The Mass Man

Every thinker has one idea—and after he formulates it, all his subsequent works are no more than elaboration: developments and revisions of the same basic intuition. Or so, at least, claimed the French philosopher Henri Bergson, and if ever there was a definitive example, it’s José Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish writer who lived from 1883 to 1955. There’s a reason Ortega is remembered for his 1929 book, The Revolt of the Masses. He authored many other works, including History as a System, The Origin of Philosophy, The Dehumanization of Art, and The Mission of the University. But he remains, more than any author I can think of, remembered as the author of a single idea, the one he put forth in his Revolt of the Masses. Ortega’s accomplishment in that book was to identify a new sociological species: mass man. As The Revolt of the... [read full story]