Disoriented Liberalism: Ortega y Gasset in the Ruins of Empire

• DOI: 10.1177/0090591719830794
• Author: Alec Dinnin
• Date: 01 October 2019
• Published date: 01 October 2019
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591719830794

Political Theory

2019, Vol. 47(5) 619 –645

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591719830794

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Article

Disoriented Liberalism:

Ortega y Gasset in the

Ruins of Empire

Alec Dinnin1

Abstract

The fraught ideological relationship between liberalism and imperialism has

been theorized primarily through the British, French, and American empires.

This article moves beyond the experiences of these “great powers” by

turning to Spain and its preeminent twentieth-century liberal thinker, José

Ortega y Gasset. Unlike his British, French, and American counterparts,

Ortega articulated liberalism not to promote or defend the forging of empire

but rather to cope with the disorienting effects of its unequivocal loss in

the wake of the Spanish–American War. The experience of imperial loss, I

argue, informed Ortega’s call for a “new liberalism” that could enable Spain’s

national and cultural renewal. Reading Ortega’s thought in this context thus

reveals the lasting impact that imperial dispossession can have upon certain

strands of liberalism. It also suggests that, in order to fully capture the

relationship between liberalism and empire, it is necessary to incorporate a

wider range of historical sources and imperial trajectories.

Keywords

Empire, liberalism, José Ortega y Gasset, culture, regeneration

José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955), Spain’s most prominent twentieth-cen-

tury political philosopher, is viewed as an important figure in the

development of liberal thought.1 Known above all for his 1930 text, Revolt of

1Department of Political Science, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

Corresponding Author:

Alec Dinnin, Department of Political Science, University of Florida, 234 Anderson Hall, P.O.

Box 117325, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA.

Email: alecdinnin@ufl.edu

830794PTXXXX10.1177/0090591719830794Political TheoryDinnin

research-article2019

620 Political Theory 47(5)

the Masses, which synthesized a range of interwar liberal anxieties pertaining

to “the masses” and demagoguery, Ortega remains a resource for those who

seek to theorize the importance of moderation for democratic politics,2 the

political role of the liberal intellectual,3 and the historical trajectories of lib-

eral thought.4 Within Spain, he is looked to as a key figure in the development

of Spanish liberal democracy.5 However, none of these views contends with

how Ortega’s political thought was shaped by the loss of the Spanish Empire.

Reflecting upon his intellectual career in 1934, Ortega wrote that “Spain

was and is the foreground of [his] circumstances,” which he had to face in

order “to live an authentic life.” What did those circumstances involve, in

Ortega’s view? A Spain “reduced to a fraction of her former self” by “war

with the United States,” which “had deprived us . . . of our last colonies.” To

accept Spanish circumstances at the time Ortega entered adulthood in the

early twentieth century, then, meant embracing the “first imperial nation,”

“both quantitatively and chronologically,” a “nation that was once every-

thing” but had seen its empire crumble. It meant, in short, embracing the

ruins of an empire.6

In this article, I argue that Ortega’s version of liberalism was fundamen-

tally shaped by his response to the loss of Spain’s final overseas colonies—an

event known in Spain as the Desastre del 98 (Disaster of 1898)—and thus

that his “new liberalism” drew its coordinates directly from the experience of

defeat in the Spanish–American War. Recovering this aspect of Ortega’s

thought offers political theorists novel insight into the study of liberalism’s

relationship with empire. This is because the aftermath of the Spanish–

American War elicits a different question from that which usually frames the

literature: specifically, how does liberalism navigate the unequivocal loss of

an empire, with little hope of either imperial renewal or alternative projects

of domination? This question is derived both from a shift in geographical

emphasis and a focus on a different stage of empire than is ordinarily taken

up by political theorists. Though there has been a rich literature dealing with

the empire–liberalism relationship, the British, French, and (more recently)

American empires have received the lion’s share of scholarly attention.

Consequently, the ideological interplay between empire and liberalism has

been approached mostly within the limits of the historical experiences of

these “great” powers forging an empire. This is evident in the theoretical

questions around which the empire–liberalism literature presently circulates,

such as whether liberalism is complicit in or responsible for the furtherance

of Western imperial domination;7 how liberal imperialists handle anxieties

regarding relative great-power “decline”;8 and how imperialism was gradu-

ally transformed into the language of liberal internationalism.9 Against this

backdrop, the early political thought of José Ortega y Gasset—widely