Ortega and the State

This is the second in a series of three articles on Friedrich Nietzsche/José Ortega y Gasset and the State, or “Nietzsche contra Ortega.” This article focuses on José Ortega y Gasset, a Spanish philosopher who witnessed the consequences of Statism in graphic detail. His critique is of the State is somewhat unique. Enjoy!

Ortega and the State
By Michael Kleen

Exclusive to STR

José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) was the preeminent Spanish philosopher of the first half of the 20th Century. A complex figure, he was at the same time an elitist, a classical liberal, and a republican. He was born into a wealthy bourgeois family, became the Chair in Metaphysics at Complutense University in Madrid in 1910, and he was the deputy for the province of León until the Spanish Civil War. After the outbreak of the war, he lived in self-imposed exile in Argentina until 1945. Ortega, as a witness to both the First and Second World Wars, was an ardent critic of the modern State. In La rebelión de las masas “The Revolt of the Masses” (1930), he predicted that the forces of Statism would inevitably lead to ever-increasing levels of violence. The State, he wrote, was “the gravest danger now threatening European civilization.”

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