Between Nietzsche and Pareto: Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses

• In Event: Revisiting The Revolt of the Masses in an Age of Global Populism

Abstract

In his 1983 review of Ortega’s The Revolt of the Masses, the French political theorist Raymond Aron concluded with Ortega that what decadent Europe needed was a new elite. But where was this elite to come from, and how are we to define it? For Ortega the ‘mass-man’ he decried in Revolt is a type of Nietzschean ‘last man’ who believes he is the end of history, whereas his new aristocrat is an Übermensch willing to give himself his own mission in the age of the ‘Death of God’. But if we link – as Aron did – Ortega’s aristocrat with Pareto’s theory of the elite, then a much richer picture emerges of what this new elite might look like, and what form its relationship to the mass might take. Through his sociological and political writings this is precisely what Aron set out to do, developing, on the basis of his engagement with Pareto and the other ‘elite’ theorists Mosca and Michels, a theory of a ‘divided’ and ‘unified’ elite, which provided the theoretical framework for understanding the difference between liberal and authoritarian regimes. This paper proposes to explore Aron’s theory of democratic elites to help make sense of the revolt against the elites we are currently living through today, and in doing so recover the thinking of Pareto and the other ‘elitists’ to help shed light on today.

Author

• Hugo Drochon, University of Nottingham