THE REVOLT OF THE MASSES—Jose Ortega y Gasset—Norton ($2.75).
Though economists now have the floor and philosophers are, as Philosopher Ortega y Gasset admits, anything today rather than philosophers, this penetrating analysis of the world's state is not economic. No fatalist, Ortega y Gasset, searcher for the truth about Western civilization, believes that something may still be done with the truth when it is found. A yea-saver, his gloomiest proph ecy is still hopeful in a sardonic Spanish way: ''Before long there will be heard throughout the planet a formidable cry, rising like the howling of innumerable dogs to the stars, asking for someone or some thing to take command, to impose an occupation, a duty."
That the world is demoralized he thinks not altogether a bad sign. "Our epoch . . . believes itself more than all the rest, and at the same time feels that it is a beginning. What expression shall we find for it? Perhaps this one: superior to other times, inferior to itself. Strong, indeed, and at the same time uncertain of its destiny; proud of its strength and at the same time fearing it." Most of his book is an analytical arraignment of the mass-mind, tyrant of the age. "The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the right of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. As they say in the U. S. : 'to be different is to be indecent.' " It is a crowded age, especially in Europe, whose population has increased from 180,000,000 to 460,000,000 since 1800. Ortega y Gasset denies that Europe is being Americanized, says "Americanization" is a worldwide, spontaneous growth.
Making a vital distinction between "mass" and "class," he defines "mass-mind" as the commonplace mind, no matter in what class it is found. The massman is barbarian, only concerned with his own wellbeing, content to plunder civilization, not labor intelligently to continue it. By his definition of "barbarian" Ortega y Gasset covers a multitude of public "leaders": "If anyone in a discussion with us is not concerned with adjusting himself to truth, if he has no wish to find the truth, he is intellectually a barbarian. That, in fact, is the position of the massman when he speaks, lectures or writes." Even highly-trained specialists—scientists, financiers, doctors, engineers—behave like barbarians in spheres outside their specialty. Result: "The direction of society has been taken over by a type of man who is not interested in the principles of civilization."
What distinguishes our age from preceding ones is that "the masses are in revolt," determined to take the world into their own hands. The commonplace has become tyrannical. In former times "the masses asserted no right to intervene in [government] ; they realized that if they wished to intervene they would necessarily have to acquire those special qualities and cease being mere mass." A fierce believer in aristocracy of intellect and character, not of heredity, Ortega, y Gasset calls such organized mass-government as Fascism and Bolshevism "two false dawns . . . mere primitivism." Europe's answer, he thinks, is to build itself into one great state in which, he implies, the massman will no