Given there are posted reviews going back 10 years on this book and given the intellectual culture of the reviewers, I find it astonishing that many of them have failed to grasp why this book is so chillingly relevant to understand the formation of modern democracy.
First remember it was published in 1930 and written at the end of the 1920's. It is a mesmerizing prediction of coming somber events and an invaluable report of the political and philosophical ideas being debated then. 85 years after we can live the futility of extremist arguments and their disastrous consequences in history. Having had in my family people fighting for all sides in the Spanish civil war, it gives me perspective, understanding why the folly of putting fancy avant-garde holistic ideas before natural freedom and justice is simply an intolerable basis on which to build human societies.
Second, saying that José Ortega y Gasset is an elitist, insinuating he supports a self-perpetuating commanding class is in my view a MAJOR and awkward misreading of his work. Because he is EXACTLY the opposite of that: a man who profoundly believes in liberal democracy and is afraid of how lightly the established elites are using Freedom to satisfy their own power-seizing urges, overlooking its fragility and the enormous price paid to establish it in the first place. In the original Spanish version, he calls them "los señoritos" which is a derogatory term to talk about self-sufficient elites who acquired their status not by merit but by heritage or undeserving means. Suffice to read other essays from him like "The Dehumanization of art and Ideas about the Novel" to understand from a complete different angle, his nuanced position towards the elites, on the one hand admiring and calling for the leadership and creation that comes through meritocracy, on the other despising the self perpetuating and castle building mechanisms that come with elites that do not owe their current position to merit.
To me the Revolt of the Masses is a must read work from a brilliant philosopher whose intellectual honesty and realism allowed him to passionately try to perform a Crime Scene Investigation of extremism before the crime had even happened. With the retrospective of 85 years, you will succumb to vertigo when comparing your knowledge of future events with the initial vision from Ortega y Gasset. The kind of vertigo that comes with profoundly impressive and relevant revelations pertaining to our very nature as human beings.
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Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on September 30, 2011
- Reviewed in the United States on April 12, 2017
Top reviews from other countries
- Alex GibsonReviewed in the United Kingdom on February 25, 2020
great book on the relationship between evolving democracy and collectivism
