Restrictions, standards, courtesy, indirect methods, justice, reason! Why were all these invented, why all these complications created? They are all summed up in the word civilisation, which, through the underlying notion of civis, the citizen, reveals its real origin. By means of all these there is an attempt to make possible the city, the community, common life. Hence, if we look into all these constituents of civilisation just enumerated, we shall find the same con1mon basis. All, in fact, presuppose the radical progressive desire on the part of each individual to take others into consideration. Civilisation is before all, the will to live in common. A man is uncivilised, barbarian in the degree in which he does not take others into account. Barbarism is the tendency to disassociation. Accordingly, all barbarous epochs have been times of human scattering, of the pullulation of tiny groups, separate from and hostile to one another.
The political doctrine which has represented the loftiest endeavour towards common life is liberal democracy. It carries to the extreme the determination to have consideration for one's neighbour and is the prototype of "indirect action." Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at its own expense, to leave room in the State over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority. Liberalism-it is well to recall this to-day-is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy ,which is weak. It was incredible that the human species should have arrived at so noble an attitude, so paradoxical, so refined, so acrobatic, so antinatural. Hence, it is not to be wondered at that this same humanity should soon appear anxious to get rid of it. It is a discipline too difficult and complex to take firm root on earth.
Share our existence with the enemy! Govern with the opposition! Is not such a form of tenderness beginning to seem incomprehensible? Nothing indicates more clearly the characteristics of the day that the fact there are so few countries where an opposition exists.--José Ortega y Gasset (1932) The Revolt of the Masses (anonymous translator), p. 75-77. [HT Jeffrey Bernstein]
Regular readers know I am not a fan of the use of a barbarism/civilization contrast in social theory and political life because it facilitates the domination of the barbarians by the self-proclaimed civilized. It is pretty clear that for Ortega y Gasset the barbarous are in a Hobbesian state of nature, and so one may well suspect that he advocates their submission to a civilizing authority. And many humane critics of liberalism are eager, not wholly unfairly, to tie it to the evils of imperialism and colonialism. Even so, I want to convince you there is something important in this passage.
Not unlike James Burnham (recall here; here), Ortega y Gasset accepts the diagnosis of the Italian Elite school that in political life necessarily some minorities rule. And because of his relentless cultural and meritocratic elitism, Ortega y Gasset is an unlikely friend of democracy. But while no martyr to the ill-fated Spanish republic, he served, I think, it with honor (see for some hints to the contrary here). In fact, alongside his friend Johan Huizinga, he was one of the people invited to the Lippmann Colloquium in 1938, although both declined to attend.*
That it is constitutive of liberal democracy to permit systematic opposition to authority is, of course, a cliché by now. Theoretically it originates in eighteenth century British parliamentary life and its classical theorists are Hume and Burke (writing as a Whig). It is generally articulated in terms of a loyal opposition or party competition with the opposition being a government in waiting. In parliamentary systems the leader of the opposition is granted all kinds of privileges including not infrequently considerable access to state secrets. In some Presidential systems, the opposition can even be in control of the government or major legislative chambers.
Okay, with that in place I want to make two observations on Ortega y Gasset's approach. First, as the relentless repetition of 'enemy' suggests, he is clearly responding to an argument or position we now associate primarily with Carl Schmitt. I can't prove that Ortega y Gasset read the (1927) journal article version of Schmitt's "The Concept of the Political" (published in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 58(1), pp. 1–33). But since Ortega y Gassett was partially educated at Berlin and Marburg, he certainly knew German well. But I leave this to the specialists.
And Ortega y Gasset is quite clear that the enemy remains an enemy within some political unities. So, his defense of liberalism, which relies on some Christian tropes, does not require that the opposition is treated as (agonistic) friends (or -- if one takes Schmitt's self-revisionism at face value -- as foes). In fact, he is quite adamant that a liberal state can constitute a radical pluralism with a majority and a minority people 'who neither think nor feel as it does.' In my view he anticipates Popper here (recall).
Now, one may well wonder how this is supposed to work beyond bald assertion. And I don't think Ortega y Gasset has all that much to say about it other than stating it as a (rare) fact. (One may well suggest that some linguistically and religiously diverse federations -- canonically Switzerland -- provide some evidence for the kind of forbearance that Ortega y Gasset has in mind.) So, that's disappointing. But near the end of Revolt of the Masses, he does offer a kind of historical explanation of the possibility of living with the enemy. And here he anticipates an observation by Foucault (recall in Birth of Biopolitics): that the European state system, which provides the context for the development of nation-states, actually taught Europeans to accommodate themselves to, and even trade regularly with, enemies, and recognize at least fellow Europeans as fundamentally equal (pp. 177-178). This is a remarkably optimistic point to take from the wreckage of the first world war.
But I think Ortega y Gasset is right that there is an important line between forbearance to a domestic enemy and allow for some kind of common life, and a desire to crush enemies. And within liberalism this line should not be crossed.** And this gets me to the second point. Given Ortega y Gasset's rhetoric I quoted one must think that that the view I have attributed to him is kind of idiosyncratic, a foolish high minded aristocratic liberalism whose time has passed. But this point is actually more common in the 1930s across the political specter.
Take, for example, Max Lerner, a self-described liberal collectivist, who in It is Later than you Think: the need for a militant democracy (1939) writes eloquently in favor of the "majority principle" and defends the utility of (at least some) demagogues, and who treats defenses of 'minority rights' as thinly disguised efforts to promote "oligarchical rule." He advocates collective planning, technocracy, and explicitly rejects separation of powers. His "insurance against tyranny must be placed...squarely on the party system." (233ff) The necessity of an "opposition" must be cherished. (237 with positive claims about British parliamentary practices.) And he thinks that only collectivist planning can allow for a functional true opposition system.
And, again, moving to another angle of the political spectrum, James Burnham who (having left his Trotsky-ism behind) is an adamant and eloquent critic of liberalism. In re-founding modern conservatism, he argues, in a book that draws heavily on the Italian Elite school, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943) that liberty involves "above all...the existence of a public opposition to the governing elite....it is the only effective check on the power of the governing elite." (223) For him, "the existence of an opposition means a cleavage in the ruling class." In fact, for Burnham opposition need not be only party opposition--what a free society requires is a clash of social forces to generate what I called (recall), in my own reading of Machiavelli, 'creative turbulence" (recall also this post on Popper). This, too, requires a certain forbearance against those that one may well see as the enemy.+
Okay, when confronted with one-party totalitarian states and calls for direct action, very different theorists in the 1930s discerned that it is crucial to maintain a more than merely formal mechanism of internal opposition. And this provides us, I think, with a useful heuristic when looking at contemporary political movements and parties and leadership-cults that self re-present as defenders of freedom and liberty (often speaking in the name of the people against corrupt elites). Do they actually recognize a place for opposition to their future rule? If not, they are mortal enemies of liberty.
*See p. 9 & 12 of the Introduction by Jurgen Reinhoudt and Serge Audier to the translation of the colloquium.
**As Popper recognizes, it does not follow that one must turn the other cheek when domestic enemies signal their desire to end such mutual forbearance altogether.
+In the Managerial Revolution, Burnham suggests that while internal opposition existed in the early socialist phase of the Russian revolution, it was soon abolished and with it true socialism.
Asked a scholar who worked intensely in Ortega's recent complete workse edition: apparently, Schmitt is not cited or mentioned there, but he must have been familiar with Schmitt work nonetheless. In 1931 the journal he edited, Revista de Occidente, published Schmitt's "Hacia el Estado total"
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Thanks for the post!
Posted by: David | 01/29/2022 at 10:27 AM