Frankfurt School (related): Raymond Aron on Ortega y Gasset's "Revolt of the Masses" (1 of 2)

Raymond Aron (1905-1983)

French political scientist Raymond Aron was primarily famous as a Cold Warrior and a liberal in the European tradition (which is quite different than what we mean by "liberal" in American politics). In his post-Second World War career, he can hardly be said to be a practitioner of Critical Theory, the outlook known as that of the Frankfurt School.

However, in the 1930s, the Frankfurt School’s flagship journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung featured Aron’s writing on numerous occasions, e.g., "La sociologie de Pareto" ZfS 1937, pp. 489ff. This essay/post is not about Aron’s biography. But the evolution of his thought is part of the story of the Frankfurt School. His was particularly known in the Cold War as an advocate of the Realist school of foreign policy thought. Pierre Hassner wrote in 2007 that Aron "single-handedly introduced this academic discipline in France" and that he had written "still the only real French contribution to the field", Peace and War (1966). Hassner calls it "probably the most exhaustive treatise on war and on international relations in general which appeared in the 20th century." (Raymond Aron: Too Realistic to Be a Realist? Constellations 14: 4; 2007)

Aron advocated what we might call a robust version of containment of the Soviet Union and defended American foreign policy against French critics on the left. But he sympathized with anti-colonial nationalism and criticized France for its Algerian War.

My interest here is an essay Aron did in about the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, which first appeared as "Ortego y Gasset et la revolte des masses" Commentaire 11:40 (Hiver 1987-88). It was published in Spanish in the Revista de Estudios Oreguianos 12-13/2006 as, "Una lectura crítica de La rebelión de las masas". He first presented it at a conference honoring Ortega in May 1983.

In it, he makes a comparison of Ortega’s Revolt of the Masses (published 1930, though Aron notes it was written in 1924-6) to one of the most famous works associated with the Frankfurt School:

La Revolté des masses appartient au genre que l’on appelle Kulturkritik. Or ce genre n'a pas disparu avec le développement de la sociologie. Le livre de Herbert Marcuse, L’homme unidimensionnel, comporte aussi des jugements de valeur sur les hommes, leur manière de vivre et de penser. Un rapprochement peut illustrer la permanence de certains thèmes de la Kulturkritik. Pour Ortega, les hommes-masses sont comme des enfants gâtés; ils jouissent d'avantages matériels et même moraux jadis resérvé â une étroite minorité, mais ils veulent tout, tout de suite; ce qui est donné à quelquesuns doit 1'etre â tous; les innovations se répandent à travers la masse et éveillent les désirs de tous. Marcuse, lesté de son vocabulaire hégélien et freudien, présente les individus de la société industrielle avancée comme aliénés, victimes des médias, assoiffés de biens, parece que les producteurs suscitent la passion de consommer, faute de laquelle la machine économique cesserait de tourner. Le premier dit que les hommes des sociétés riches sont devenus des enfants gâtés qui veulent obtenir tout sans comprendre les causes de leur opulence, sans se soumettre à des commandements moraux. A cette analyse de moraliste s'oppose 1'analyse freudo-marxiste : c'est le régime qui crée les hommes dont il a besoin.

[Revolt of the Masses belongs to the genre called Kulturkritik. Now, this genre has not disappeared with the development of sociology. The book by Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man {1964}, also makes value judgments about men, their way of living and of thinking. A comparison can illustrate the persistence of certain themes of Kulturkritik. For Ortega, mass men are like poorly raised children; they take pleasure in material advantages and the same morals once reserved to a strict minority, but they want it all, all at once: what is owed to one is owed to everyone; innovations are disseminated among the masses and aware the desires of everyone.

Marcuse, burdened with the Hegelian and Freudian vocabulary, presents the individuals of advanced industrial society as alienated, victims of the media, asphyxiated by goods, because the producers sustain the passion of consumption without which the economic machine would cease to function. The first says that the men of rich societies have converted themselves into spoiled children that want to obtain everything without understanding the causes of their opulence, without submitting themselves to moral mandates. To this moralistic analysis, is opposed the Freudo-Marxist analysis {of Marcuse}: it is the regimen that creates the men it needs.]

I'm not sure Aron's description of either book is especially generous to their respective authors. But it's an interesting comparison. Both Ortega and Marcuse wrestled with the phenomena associated with mass movements and how the available means of communication can be used by unscrupulous leaders to generate mass support for policies and movements that are destructive to the interests of the majority. Both focused great attention on the implications of the fascist political movements of their times. They were contemporaries, though Ortega was 17 years older than Marcuse. Both were adults in the 1920s when Mussolini’s Fascist movement came to power in Italy and when Communism, following the lead of the ruling Communists in the Soviet Union, developed as a distinct political movement from Social Democracy.

Aron is correct that Ortega worked from a liberal philosophical position and Marcuse from a Marxist one. (Ortega was a classical European liberal, not a liberal in the present-day American sense.) But in the context of Spain of Ortega’s early adulthood, which was the period of corrupt semi-democracy knows as the Restoration of 1874-1923, he was less attracted to the two established parties, the Partido Conservador and the Partido Liberal, than to the more militant republicans, democrats and socialists who were pressing for a more genuinely representative government. In his earlier years, Ortega argued in favor of socialism in theory, though he never embraced Marxism as a political or philosophical outlook and rejected the notion of a class party of the working class, which was the idea of the social democratic parties in Europe in his time. Ortega's early concept of socialism was focused on the modernization and Europeanization of Spanish society; he was heavily influenced by the socialist ideas of Ferdinand Lasalle and of English Fabian Socialism.

Both Ortega and Marcuse were heavily influenced by German philosophy, though Ortega was more attracted by the thought of Kant than of Hegel. Both engaged with the philosophies of phenomenology and existentialism and the issues they raised. Both were deeply interested in the implications for philosophy and mass culture of developments in the hard sciences.

And both experienced political exile in their lives starting in the 1930s, though that experience for Ortega came after the first publication of Revolt of the Masses; Ortega did write a long prologue from exile for the 1937 French edition of the book.

(Continued in Part 2 tomorrow)

Tags: frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, ortega, ortega y gasset, raymond aron