass is a psychological type, the hombre-masa or mass-man, and he finds it in every stratum, the professions and the old aristocracy included. A duke can be one. So can a surgeon.

Two traits define him. First, he discovers that he's like everybody else, and the discovery pleases him; his own ordinariness becomes a right to assert, never a starting point to work from. Second, he was born inside a civilisation of enormous complexity, liberal democracy and anaesthetics and grain shipments and appeal courts, and he takes the whole apparatus as a natural given, like weather. Ortega's name for him is the señorito satisfecho, the satisfied rich boy who has never seen a bill.

The sharpest case in the book is the specialist, who gets a chapter to himself: La barbarie del especialismo, the barbarism of specialisation. A man knows one square metre of physics. He knows it properly. Then he crosses every other field with the confidence his one square metre earned him, and Ortega files him under sabio-ignorante, the learned ignoramus. The machinery that produces good science produces him too, which is what makes him hard to legislate against. Stupidity is old news. The new thing is competence that has stopped noticing its own edges.

They arrive vertically. Ortega takes the phrase invasión vertical de los bárbaros, a vertical invasion of the barbarians, from Walther Rathenau. These barbarians have crossed no frontier. They were born inside the walls, and a fresh cohort is delivered every generation, which is why he treats the problem as permanent and never as an episode with a date on it.

Civilisation mistaken for weather

Here is the mechanism, stated flatly. A civilisation is a set of arrangements that exist only while somebody maintains them: a currency, a court, a vaccination schedule, a grid. Each was built by people who knew what it cost, because they paid. Their heirs get the benefit and never see the bill. If nobody transmits the reason and the discipline along with the benefit, the heirs will take the arrangement for a fact of nature and demand its outputs while refusing the obligations that produce them. Ortega's charge fits in a line: the heir treats civilización, which was built, as naturaleza, which is simply there. Most accounts of why civilisations fall look to soil, silver or constitutional design. This one puts the failure in transmission. It can happen while the roads are excellent.

Run it as a test. Take an arrangement you benefit from, then ask who currently knows why it's built that way, what it costs to keep, and what they personally owe it. If the answer is nine people over sixty, you have Ortega's condition. G. K. Chesterton made the narrow version of the point in The Thing (1929), with the fence in the field that you shouldn't pull down until you know why it went up. Ortega's version is wider and worse: the fence, the field, the law of property and the surveyor's training, all at once.

The counter-type has to be earned weekly. Ortega's minoría selecta, the select minority, has nothing to do with birth or money, and it turns on a single demand: you ask more of yourself than anyone asks of you. Nobility in his usage names a life set on exceeding itself, and it lapses the moment you stop. You can lose it by Tuesday. He had a related word, ensimismamiento, for withdrawing into yourself to think instead of being knocked about by whatever is loudest. The line that anchors the whole system is older, from Meditaciones del Quijote in 1914: "Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia", I am I and my circumstance.

The objection Raymond Williams makes best

Elitism is the charge Ortega expected, and he had his answer ready, since the minoría selecta admits anyone willing to demand more of himself. The harder objection, and the one I can't get round, is that the hombre-masa can't be wrong. Nothing falsifies it. The type is defined by disposition, so every counter-example gets reassigned. The well-read man who irritates you becomes a sabio-ignorante. The docker reading Lucretius becomes an honorary member of the select minority. A category that no evidence can embarrass describes; it does not explain.

Raymond Williams put the general form of this in Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958), aiming it at the English writers who had been working the same figure. He argued that no masses exist anywhere, only habits of seeing other people that way, and that the word tells you where the speaker is standing. That lands on Ortega hard. It also explains the book's second life: a schema that flatters whoever wields it will never lack for wielders.

The book is thin as sociology too. There is no account of capital, of land tenure, of who owns the newspapers, of the party machines, and nothing on how a psychological type gets manufactured in the first place. Ortega gives portraiture where he owes causation. The readership problem is real as well: The Revolt of the Masses was taken up with enthusiasm by the anti-democratic right, by readers who had missed that Ortega treats Fascism and Bolshevism as two symptoms of one disease. The February 1931 manifesto is on the record. Both facts hold at once.

What it is still good for

Treat the argument as a maintenance checklist and it earns its keep. It leaves you a question you can answer inside a real organisation on a real day: for each arrangement we depend on, who understands the reason for it, and what happens in the year that person retires? Air traffic control has an answer. Academic peer review, mostly, doesn't. Ortega's vocabulary is what sends you to look.

Ortega's weakest claim is the one his admirers repeat most, that the type is spreading. He couldn't measure that. Neither can you, and neither can the man quoting him at you about standards. What survives is narrower and more useful: a society can lose a practice while every building still stands, because the practice lived inside people who were never asked to explain it, and the explaining is the expensive part. The test is unkind to whoever picks it up. The minoría selecta has no roll and no badge, only a requirement you fail privately, most weeks, including the week you write about somebody else's decline.