Word: ortega
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INVERTEBRATE SPAIN-José Ortega y Gasset-Norton...
...Spaniard at that, which was read with respect by brokers and Senators alike. The Revolt oj the Masses (TIME, Sept. 19, 1932) was one of those surprise best-sellers which was not aimed at the large depression-chastened audience it found. That book established Professor José Ortega y Gasset in the U. S. consciousness as an original and forceful thinker-about-civilization. Last week his third book, a collection of essays on Spain, came no less timely to U. S. readers...
...Ortega is no longer a professor and no longer in Spain. After the Spanish Revolution of 1931 which his writing and influence did much to bring about, he was a deputy to the new Republic's first Cortes. At the outbreak of the Franco rebellion last summer, Ortega added his signature to a proclamation of loyalty to the Government. Later, a sick man, he left his war-torn country for neutral France. The essays in his book were all written before the Spanish civil war began, but this historian's-eye-view reveals an even grimmer prospect than...
...nation's history, according to Ortega, consists of a period of amalgamation and a period of disintegration. Spain has been disintegrating since 1580, when Philip II conquered Portugal. If the process of history could be telescoped like the cinema of a growing plant, "the history of Spain takes on the clear expressiveness of a gesture, and the modern incidents with which the vast attitude is ending are as self-explanatory as cheeks marked by anguish or a hand that falls exhausted." Spain's last 300 years Ortega calls a "long coma of egotism and idiocy . . . today...
...political life, but-and this goes deeper and is more fundamental-in its own social living together. None of the mechanisms which integrate the machinery of public life can function this way. One institution breaks down today, another tomorrow, until complete historic collapse will overtake us." But Ortega will not admit that economic determinism (Marxism) supplies the right answer for Spain's condition. Marxism, which he calls "one of the great ideas of the 19th Century, ... is one of the great wheels in the mechanism of history, but it travels in gear with many other wheels. The whole machine...