The Silent Revolt

For ninety years, one book has told the modern world what went wrong with it. Jose Ortega y Gasset gave the twentieth century its most durable diagnosis: a new kind of human being, entitled to everything and answerable for nothing, inheriting a civilization he did not build and cannot maintain. The description was so good that we are still using it. Politicians reach for it. Columnists reach for it. Whole political movements have furnished themselves out of it.This book takes that diagnosis seriously enough to check it, and finds that Ortega prescribed the one cure guaranteed to manufacture the disease.The traits he assembled into his portrait of the mass man are not what appears when standards collapse. They are what reliably happens to the winners of any contest for authority. Ortega's remedy was a select minority placed above the rest; selection into hierarchies is precisely the machinery that produces the creature he feared. The mass man is not what the elite protects us from. It is what the elite becomes.Along the way: why a society that is working emits almost no signal to the people whose job is to describe it, why a great newspaper is a defective instrument for measuring a nation, why genius that nobody hears is indistinguishable from no genius at all, and what nine years inside a community of the supposedly hopeless revealed about human beings left alone to organize themselves.It ends where Ortega could not, with a change to the building rather than to the tenants.Keywords: mass society, elites, political philosophy, intellectual history, power, democracy, social structure

For ninety years, one book has told the modern world what went wrong with it. Jose Ortega y Gasset gave the twentieth century its most durable diagnosis: a new kind of human being, entitled to everything and answerable for nothing, inheriting a civilization he did not build and cannot maintain. The description was so good that we are still using it. Politicians reach for it. Columnists reach for it. Whole political movements have furnished themselves out of it.This book takes that diagnosis seriously enough to check it, and finds that Ortega prescribed the one cure guaranteed to manufacture the disease.The traits he assembled into his portrait of the mass man are not what appears when standards collapse. They are what reliably happens to the winners of any contest for authority. Ortega's remedy was a select minority placed above the rest; selection into hierarchies is precisely the machinery that produces the creature he feared. The mass man is not what the elite protects us from. It is what the elite becomes.Along the way: why a society that is working emits almost no signal to the people whose job is to describe it, why a great newspaper is a defective instrument for measuring a nation, why genius that nobody hears is indistinguishable from no genius at all, and what nine years inside a community of the supposedly hopeless revealed about human beings left alone to organize themselves.It ends where Ortega could not, with a change to the building rather than to the tenants.Keywords: mass society, elites, political philosophy, intellectual history, power, democracy, social structure