The mutiny of the masses

By Barry Casselman

The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote many brilliant books before his death in 1955, but his most famous book still is pertinent almost a century after it was written in 1928. Its title is The Revolt of the Masses, and it chronicles in elegant Spanish prose (which translates well into English) a long-term pattern in human behavior beginning with the Renaissance in Europe and culminating in post-World War I Western civilization – namely, the gradual and unrelenting coming to power of the masses as they overthrew the ancient institutions of feudal and imperial rule.

What makes The Revolt of the Masses so remarkable is its prophetic account of the rise of totalitarian fascism and communism. Ortega predicted in 1928 the rise of Hitlerian Nazism and Stalinist communism, and the consequences, well before these totalitarian upheavals murdered tens of millions of persons and violently disrupted the lives of hundreds of millions more.......

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