The Revolt of the Masses

A book by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, serialised in a Madrid newspaper from 1929 and published in 1930. It opens with a plain observation: everywhere is full, with crowds in trains, theatres and on beaches. From this Ortega diagnoses the arrival of the 'mass man'. The mass is not a social class but a type found in every class: the person who demands nothing special of himself, feels just like everyone else, and is content with that, while the select person makes demands on himself. Liberal democracy and technology have given the mass man comforts and rights he takes for granted, as if they were natural, and he now intervenes in everything without qualification. One example is the specialist, learned in one narrow field and confidently ignorant of the rest. Ortega warns that the state threatens to absorb social life, and ends by calling for a united Europe. Critics often read the book as elitist, though Ortega insists he describes attitudes, not classes.

It is a sharp early analysis of mass society, entitlement and the growth of the state, and its portrait of the confident specialist is still easy to recognise.