These intemperate lamentations are the first and the latest links in a tradition that includes, prominently, Ortega's Revolt. He chimed in soon after Heidegger had declared in Sein und Zeit (section 27):

In utilizing public means of transport or in making use of information services such as the newspaper, every Other is like the next. This Being-with-one-another dissolves one's own Dasein [existence] completely into the kind of Being of 'the Others', in such a way indeed that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the 'they' is unfolded.

In case that was not perfectly clear, Heidegger was saying that every time you get on a bus or open a newspaper, you wipe out your selfhood and fall victim to the dictatorship of the masses - apparently even if the newspaper does not have pictures.

Ortega put this more accessibly, forcefully, and colorfully in "the classical intellectual account of the advent of mass culture in the early twentieth century" (Carey). He went beyond J.S. Mill who in 1859 had said in On Liberty, "The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.... At present individuals are lost in the crowd." He did so by insisting on the baleful influence of mass taste on the creativity proper to the select minority. Because the mass was vulgar and insolent, it dominated the age and instituted the rule of barbarism over taste. This would have been difficult to prove (even supposing Ortega could ever be bothered with proofs of his utterances) because, although the mass production of kitsch and cheap entertainment is obvious, so is the unprecedented volume of output of high-culture materials, and it is often cross-subsidized, via record companies and publishing houses, by mass culture. Ortega could not foresee Marcuse's bizarre argument that when a classical work - say, Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal - is mass-produced in paperback, it ceases to be high art and becomes another instrument of repressive tolerance, because genuine art must be inaccessible to the masses. But Ortega came near, as when in The Dehumanization of Art, he approved contemporary abstract painting because the mass failed to understand it and left the elites to appreciate it undisturbed. Actually, Ortega did not particularly like it himself, but he rejoiced to see the sheep separated from the goats. Snobbery has rarely been more insolent.

His broadside against popular taste was welcomed by those artists and intellectuals who were engaged in Modernism's effort to bamboozle the common people. Johan Huizinga in In the Shadow of Tomorrow (1935) commended Ortega's diagnosis of the "puerilism" of the day, "that blend of adolescence and barbarity", the "worldwide bastardization of culture", "the entry of half-educated masses into the international traffic of the mind", and the links it all had with totalitarianism: "the spectacle of a society rapidly goose-stepping into helotry." Huizinga's contempt for his age persisted in Homo Ludens (1938). T.S. Eliot also was enthusiastic about Ortega; in the arbitrary game of ascribing sins to mass-man, Eliot threw in "the new paganism" (which would not have bothered Ortega), while deploring liberalism, which Ortega claimed to represent, for paving the way for fascism. Under their differences of temper and opinion, they were united only in the Odi profanum vulgus.

This whole story, in which Ortega's part was accessory, is best told in John Carey's magisterial The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939 (London, 1992). The first chapter is called "The Revolt of the Masses." He notes that when Geoffrey Grigson founded the periodical New Verse in 1933, the first number began with a salute to Ortega for describing the vulgarization of the arts produced by the revolt of the masses, and announced that the aim of the periodical was to let writers talk to each other free from the limitations of mass intelligence. Carey sees this as emblematic:

[T]he principle around which modernist literature and culture fashioned themselves was the exclusion of the masses, the defeat of their power, the removal of their literacy, the denial of their humanity. What this intellectual effort failed to acknowledge was that the masses do not exist.... The metaphor of the mass serves the purposes of individual self-assertion because it turns other people into a conglomerate. It denies them the individuality which we ascribe to ourselves and to people we know.

Ortega and the Nazis

If the "mass" concept served only the self-assertion of intellectuals, it would be pretty harmless. But it obviously can serve another purpose, as when Hitler said, "Russians exist only en masse and that explains their brutality" - the purpose, namely, of dehumanizing candidates for destruction. There is, in fact, a faint but disturbing aroma of authoritarianism, thinly disguised as cultural snobbery, about Ortega's whole theory of mass society. We do not have to go as far as George Lukacs when he judged Ortega (like Heidegger) guilty of preparing the Hitlerite ideology, of making a suitable atmosphere for fascism, with his anti-democratic, aristocratic philosophy of society. But his sympathies and his silences do attract attention to the seamier implications of mass-man theory. Now, this is odd, because it is precisely the exponents of mass society theory who claim (as Hannah Arendt did in The Origins of Totalitarianism) to have discovered one of the very causes of fascism. There is a chiasma of ideas here that would be interesting to dissect.

Ortega was capable of spurning the Nazis as vulgar and then embracing their pet theories. For example, in The Revolt he says that "the reality of history lies in biological power, in pure vitality, in what there is in man of cosmic energy, not identical with but related to the energy which agitates the sea, fecundates the beast, causes the tree to flower and the star to shine." Against that biological undertow, politics and culture are "the mere surface of history." Later he dismisses culture and nationality as secondary historical elements compared with "vitality." Moreover, this peculiar substance "vitality" seems to be what distinguishes the elites from the masses, and gives them their right to rule and to determine taste. He can give no better account of them than that they try harder, they do not spare themselves, whereas mass-man is lazy and unambitious.

But we are not told what they try harder at, what their policies are; remembering that Pareto said there was an elite in every calling, including among bank-robbers, we can see that this is not a theory to disturb Nazi "elites" any more than Heidegger's mysterious distinction between "authentic" and "inauthentic" life. Ortega was later to criticize Jean-Paul Sartre's engagement as "nihilistic" and an incitation to mindless activism, but it is only his enormous self-confidence that prevents him seeing that he does no better when he cheers on his faceless elites. This fatal vagueness is, of course, the nemesis of all elitist theory in politics, once it claims to say anything more than the banality that fewer people give orders than take them.

Patrick Brantlinger points out that after Ortega jettisons mass culture and then the scientific and technical elements of high culture, "there remains only a set of reactionary political attitudes" that are frequently difficult to distinguish from fascism. His politics "fails to transcend ideas and attitudes - nostalgia for lost authority, a loathing for the vulgar and common man, distrust of science and democratic procedures - compatible with the fascism he sees as one of the most tragic consequences of the revolt of the masses." That is, no doubt, why he was invited by José Antonio Prima de Rivera, founder of the Falange and son of the former dictator of Spain, to become the movement's intellectual leader. He refused, but then he despised all politics. (His son fought the civil war in the Nationalist army.)

Ortega got his higher education in Germany, and scholars have shown that German sources can be identified for most of his ideas (notably the American scholar Nelson Orringer in his Ortega y sus fuentes germanicas, Madrid, 1979). Certainly in writing The Revolt he was squarely in that tradition of conservative imperial Germany which held that the Teutonic soul was threatened by "Americanization", meaning Mammon, materialism, colossal machines, and mass society. Now this is one of those home-grown leather-breeches and rye-bread ideologies that fed directly into Nazism, as Fritz Stern showed in his classic study, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (1961). Nazism, he says, did not come from Versailles or Weimar - nor, we must now add, from mass-man either - but from supposed elites, educated people often in established positions, who were heirs to a century-old national frustration and galling cultural discontent, which inspired in them nationalist fantasies and the idealism of anti-modernity.Ortega got his higher education in Germany, and scholars have shown that German sources can be identified for most of his ideas (notably the American scholar Nelson Orringer in his Ortega y sus fuentes germanicas, Madrid, 1979). Certainly in writing The Revolt he was squarely in that tradition of conservative imperial Germany which held that the Teutonic soul was threatened by "Americanization", meaning Mammon, materialism, colossal machines, and mass society. Now this is one of those home-grown leather-breeches and rye-bread ideologies that fed directly into Nazism, as Fritz Stern showed in his classic study, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (1961). Nazism, he says, did not come from Versailles or Weimar - nor, we must now add, from mass-man either - but from supposed elites, educated people often in established positions, who were heirs to a century-old national frustration and galling cultural discontent, which inspired in them nationalist fantasies and the idealism of anti-modernity.

Forces of that sort were infinitely more important in Germany in 1930 than the developments that obsessed Ortega, such as the common people's challenge to the political and cultural dominance of their betters. That was going on everywhere, but the very societies where political equality and universal education were carried furthest, such as the United States, were the least tempted by totalitarianism (as Arendt admitted). The elaborate argument about how the modern world had atomized and leveled and isolated individuals into insolent mass-men who were about to seize power was just another variation of the anti-modernism it was called in to explain.