Ortega vs. the Right
A Comparison of Ortega y Gasset to Schmitt, Nietzsche, and Others on the Right
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Last week we laid out José Ortega y Gasset’s argument in The Revolt of the Masses that what he calls mass man—the trust-fund kid of modern civilization—has inherited what he takes for granted and cannot maintain. Everything we said about Ortega paints him as a man of the right. But a closer reading shows that picture to be complicated—Ortega disagrees with many of the deeper foundations of the political right.
This week we will directly compare Ortega to some of the greatest right-wing thinkers in history: Schmitt, Nietzsche, the absolutists, and the fascists. At the end of this essay, we will compare him to some of the currents in the modern radical right, to people living and working today, in our own circles. If he were alive today, would he be an Imperium reader, a BAPist, a groyper, or something else?
Ortega vs. Schmitt
Ortega forms a relatively neat contrast with Carl Schmitt. Despite both being “on the right,” their disagreements help to situate Ortega ideologically within that broad category.
Carl Schmitt was a jurist and legal philosopher in the Third Reich, one of the greatest legal philosophers of all time. His thought naturally stands far outside the conceptual categories of the modern West, but he was able to see liberalism from the outside in an important way.
Liberalism is generally characterized within academia (such as by David Starkey) as a form of minoritarianism. This does not necessarily mean that it favours ethnic minorities, though in practice it often does. What it means is that liberalism protects smaller groups from larger groups, and from this flows the liberal methodological approach of individualism—the individual being the smallest minority possible. On this score, liberalism is distinct from democracy because it protects minorities (including individuals) from the “tyranny of the majority.”
Schmitt adds another dimension to this view of liberalism that is helpful: in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, he ties liberal parliamentarism to the belief that open and public argument can produce relatively rational law. He sharply separates that from democracy, which for him means the identity of ruler and ruled within a homogeneous people. Once that identity is treated as decisive, Schmitt argues that even a minority—or a dictatorship—can embody the people’s true will. We need not agree with Schmitt on his definition of democracy (which bears little resemblance say, to classical Athenian democracy) to agree with him on the nature of liberalism: at least one essential fact of liberalism is its commitment to relatively open public discourse.
On that schema, Ortega is liberal in a recognizably Schmittian sense. He explicitly says that the older democracy was moderated by liberalism and law, under whose shelter minorities could act and live. He calls liberalism the political principle by which power limits itself and leaves room for those who think differently. Finally, he praises coexistence with opposition as one of civilization’s highest achievements, which places him against Schmitt at a crucial point. Ortega treats the collapse of discussion and the rise of “direct action” as barbarism, not as a more authentic politics. He says the mass man repudiates the kind of open discussion found in parliamentarism, and he treats that as a civilizational regression. He also says that while complaints against parliament may be justified, the answer is to reform parliament, not to abolish it, and that nineteenth-century parliaments built extraordinarily powerful states. On that point he is much closer to liberal parliamentarism than to Schmittian decisionism.
That said, Ortega is not a liberal democrat in the ordinary egalitarian sense, and this is where the Schmitt comparison becomes useful. His defense of minorities is openly aristocratic: minorities are the “especially qualified.” Society is in its essence aristocratic, and the mass is not fit to rule itself. He defends minority leadership because civilization depends on excellence, discipline, and standards that the average man is by definition not capable of. Put simply: liberalism is different than democracy; Ortega is a liberal, not a democrat.
Ortega vs. Nietzsche
Much in Ortega sounds vaguely, sometimes not so vaguely, Nietzschean. And he is Nietzschean—in part. He was deeply marked by Nietzsche, especially in his early formation and in the tone of his diagnosis of modernity. But the mature Ortega takes several recognizably Nietzschean themes and reroutes them through neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, Dilthey, and his own doctrines of vital reason and historical reason.
The most obvious Nietzschean dimension is Ortega’s critique of the mass. Ortega’s mass man belongs in the same family as Nietzsche’s herd: mass man is the conformist type who is content to be like everyone else and resents what stands above him. Ortega defines the mass as the person who feels himself “like everyone else,” while the select man is the one who “demands from himself more than the rest.” This Nietzscheanism is also seen in Ortega’s rank-ordering of human types. He is anti-levelling, anti-mediocrity, and is convinced that higher forms of life depend on self-overcoming. His contrast between mass and select minorities looks like a softened version of Nietzsche’s higher-man rhetoric, but it differs in an important way: his select man is not simply the one who dominates, but the one who imposes harder demands on himself.
The other main point of contact is perspectivism. Ortega and Nietzsche are often paired here, and not by accident, but with some differences. Although the theme of perspectival truth is commonly associated with Nietzsche and Ortega together, it is misleading to read Ortega as denying any authoritative criterion of truth. Ortega’s perspectivism tries, however successfully, to preserve truth through a plurality and hierarchy of perspectives.
There is also a broader family resemblance in their diagnosis of modern crisis. Ortega himself places Nietzsche among the thinkers who foresaw the coming age, writing in The Revolt of the Masses that Nietzsche “shouted” that nihilism was rising. Ortega shares Nietzsche’s sense that modern Europe faces a spiritual crisis, not just a technical or economic one. He is likewise suspicious of the self-satisfaction of modern man in all its complacent progressivism and levelling egalitarianism.
But Ortega is no Nietzschean. First, he is much more committed to reason. He does not overthrow reason in the name of life; he reformulates it as vital reason and later historical reason. Ortega wants a reason adequate to life, not a triumph of instinct over reason. Second, Ortega is less solitary and less self-creating than Nietzsche. Although his select individual resembles Nietzsche’s Übermensch, Ortega insists that the self realizes its possibilities through absorption in circumstance and through interaction with others, whereas Nietzsche’s highest type often appears as a lonely legislator of value. Ortega’s superior type is far more embedded in history, society, and inherited circumstance. Third, Ortega’s “nobility” is more duty-bound than Nietzschean. Ortega says the noble life is one of service to something higher, a marked difference from Nietzsche’s rhetoric of transvaluation. Ortega is more civic, more sober, and in some ways more classical than Nietzsche. Fourth and finally, Ortega is more historical than Nietzsche. Nietzsche certainly has genealogy and a powerful sense of history’s burden, but Ortega’s mature claim is that rather than having a nature, human beings live as history, as projects in circumstances. Later Ortega moves from a Nietzschean-sounding critique of herd modernity toward a philosophy centred on the constructive management of civilization.
Ortega is Nietzschean in his diagnosis, his sensibility, and some anthropology. His anti-herd elitism, his critique of complacent modernity, his stress on rank, and his suspicion of leveling all bear a Nietzschean stamp. But he domesticates Nietzsche, which the old German would have detested. He turns the explosive Nietzschean critique into something more disciplined, more rational, more historical, and more civically ordered.
Ortega vs. the Absolutists
Ortega can also be fruitfully compared with a much older anti-democratic line: the absolutists. He and they belong to the same anti-demotic family, in that they all think political order collapses when the many cease to be led by some higher principle or superior element.
Their projects overlap, but they are not quite the same. Jean Bodin is really concerned with indivisible sovereignty in a setting of civil war during the French Wars of Religion. Joseph Maistre is concerned about with revolutionary impiety and the destruction of sacral authority, and Juan Donoso Cortés with liberal discussion, paralysis, and a revolutionary-socialist crisis. Ortega’s concern is broader and more civilizational: the object of his critique is a new psychological type produced by modern success itself—the self-satisfied mass man.
Bodin is the odd one out. He is not a polemicist against democracy in the later, nineteenth-century sense of a Maistre or a Bonald. For him, monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy are all legitimate forms, differing only in where sovereignty resides. What he cannot tolerate is divided sovereignty: the sovereign must be supreme and absolute in relation to positive law, even if it is bound by natural and divine law. He prefers royal monarchy, but he does not discount democracy outright. His central problem is juridical and constitutional—unlike Ortega, the vulgarity or moral psychology of the masses factors into his thought only tangentially.
Maistre is much closer to an absolutist critique of democracy. He treats society and sovereignty as prior to individual choice. Contract, at least at the level of society, is always illusion. At best, deliberation is merely the “work of circumstance” whereby the divine will shapes the world. Sovereignty is synonymous with infallibility, and government lives through submission and belief, and with monarchy being the most natural form. He sees private judgement and political discussion as corrosive of the national mind, and scrutiny as a corrosive force that will eventually undo the social order. Maistre’s is a theological-political critique. The average man may be spoiled or mediocre or brilliant, but for Maistre democracy is dangerous for a reason other than competence: because it dissolves sacred authority, hierarchy, and inherited political faith.
Donoso Cortés is the closest precursor to Schmitt and, of the major absolutists (Filmer notwithstanding), he comes closest to Ortega in his apocalyptic tone, but he is far harsher and far less liberal. Donoso argues that human beings are naturally depraved and irrational, and due to our inherent irrationality, free discussion cannot yield truth. Discussion is the essence of liberalism and opens a vacuum of doubt, and that vacuum must be filled by dogma, repression, and when necessary, dictatorship. Like for Maistre, for Donoso the mediocrity of the many is beside the point. The issue is that modern liberal society cannot survive because argument itself is politically disintegrative, whatever the virtues of the deliberators. Hence his famous movement from “discussion” to “decree.”
Ortega’s critique is different in kind. His mass man is not simply the demos in a constitutional sense, but the average man who feels no need to demand more of himself and wants to impose his appetites directly. He explicitly says that the mass is not just a class and that there can be mass men even in traditionally elite spheres. His diagnosis is therefore anthropological and sociological, whereas the absolutist diagnosis is constitutional. The crisis Ortega sees comes not from the structure of liberal democracy itself, but from liberal democracy and technics having successfully elevated ordinary life so far that the beneficiary of this success now treats standards, expertise, and inheritance as dispensable.
As we discovered in our comparison with Schmitt, Ortega is a liberal, whereas the absolutists directly oppose the liberal project. The two arrive at similar-sounding conclusions—unmediated popular self-assertion is destructive; political life requires hierarchy, command, and forms not reducible to mere number—but their object is much different. Ortega says “hyperdemocracy” appears when the mass acts directly and without law, but he also says liberal democracy is the highest political form because it protects minorities and opposition. He explicitly treats liberalism as “supreme generosity” and condemns direct action as barbarism. He also treats fascism and Bolshevism not as cures for democratic weakness, but as further expressions of the same mass phenomenon. On precisely this point he stands almost opposite to Donoso, and a long way from Maistre. Put simply: Ortega thinks the disease is the collapse of discussion; Maistre and Donoso think the disease is discussion.
Ortega vs. Fascism
Of all the political movements on the right that Ortega opposes, he opposes fascism most directly. Though the particularly Spanish form that fascism took—Falangism and later the dictatorship of Francisco Franco—postdated the writing of The Revolt of the Masses, Ortega was acutely aware of fascism and addressed it directly in the text. He repeatedly places fascism inside the very pathology he is diagnosing: mass-man politics. He says he is treating fascism only “obliquely,” but what he says is already hostile.
Fascism is, quite straightforwardly, a mass phenomenon. Ortega’s whole framework is built around the distinction between genuine minorities and the mass man, and when he gets to fascism, he does not treat it as the restoration of qualified rule under the former, but the proletarian excretion of the latter. He says that under the sign of syndicalism and fascism there appears a type who does not want to give reasons, nor even be right, but simply wants to impose his opinions. Later he says flatly that fascism is “a typical movement of mass men.” Fascism also belongs to direct action, which Ortega treats as barbarism. Liberal democracy is indirect action: law-bound, mediated discussion according to definite procedures which allows opposing factions to coexist. Direct action is the suppression of all that in favour of immediate imposition. He says fascism is one of those strange modern movements in which the mass man claims “the right not to be right,” and he links this whole style to violence becoming prima ratio rather than ultima ratio. In this, he eerily resembles modern left-liberals who critique the right in saying that one is entitled to one’s own opinions, but not one’s own facts.
Chapter X contains Ortega’s most extended treatment of fascism in the book, and in it he focuses his ire on fascism’s archaicism and what he sees as its anti-historicism. In this chapter, he groups fascism and Bolshevism together as “two clear examples of substantial regression,” as neither are “attuned with the times.” On his account, neither digest the past and move beyond it, but each repeats old forms under a new mask. In this same chapter, Ortega then offers an anti-fascist argument that seems rather bizarre, saying that Europe must go beyond nineteenth-century liberalism—but that the fascist cannot do this precisely because he is merely anti-liberal. In a formulation that seems strange and almost incomprehensible, he claims that Europe must “conserve its essential liberalism” in order truly to overcome liberalism. But the knot is untangled when we keep in view Ortega’s progressivism: anti-liberalism, in his eyes, is a reactive posture and a step backward into a bygone world that can never return.
In Chapter XIII, he treats Mussolini explicitly. Hearing “everything for the State; nothing outside the State; nothing against the State” should, he says, be enough to identify fascism as a mass-man movement. Mussolini is using powerful state machinery built not by fascism but by liberal democracy, and using it without restraint. Ortega says the actual results are meagre compared with the liberal state, while the danger is enormous: statism normalizes violence and direct action while it crushes individuals and creative minorities, and “burns the future for good.”
Ortega opposes the fascists because he sees nationalism as a dead end and wants Europe to move toward a larger continental political form. Although he wants authoritarian rule, discipline, and command, he wants them inside a civilization of liberal law and mediation. Where fascism advances itself as a cure to the ills liberalism has wrought, Ortega believes that the liberal project can be salvaged.
Ortega vs. the Right
Much of the critique found on The Revolt of the Masses inherently sits on the right side of the political spectrum. Ortega is certainly anti-egalitarian, anti-mass-democratic, hierarchical, and elitist, but he is also opposed to some of the foundational elements of the right-wing worldview. A good deal of the better secondary literature now tends to place him in something like the aristocratic liberal or elitist liberal-Europeanist tradition.
He is strongly anti-restorationist, admitting no way back, and claims that liberalism is “ultimately, something unavoidable, inexorable; something Western man today is, whether he so desires it or not.” For him the past is not something to be emulated even in spirit, but the past tells us mainly what to avoid; hence fascism and Bolshevism are condemned as anti-historical “pseudo-dawns” because they repeat old forms instead of digesting the past and excreting it. This places him in a very unstable position vis-à-vis most of the right, which may be progressive to a degree, but always looks to the past for some sort of model.
His thought also carries notes of civic nationalism. Ortega is anything but a blood-and-soil nationalist; he says that blood, language, and territory are not the foundation of the nation-state, but largely its effects or even former obstacles. The nation is above all a shared future project and leaves unspecified any real criterion for membership. This goes further when he advances supranationalism: he wants Europe to outgrow the old nation-state cage and become a larger political unit, almost a higher-order nation-state. Boundaries do not figure significantly into his thought, while boundaries are arguably the core element in any right-wing worldview. Indeed, in the later nation-state chapters he treats the state as something that begins when man escapes purely natural society, and he explicitly says the state begins in the overcoming and mixing of blood and tongues. He is profoundly a thinker of the civic-political over the natural-familial, regarding the latter as primitive—again his progressivism, at least in degree, pushes him away from a genuine right-wing worldview.
His worldview also has little room for religion beyond a vague sense of the “spiritual.” He certainly does not write like a Maistre or Donoso. In the crucial passage on the “most reactionary European,” he says even the Catholic attached to the Syllabus still carries within himself the inescapable liberal truth of modern Europe. There is no space in Ortega’s worldview for integralism, and little about religion or the spiritual in general. This does not by itself place him outside the right—Nietzsche cannot seriously be considered left-wing either—but taken together with his other disagreements, it does start to paint a picture of someone who does not sit comfortably on the right.
Extended Analysis Below:
Comparison of Ortega to:
Groypers
BAPists
Racist Liberals
The Alt-Centre (ex-dissident rightists)
