There are some questionable ideas in The Revolt of the Masses, but it contains many important observations. In our era of growing illiberalism, it is fitting to look back on the book some nine decades after it first appeared in English.

The mass-man and the state / Ortega views the revolt of the masses as the most important fact of his time. The “mass-man” (including the mass-woman, of course) is the “average man,” “not specially qualified,” “undifferentiated.” Mass-men are those “for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection.” It should be noted this is not class theory. Ortega makes clear that we often see “nobly disciplined minds” in working classes, while in the upper classes of surviving nobility and among intellectuals we frequently find “the mass and the vulgar.”

The mass-man does not have a moral code. He wants rights without obligations. He rejects “courtesy, truthfulness and, above all, respect or esteem for superior individuals.” The “superabundance” brought by a growing standard of living has turned the mass-man into a sort of “heir-man,” akin to the spoiled child and the hereditary aristocrat. The mass-man’s inheritance, Ortega tells us, is civilization with its conveniences, its security, and all its advantages such as “marvellous instruments, healing medicines, watchful governments, comfortable privileges.” But the ignorant mass-man doesn’t realize that the maintenance of these benefits requires the respect of certain liberal institutions.

The masses don’t just have empty opinions, they also dominate politics through the “hyperdemocracy” that has replaced the old democracy in which minorities could live “under the shelter of liberal principles and the rule of law.” Without referring to “some higher authority,” which includes “superior individuals,” the mass is a mob—“it lynches.” “The masses” is another name for the new middle class that appeared at the end of the 18th century and took over the state. In Ortega’s mind, these are the masses who rebel.

The state is “the greatest danger that to-day threatens civilization.” It absorbs “all spontaneous social effort.” Inherited from liberal democracy, the state takes over society. Ortega quotes Mussolini’s maxim: “All for the State; nothing outside the State; nothing against the State.” Fascism is “a typical movement of mass-men.” The state, now occupied by the masses, endeavours to “crush the independence of the individual and the group.” Hence “the enormous increase in the police forces of all countries” except England where, Ortega specifies, the state faces limits.

Authority and spontaneous order / The Revolt of the Masses shows a tension between liberty and authority. Ortega makes statements like, “The function of commanding and obeying is the decisive one in every society.” He idolizes the new democratic national state based on a common programme of action instead of blood and language. Of course, he did not know public choice analysis, which a few decades later would show how imperfect are the processes of majoritarian democracy. The reader must remember that the book was published in 1930.

Ortega believed that the “demoralization of Europe” led to its abandonment of world leadership, which led to the demoralization of the world and the rebellion of the undirected masses. He still hoped that Europe would reject communism, an imminent threat at the time; fortunately, he explained, the European is an individualist. But he thought that this would require “the building-up of Europe into a great national State,” a surprising hope for the time.

The ideal national state, Ortega argues, brings together everybody in “a plan of common life with an enterprise in common.” “The subjects,” he writes, “are now the State.” He did not seem to understand the distinction, formulated by French political theorist Benjamin Constant in the 19th century, between the ancient conception of liberty, which is collective liberty, and the modern liberal concept of individual liberty. When the author of The Revolt of the Masses writes that “either I rule or I obey,” he seems to think that “I” can rule collectively without “I” then having to obey the collective. The Spanish philosopher, who was obviously not familiar with economics, did not fully understand the possibilities of a spontaneous (or autoregulated) social order. Hayek later explained how, in such a social order, each individual is free to pursue his own individual goals without someone or some group giving him commands.

Incomplete liberalism / In a vibrant passage that Hayek used in part as a chapter epigraph in his Law, Legislation, and Liberty trilogy, Ortega wrote:

Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at its own expense, to leave room in the State over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority. Liberalism … is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. … It was incredible that the human species should have arrived at so noble an attitude, so paradoxical, so refined, so acrobatic, so anti-natural. Hence, it is not to be wondered at that this same humanity should soon appear anxious to get rid of it.

The Revolt of the Masses is, however, silent about the institutions that are necessary to restrain the majority and buttress this generosity. The quote ignores that what is at play is so much generosity as an ethics of reciprocity that is in everybody’s enlightened self-interest. (See “An Enlightenment Thinker,” Spring 2022.)

Another tension we find in The Revolt of the Masses is between the dignity of the individual and the mass-men produced by hyperdemocracy. The distinction that should be made more explicitly in the book is between, on the one hand, the dignity of “natural equals” (in James Buchanan’s terminology) who in a constitutional democracy mostly govern themselves individually and are ipso facto responsible for their actions, and on the other hand the scorn well-earned by the mass men who pretend to govern others.

The middle class and the good life / As we have seen, Ortega identifies the mass-men as being comprised largely of the prosperous middle class that appeared in the 19th century. He does not seem to fully realize that this middle class generated the Great Enrichment, that self-interest on the market is beneficial to virtually everybody, and that what is detrimental is when a group tries to govern others.

The middle-class issue can be related to the apparent disdain that the Spanish philosopher expresses for the consumer society. This brings back the old philosophical question of whether the good life is the easy life or, instead, a “noble” life of effort and struggle. (See “Fukuyama: Interesting Books, With Some Baggage,” Fall 2022.) Ortega blames the mass-man for abandoning himself to indolence and inertia. I would argue that the terms of the debate must be changed: in the libertarian or classical liberal perspective, each individual makes his own choice as to whether he wants to be a hero or an ordinary person or someone in between.

There is a less critical way to read The Revolt of the Masses. According to the late professor Francisco Lopez Frias of the University of Barcelona, Ortega’s conception of the heroic life was not as elitist as we might think. Lopez explains, paraphrasing Ortega:

Authentic heroic behavior is that based on not renouncing any of the responsibilities and obligations presented, and that goes for individual situations as well as collective ones. The hero is not, then, the exception, but the norm, the everyday. … Liberals must accept responsibility and refuse to renounce a single liberty, no matter how insignificant it may seem.

Acute observations / In the process of grappling with these difficult issues and without the benefit of the knowledge we have gained over the past hundred years, Ortega frequently makes acute observations and prescient predictions. He tells us that, when the mass-man reads, he “does so with the view, not of learning something from the writer, but rather of pronouncing judgment on him when he is not in agreement with the commonplaces that the said reader carries in his head.” Don’t we meet many such mass-men today?

Ortega views “the scientific man” produced by 19th-century technicism as the prototype of the mass-man. Science is essential, of course: “China reached a high degree of technique without in the least suspecting the existence of physics,” he writes. “It is only modern European technique that has a scientific basis, from which it derives its special character, its possibility of limitless progress.” But science requires narrow specialization. Thus, the scientific man has no culture. Contrary to Einstein, “who needed to saturate himself with Kant and Mach before his own synthesis,” the typical scientific man is “astoundingly mediocre, and even less than mediocre.” He is “a learned ignoramus.” Perhaps a good example in our own days is the public health expert. (See “The Dangers of ‘Public Health,’” Fall 2015.)

Ortega’s mass-men seem to prefigure the obscurantist era that we seem to be entering today. The mass-man is not interested in the conditions of civilization, even in the conditions of science, which provides him with “his motor-car … but he believes that it is the spontaneous fruit of an Edenic tree.” He is like a primitive with no knowledge of history and who cannot but repeat mistakes of the past.

Historically and culturally tabula rasa, Ortega’s mass-man often resembles today’s woke or MAGA. He does not believe in reason and a world of intelligible truths. He “accepts the stock of commonplaces, prejudices, fag-ends of ideas or simply empty words which chance has piled up within his mind, and with a boldness only explicable by his ingenuousness, is prepared to impose them everywhere.” Intellectually, he is a barbarian. “Hardly anyone offers any resistance to the superficial whirlwinds that arise in art, in ideas, in politics, or in social usages.”

Still, Ortega believed that the forces of darkness would be defeated. He makes an astonishing prediction: “There is now coming for Europeans the time when Europe can convert itself into a national idea … a gigantic continental state.” Given what happened a decade after The Revolt of the Masses appeared, its author was certainly right to fear ethnicism and nationalism. The European Union partly owes its existence to Europeans’ fear of another war.

We have seen that Ortega’s liberalism is not egalitarian in the socialist sense of an equal wisdom of everybody to politically dictate how others should live. Many if not most libertarians and classical liberals would agree with this idea in the context of formal equality before the law and a limited state. In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek wrote, “The liberal, of course, does not deny that there are some superior people—he is not an egalitarian—but he denies that anyone has authority to decide who these superior people are.”

We might read The Revolt of the Masses as the work of a philosopher in search of classical liberalism.

Readings

• Law, Legislation, and Liberty, by F.A. Hayek, edited by Jeremy Shearmur. University of Chicago Press, 2022.
• “Ortega y Gasset: On Being Liberal in Spain,” by Francisco Lopez Frias. Analecta Husserliana 29: 149–166 (1990).
• The Constitution of Liberty, by F.A. Hayek. Henry Regnery Company, 1960.