Resumen de Ortega y Gasset and the twenty-first-century theories of civil society
Some political scientists have compared the rise of populism after the 2008 crash to the advent of authoritarianism in the wake of World War I and particularly in the 1930s. Although these analogies are, in the opinion of others, inaccurate, they have drawn everyone’s attention to the alarming extent of political decay across the West today. In 1993, Julián Marías noted that José Ortega y Gasset’s La rebelión de las masas (1930) addressed many social questions still pervasive in Spanish society. And, indeed, in España invertebrada (1921) and La rebelión de las masas Ortega examined some of the social and political troubles that have persisted until this day. His definition of society in La rebelión de las masas prefigures the concept broken society used by politicians like David Cameron in the late 2000s; his definition of particularismo cogently describes today’s identity politics; and his term hiperdemocracia encapsulates the concept of political day as it was coined by Samuel Huntington and later described by Francis Fukuyama. This paper will explore how Ortega analysed and explained crucial political phenomena which have recently been observed in 21st-century liberal democracies by political scientists and sociologist like Bernard-Henry Levy, Carolin Emcke, Francis Fukuyama, David Runciman, and others. This comparison will reveal Ortega’s España invertebrada and La rebelión de las masas as a lucid point of reference to understand the nature of political decay in the 2010s.
