Gabriel Tarde had seen the difference and invented the notion of
"publics", that is the "crowd" that reads a mass-circulation paper
but never meets, a notion that later founded the study of mass
communications. So Ortega could claim originality in trying to
develop a psychology of the members of social masses, to study their
tastes and opinions. Moreover, his colorful and somewhat arbitrary
account of that mentality contained an unexpected element that
changed the direction of the whole discussion. He said that mass-man
at his crassest, most ignorant, and dangerous could nevertheless be
highly educated.

Compare that thought with the description of the mass outbreaks that
terrorized the English gentry given in the essay "The Many-headed
Monster", in Christopher Hill's Change and Continuity in Seventeenth
Century England. The mobs that were a menace to society were held to
consist of ignorant brutes, unruly clowns, enraged beasts. Updated
from age to age, that was the commonly assumed view of the
threatening masses that persisted down to les classes dangereuses of
the nineteenth century. Ortega helped change that. He not only saw
that (in John Carey's words), "The difference between the nineteenth
century mob and the twentieth century mass is literacy." He went
further and specified that teachers, doctors, scientists, financiers,
and all manner of specialists could clump together into a dangerous
asocial mass that could destroy a polity and debase a culture.
François Furet lately recalled the newness of Ortega's thought at the
time, saying in Le passé d'une illusion (1995), "The new thing . . .
is the discovery that this 'man of the masses' is not, or not
necessarily, an illiterate and uneducated person." Ortega had seen
educated northern Italy fall for Mussolini and the most cultivated
nation in Europe was falling for Hitler. "So fascism finds its cradle
not in archaic societies but in modern ones. . . ."

Nietzsche had reported that even philosophers could today have
plebeian souls, so that there exist civilized barbarians and educated
philistines. But Ortega was the first to advance the notion that "the
most immediate cause of European demoralization . . . this rebirth of
primitivism and barbarism" lay not in the restive rabble or delirious
crowds or toiling masses but in the ignorant presumption of educated
specialists, particularly scientists and technicians. If true, it
would be a despairing thought. We would no longer have Matthew
Arnold's dichotomy of culture and anarchy, but a culture that
produced anarchy, a headlong rush into cultural decadence and
political disaster led by learned ignoramuses with the souls of
mass-men.

Despairing or not, it is a notion that has become current coin, as
witness two recent books out of Germany. Peter Schneider, a leader of
the 1968 Berlin student movement who has become très assagi, uses
precisely Ortega's language, in his Vom Ende der Gewissheit (Berlin,
1994), to denounce the rebirth of barbarism in present-day Germany,
and notably the fact that the children of educated middle class
families are "like little beasts, dehumanized, or rather they never
were human." Hans Magnus Enzensberger, in his Civil War (London,
1994), uses similar terms to describe the spread of thuggery in a
prosperous educated society and calls for an effort to stop the
rebirth of German barbarism, unless we have "an excessive taste for
continuity", that is, unless we want to go back to the situation
Ortega was describing in 1930. It is another matter whether what he
was seeing was mass-man in action, but at least events since that
date incline us all to accept as readily as Schneider or Enzensberger
Ortega's point that cultured society can produce barbarity.

He offered that thought just when the notion of the threatening
masses, as inherited from the nineteenth century, was in need of
serious revision. By 1930 it was clear that the proletariat had
shrunk to a (sizable) minority in Western societies and there was
less prospect of a working class revolution than of a classless
fascist takeover. So, says Salvador Giner in Mass Society (1976),
Ortega accomplished the necessary revision by transferring prevailing
notions about the lower classes to the newly emergent middle class of
educated specialists and linking them to totalitarian movements. That
is why, Patrick Brantlinger says, "The Revolt of the Masses is a sort
of Communist Manifesto in reverse. . . . The uprising of Ortega's
mass nobodies . . . spells the demise of Marxist hopes for a
proletarian revolution." It would turn out to be as unreliable a
guide to the future as the Manifesto, but at least it was decked out
in up-to-date dress.

Indeed, many of its ideas had been in the air. What Heidegger in Sein
und Zeit (1927) had called inauthentic life, the world of das Man,
sounded like Ortega's mass-man, whose thinking (or inability to
think) showed the features of what Lukacs and the Marxists were
calling "reification." Wyndham Lewis, in The Art of Being Ruled
(1926), had included the scientists in the scorned masses. The Revolt
appeared at the same time as F.R. Leavis' Mass Civilization and
Minority Culture, which argued that the mass media had brought about
"an overthrow of standards" and that "the intellectual and artistic
minority was cut off as never before from the powers that rule the
world", precisely Ortega's theme. There was in some parts of the
intelligentsia a panic fear of the masses, which stimulated an
interest in eugenics that the Nazis would have approved. D.H.
Lawrence was hoping that the masses would "fall into death in
millions", and Aldous Huxley decreed in 194, "Universal education has
created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid."

Such a climate guaranteed an enthusiastic reception for The Revolt.
It was eventually translated into more than a dozen languages and was
a minor bestseller in the United States and Germany through the 1990s.
Its argument for meritocracy and condemnation of collectivism help
explain its U.S. success, but its popularity in Germany both before
and under Nazi rule is interesting. Favor with a mass audience should
have dismayed Ortega but, instead, he boasted he was the most widely
read contemporary philosopher. The Atlantic Monthly maintained that,
"What Rousseau's Contrat Social was for the eighteenth century and
Karl Marx's Das Kapital was for the nineteenth, Revolt of the Masses
should be for the twentieth century." This was patently absurd but
that has not stopped Norton and Company reproducing that claim on the
cover of their 1993 re-issue of the English translation, first
published in 1932. Not only do re-issues continue (numbering in the
twenties and thirties in various languages) but a new translation,
with a prologue by Saul Bellow, appeared in the United States in
1985. The communists had no use for Ortega, whom their Lexikon A-Z in
einem Band (Leipzig, 1955) dismissed as "an extreme reactionary and
individualist philosopher." But most other shades of opinion, from
liberal to fascist, found something sympathetic in this ambiguous and
basically confused book.

The tradition in which Ortega's book is inscribed, and within which
we might seek its influence, is twofold: the sociological theory that
there is such a thing as "mass society", on the one hand; and on the
other, the study of "mass culture", the joint consequence of
universal education and the large-scale reproduction and circulation
of cultural materials.

The Homogenized Society

The theory of mass society holds that, whereas earlier societies were
internally diversified, industrial democracies have eradicated the
elements of diversity as incompatible with political equality and
economic efficiency. This homogenization of society has destroyed
much that was old and precious (if not sacred) in social intercourse,
leaving individuals identical but "atomized", lonely, separated, and
self-satisfied in a moral desert, vulnerable to regimentation by
bureaucracies. A corollary, associated with Hannah Arendt, is that
masses of such individuals can seek refuge in ideological fanaticism,
turning from the old political parties to totalitarian movements that
promise something better than moral apathy and secular disbelief.

Thus the theory is offered as an explanation of the major political
events of the twentieth century, as well as an account of its social
life, the world of mass-man, alienated, unfree, resentful, and
manipulated. There are countless variations on this theme, which, as
Giner said, is too "loose and unfalsifiable" to deserve the name of
theory, too much colored by the pathos of cultural pessimism to serve
in analysis and explanation. That did not prevent the theory of mass
society from being, as Daniel Bell said in 1956, the most powerful
idea in the Western world after Marxism; and in 1962 Edward Shils
described it as the specter that was haunting sociology.

Ortega eloquently brought together many threads of this sociological
figment as they existed in 1930 but it cannot be said that he
contributed much to its further development--except his captivating
title, for sundry later authors had a chapter or section called "the
revolt of the masses" or played with variations such as "the revolt
from the masses" (Bachrach), the "rape of the masses" (Chakhotin),
"the revolt against the elite" (Viereck), or the "revolt of the
elites" (Lasch) and so on. (In the muddle ground between ideology and
reason, a striking title and an ambiguous theme can go a long way.)
Karl Jaspers was writing his Man in the Modern Age (1931) at the time
of Ortega's success, and since he argued there that the issue of the
day was the struggle of selfhood against the mass order, he hailed
The Revolt, and continued to cite it in later works. Gabriel Marcel,
the Catholic existentialist, acknowledged a debt to Ortega in his
book variously translated as Men Against Humanity and Man Against
Mass Society, and he showed that a French Christian could be as
tough-minded as a Spanish atheist by declaring that the mass was "a
degraded state of the human", beyond true education, capable only of
being trained, like animals.

Essay Types: Book Review