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PARTISAN REVIEW
I shall compare Ortega's theory to those of other historians or
philosophers who use the same concepts of masses and elites. I also
shall venture to generalize from the collection of essays the philo–
sophical inspiration of his work as a whole.
The Masses and Elite
Whoever reads through
The R evolt of the Masses
remembers
above all the characterization of the masses or, more important,
mass man. What is his definition? He is the average man, mediocre.
He is also a man emptied of his own history, without the entrails of
the past, who, as a result, remains outside all disciplines. He lacks a
"within," an inexorable intimacy , an inalienable self, an irrevocable
"1."
He is always disposable, in order to pretend that he is this or
that. He has only appetites, he presumes only his rights, and he does
not believe in obligations. He is the man without nobility , who
obliges-sine
nobilitate-the
snob.
How does the elite man distinguish himself? The latter, it
seems to me, has a goal, gives himself without thinking to a task, in–
stead of letting himself live . The elite man submits himself to obliga–
tions he himself has created. But a natural objection arises: have there
not always been more mass men than elite? This question implies
the choice, by nature or society, of a small group. Ortega would ac–
cept this objection. For his thesis is not about two types of men, but
about the revolt by one of these types, by mass man who imposes his
will, his mediocrity, on the entire society . Briefly, the revolt of the
masses can be called the resignation of the elite.
A superficial reader easily would arrive at the unpleasant con–
clusion that Ortega is restating, in a different vocabulary, the op–
position between the people and the upper classes. The philosopher
refuses the sociological implication of his thesis. Elite men exist in all
classes of society, even if the upper classes inevitably have the ad–
vantage. And in passing, he detects numerous mass men among in–
tellectuals, among the learned, the specialists confined to narrow ac-
tivities - often more scientific than technical. Max Weber spoke of
some "specialists without spirit," an idea that Ortega would not have
rejected.
Elite man and mass man oppose each other because one has an
inside and the other does not; they also oppose each other because
one keeps, within himself, the entrails of history, and the other has
broken with his past. A cultured man has an historical conscience,
without which he has no access to historical reason , reason different
in nature from that of mathematical science and physics. The reason
