Disoriented Liberalism: Ortega y Gasset in the Ruins of Empire

The Disaster of 1898

José Ortega y Gasset was born in 1883 to a Madrid family deeply intertwined with the Restoration regime’s Liberal Party. Though he was well-positioned for a career in politics, Ortega instead pursued philosophy. After traveling twice to Marburg to study with the leading neo-Kantians Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp, Ortega became Professor of Metaphysics at the Central University of Madrid in 1910. Recognized throughout the early twentieth century as Spain’s most important intellectual voice, during the 1930s Ortega’s wildly popular book The Revolt of the Masses catapulted him to fame throughout Europe and the United States as well. ¹³ Empowered by his fame as a philosopher and political thinker, Ortega officially participated in the Second Spanish Republic, serving as a member of its parliament before resigning in late 1932. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, he promptly fled Spain and—in a move that generated substantial controversy—abstained from publicly commenting on politics for the rest of his life. His silence notwithstanding, since his death in 1955, and especially once democracy was re-established in 1977, Ortega has been recognized in Spain as an important figure in the development of its liberal democracy. ¹⁴

Perhaps inordinately fascinated by Ortega’s alleged liberal democratic legacy—or, alternatively, inordinately dedicated to overturning the rumor that Ortega was a closeted fascist—scholars of Ortega’s politics have focused almost entirely on recovering, classifying, and solidifying his status as an exponent of liberalism. Yet this scholarship has failed to pay sufficient attention to the impact, particularly pronounced in his early works, that the end of the Spanish Empire had on Ortega’s formulation of liberalism. When Ortega’s relationship to 1898 does receive note, it normally tends to be set aside as an event that “did not reverberate in his writing as it did in that of his older Spanish contemporaries, who felt the loss of the last vestiges of empire as a symbolic and epochal fact” ¹⁵ ; or it is addressed indirectly, vis-à-vis Ortega’s relationship to the generation preceding his own. ¹⁶ In my estimation, the emphases of Ortega’s liberalism cannot be fully understood in abstraction from his views on empire. But before considering Ortega’s reaction to the end of the empire, I want to first situate him in the broader historical and intellectual context of Spanish imperialism.

On August 12, 1898, when Ortega was fifteen years old, Spain conceded its last overseas colonies—including Cuba and the Philippines—to the United States after a short and decisive war. It is now common knowledge that this event fueled imperialist aspirations in the United States. Less widely recognized (outside Spain, at least) is that the conflict also marked the end of the Spanish Empire, and this precisely at the high-water mark of European imperialism, “when the possession of colonies was seen as the bench-mark of a nation’s fitness to survive.” ¹⁷ As British Prime Minister Salisbury announced in the Royal Albert Hall just before the war’s end, “you may roughly divide the nations of the world as the living and the dying”; and “from the necessities of politics or under the pretence of philanthropy, the living nations will gradually encroach on the territory of the dying.” At least as far as the Spanish press was concerned, there could be no doubt regarding to whose territory Lord Salisbury was referring. ¹⁸ The question that faced many Spaniards, then, was how to deal with their status as citizens of a “dying nation.”

Spain’s immediate reactions to the Spanish–American War might appear overly dramatic, especially against the historical backdrop of the Empire’s centuries-long decline. Yet dismissing these reactions as ridiculous or hysterical overlooks the cultural significance for Spain of Cuba, the Philippines, and the Empire writ large. This is especially clear considering the Restoration’s rhetorical reliance on the historical legacy of the Spanish Empire.

The Spanish Restoration regime, which began in 1876 and would last until 1923, routinely referred to the colonies to bolster its own legitimacy. In his famous “Discurso sobre la nación” (1882), for example, Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo spoke of Spain’s “duty” to “become part of the group of expansive, assimilative nations that have burdened themselves with the arduous task of civilizing the whole world.” For Cánovas, the source of this duty was “the honor that we inherited from our forefathers, an honor that is still alive today.” ¹⁹ In 1892, Spain’s empire served as the centerpiece of the Columbus commemorations, which marked the fourth centennial of the “discovery” of the New World. Then, erstwhile republican Emilio Castelar echoed Cánovas’s earlier notion of a civilizing mission, asserting in his commemorative speech that “in two years, Cortés gave to México all of the culture produced by the human spirit from the times of Abraham to those of Columbus.” ²⁰ While gently criticizing Cánovas’s government for failing to implement colonial reforms, Castelar nevertheless affirmed that “Spain made America . . . as God made the world,” and concluded that “America will be Spanish forever.” ²¹ Such sentiments both lent a benevolent sheen to Restoration policies in the colonies—where tensions were heightening, especially in Cuba—and reinforced the sense that the current regime, by maintaining a stake in the thriving landscape of European imperialism, was continuing an intimately Spanish political project.

As 1898 approached and it became clear that the United States planned to intervene in Cuba and the Philippines, regime actors ratcheted up their rhetoric. Cánovas’s Conservative Party newspaper (La Época) bombastically declared that if Spain were to lose Cuba, she “would be as little valued amongst the nations of Europe as Portugal, and would enter a period of rapid and inevitable decadence.” ²² Another Madrid newspaper writer goaded on the war effort by asserting that “the children of Cortés and Pizarro . . . cannot retire as humble lackeys from the region they discovered, populated and civilized.” ²³ But during the war itself, an attitude of dramatic fatalism quickly settled in, even among the war’s active participants. As a captain present in Santiago Bay memorably wrote, his

bugle sounded the last echo of those that history tells sounded in the conquest of Granada; it was the signal that the history of four centuries of greatness was coming to an end and that Spain was passing into the ranks of a fourth-class nation. ²⁴

Noting the damage that the loss of the empire had done to Spain’s honor and historical grandeur, some worried that serious political upheaval would follow from the war’s conclusion. A popular magazine wrote in 1899 that “the only and exclusive question” left for Spain was “one of life or death; one of whether we continue to exist as a nation or not.” ²⁵ This existential fear was bound up with the belief, pronounced among government and military officials, that the loss of the overseas colonies would cause Spanish society itself to come apart at the seams. In a widely read 1898 article titled “Sin pulso” (“Without Pulse”), future prime minister Francisco Silvela warned that perpetuating the status quo would bring about “the total rupture of national bonds” and “the condemnation, by ourselves, of our destiny as a European people.” ²⁶ Eventually, these fears of national dissolution were realized in the form of newly powerful regionalist movements (e.g., Catalonia). But immediate concerns pertained less to organized political movements and more to spontaneous popular revolt. The Minister of the Interior took this so seriously that, at the end of the war, he ordered provincial governors to prepare the Civil Guard to suppress popular unrest. ²⁷ Such fears were connected to the elite belief that the empire had somehow mitigated tensions between Spain’s diverse regions and classes. After suffering such a dramatic defeat on the international stage, the concern was that these tensions would boil over.

Ortega sympathized with these sentiments in certain respects. However, in the pages of his father’s newspaper El Imparcial—the Liberal Party’s semiofficial periodical—he routinely chastised both liberals and conservatives for failing to generate political programs that responded authentically to the crisis. In his view, this failure was most unforgiveable among the Liberal Party, which demonstrated an inability to go beyond preserving the “liberalism” already accomplished by the Restoration constitution—namely, the protection of civil liberties, religious freedom, and universal manhood suffrage. Though these existing institutions were important to maintain, Ortega argued, the Liberal Party’s inability to innovate and fashion an effective response to Spain’s new challenges made it no different from the Conservative Party, which also sought merely to preserve the status quo. This bipartisan idleness stood as proof to Ortega that Spanish politicians in general lacked “the liberal attitude and ethical impulse in favor of more and better liberty”; indeed, their stale answers to 1898 amounted to nothing more than the preservation of what the Desastre thoroughly discredited. ²⁸

Paralleling this criticism of Restoration politicians, Ortega also maintained that the influential group of liberal intellectuals commonly known as the “Generation of 1898” had not taken sufficient pains to articulate ideological solutions that might give Spain positive direction. This group, which included the famous writer Miguel de Unamuno, ²⁹ had already expressed hostility to the Restoration prior to the Spanish–American War, but their criticisms were infused with “urgency and justification” thanks to its outcome. ³⁰ Ortega recognized and valued their work, describing the Generation as apostles of a “new sensibility” that cultivated an atmosphere of “criticism, insult, aggression, rebellion, and the perforation of false currencies.” These hostile and destructive tendencies were in his view necessary, as “great and elemental barbarities necessarily had to be said” to clear the way for reform in the aftermath of the Spanish–American War. ³¹ But by “burst[ing] like barbarians into the field of ideas” and failing to coalesce around any organized message or platform, Ortega believed that the Generation of 1898 had left nearly all the positive work of regeneration undone. ³²

Compared to the stagnantly “liberal” alternatives presented by Restoration politicians and the predominantly critical atmosphere cultivated by the Generation of 1898, Ortega found arch-regenerationist historian Joaquín Costa refreshingly concrete and forward looking. Costa too did not refrain from attacking the Restoration, declaring that “what has happened with respect to the colonies and the war . . . is a faithful reflection of what has happened with everything else” under the regime. ³³ For him, the “national catastrophe” of 1898 was consistent with what the Restoration system “restored” at its inception: “not precisely Spain’s history, but her decadence.” ³⁴ The regeneration Spain needed, consequently, amounted in Costa’s view to nothing less than regime change, which he started his own political party to achieve. But Costa ultimately did not believe that the necessary political alterations could be achieved through electoral democracy. Only an “iron surgeon” (i.e., a benevolent, temporary dictator), he thought, could achieve the upheaval Spain required. ³⁵

Costa was largely unsuccessful in bringing his policies to fruition. ³⁶ But his legacy was nevertheless the one Ortega thought most worthy of carrying forward. In 1910, Ortega declared that Costa had “oriented [his] will for twelve years”—that is, since the Desastre—and taught him “political style, historical sensibility, and the best Spanish.” ³⁷ A year later, Ortega praised Costa still further for “dedicat[ing] his austere and solicitous life to the study of the Spanish people, of the irrational Spanish masses,” and emphasized the value of Costa’s “reconstitution” as an approach to the problem of Spain. ³⁸ Before his death in 1911, Costa also recognized Ortega’s proximity, telling the latter that he “would be proud of [his own] teaching if” Ortega became his “disciple.” Ortega wielded this as a “title of succession,” but he did not follow Costa’s concrete political proposals. ³⁹

Perhaps what held Ortega back is that Costa—despite his call for an iron surgeon—had much greater faith in the innate ability of the Spanish people to spontaneously restore their true destiny. In Costa’s view, Spanish elites and politicians were to blame for corrupting Spanish society; however, a “surgical intervention” would set the people free to their natural condition of goodness and unity. Ortega “recognized the attraction of that interpretation,” writes Victor Ouimette, “but believed that the people had to accept their part of the responsibility for allowing themselves to be dominated by an historically and ethically inadequate governing class.” To put it bluntly, Ortega had little confidence that the Spanish people would spontaneously regenerate the nation’s political health once freed from oligarchical oppression. ⁴⁰ This departure from Costa points the way to Ortega’s own position regarding 1898’s legacy.

Ortega and 1898 as the “Sudden Annihilation of History”

We have seen that the outcome of the Spanish–American War frightened politicians and provoked a flood of criticism from intellectuals, all centering on the loss of Spain’s last overseas colonies. This was the context in which Ortega began writing and publishing his essays. Though references to the recently concluded war are somewhat sporadic in Ortega’s writings, they are nevertheless unmistakably present and suggest that he was deeply impacted by these events. In Ortega’s third published article, for example, he declares that “the impressions of the Desastre in which we have opened the eyes of curiosity will not be easily or quickly erased.” ⁴¹ Several years later, he similarly asserts that all Spaniards, “when they look in the mirror to tie their ties” each morning, ask how it is “possible that those who have lost the colonies have not been punished, and how it is possible that they have continued occupying public posts.” ⁴² The broad impact of 1898 upon the Spanish psyche, evidently, was not lost on Ortega.

But what did he believe was at stake in the colonies that were lost in 1898? Ortega spoke of the loss of the empire in two distinct modes: first, as the ignominious endpoint of a long historical process of Spanish decline, and second, as the “sudden” rupture of the culture that the Restoration regime had been laboring to sustain. The former is an empirical claim that encapsulates Ortega’s beliefs regarding historical reality, whereas the latter refers to his generation’s direct experience of the Desastre. Reconciling these claims, I argue that the most important legacy of 1898, in Ortega’s view, was Spain’s cultural disorientation. If this condition were left unaddressed, Ortega worried, dire political consequences up to and including national disintegration would follow. It is from this interpretation of the Desastre that Ortega took his bearings and formulated the problems that motivated his liberalism.

In some of his earliest essays, Ortega addresses who to hold responsible for 1898. All agree, he contends, that “punishment is deserved” for the loss of the colonies and justice is required. Yet “if justice had been done,” he continues, “all Spaniards over the age of forty would have had to decapitate themselves, and then reanimate the dead generations to decapitate them too, and so on in bloody sequence up to two centuries ago.” The culprit for Spain’s present ills, in other words, can hardly be identified too inclusively. This is because the colonies, in Ortega’s view, “were lost in the mind of God a couple of centuries ago,” and “in reality they have been lost as if someone had wished it.” ⁴³ Politicians were partly responsible, but for Ortega so too were Spaniards writ large—“a ghost people,” or “fossil race,” “who some magic has turned to stone.” ⁴⁴

With such claims, Ortega is drawing on a longstanding tradition of thought that defines the Spanish as a decadent people and Spain as a national power in decline. ⁴⁵ An important element of this literature is the assertion that Spanish decline is not a recent phenomenon but rather one that extends across generations and hence is “historical.” However, Ortega affects a twist on this tradition of thought by disseminating blame to Spaniards from all walks of life. Responsibility is collective, Ortega argues, rather than concentrated upon the rich and powerful (as Costa would have it). “Where does the misfortune and historical decadence come from,” Ortega muses, but Spaniards themselves, who “do not know” its source because they “do not have a brain” and are “unable to knit [their] own history.” ⁴⁶ This explains why the Spanish lack what “France, England, Germany and even Italy have always had: cultural continuity.” And, he continues, given that “neither our parents, nor our grandparents, nor many generations back have done anything whose memory can comfort and serve us as an orientation,” Spaniards cannot draw inspiration and guidance from the past as they construct an appropriate response to the Desastre. ⁴⁷

In such passages, Ortega depicts 1898 as merely the last in a long line of national embarrassments, implying that the end of the empire was a foregone conclusion. In other moments, though, Ortega’s references to the Desastre point to the loss of the empire as a rupture, a qualitative break. In the 1913 essay “Competencia,” he writes that “those who arrive now to the midpoint in the walk of life have only lived one historical date: 1898.” At “just the hour in which [his] generation confront[ed] reality for the first time and [made] its first demands,” he continues, “1898 was the answer received.” ⁴⁸ This was a rude awakening indeed, Ortega thought, for 1898 signified nothing less than “the sudden annihilation of the history of Spain.” ⁴⁹

The term “sudden annihilation” appears to contradict the assertion that Spain’s decline had lasted for many generations and that the Empire was “lost in the mind of God a couple of centuries ago.” But in another 1913 essay published several months after “Competencia,” Ortega makes a subtle but illuminating shift: “1898 is the sudden annihilation of the history of Spain—of a Spain, I mean to say.” ⁵⁰ The Desastre, put differently, ended not only Spain’s empire but also a particular idea of Spain’s history, and thus a particular idea of Spain itself. There can be little doubt that it was the Restoration’s idea of Spain that Ortega had in mind.

Indeed, Ortega’s condemnation of the Restoration regime was directed in large part to the ideological culture it propagated. In an influential 1914 speech titled “Vieja y nueva política” (“Old and New Politics”), for example, Ortega rails against the regime for attempting “to focus politics on tradition, to preserve the hollow names of the past and with them to want to resolve the blemishes of the present.” This transforms Spain, he argues, into “a panorama of ghosts” and makes regime architect “Cánovas the great impresario of the phantasmagoria.” ⁵¹ Nevertheless, “the old form of Spain” that the Restoration cultivated, even if ridden with patriotic falsehoods like those of the Columbus commemorations, was for Ortega at least “a principle of spiritual orientation, of pedagogical and political equilibrium.” ⁵² One piece of this spiritual orientation, and perhaps the fundamental piece, was of course the Spanish Empire, which provided Spaniards with a link to the past and some semblance of cultural continuity. In a revealing passage, Ortega rehearses the Restoration’s narrative of this past, with which they attempted to cultivate a national consciousness. According to this narrative, Spaniards “would feel like decadent sons of a divine race,” and they would thus “warm [their] miserable entrails . . . on the embers of [their] history, on the fire and glow of [the Spanish people’s] high mission in human development.” ⁵³ It is this archaic historical narrative, and the cultural idea of Spain it conjures, that the Desastre discredited and subjected to a decisive sudden annihilation.

The dispossession of Cuba and the Philippines, then, did more than bring Spain’s long decline to a natural conclusion. It also reduced Spanish life to a “static” field by annihilating the final desiccated remnants of its national culture. ⁵⁴ And, just as importantly, it left no obvious pathways forward. The problem, Ortega writes, is that “we do not find in our modern history any moment . . . in which to look for the initiation of a better Spain, for a fruitful orientation of authentic Spanish powers.” ⁵⁵ Ortega’s generation thus “found itself without a nation to perform,” without “individuals to follow,” “without a home,” and “without parents in the spiritual sense.” ⁵⁶ The year 1898 “broke the consciousness” of Spain’s “historical continuity,” Ortega reasons, and in doing so signaled the need for “a father, a generator, a spark.” ⁵⁷

This connects directly to the practical consequence Ortega drew from the end of the empire: not only did it make recognition of Spain’s cultural disorientation unavoidable and lay bare the weakness of its national bonds, but it also made Spain’s reorientation the primary task of his generation. Despite not being at fault for the Desastre, Ortega believed that he and his contemporaries had effectively inherited the responsibility to address it. “I maintain the absolute hope that many Spaniards born at the same time as I,” Ortega writes, who came of age precisely when “our ancestral home” was “declared insolvent,” “will feel as I do, at each moment, an ethnic shame that burns their insides and tortures their imagination.” He goes on to predict that this shame, “the first political emotion that [his generation] received,” “will act on [their] lives as a perverse constellation” and ultimately come to be “favorable for our race.” ⁵⁸ It was the experience of the empire’s sudden annihilation, Ortega thought, that would enlist his generation in the task of Spanish reorientation.

For Ortega, in sum, the end of the Spanish Empire signified two different things. First, it was emblematic of Spain’s intergenerational failings, validating larger narratives of national decline perpetually on offer. And second, it constituted the sudden annihilation of the anachronistic culture propped up by the Restoration regime. ⁵⁹ Together, these contexts defined Ortega’s outlook and his generation’s objective: the regeneration of historical and cultural continuity in Spain. Notably absent in all this, of course, is any principled rejection of the Spanish Empire or imperialism more generally. Yet given the depth of Spain’s colonial losses, Ortega did not initially consider the possibility of imperial renewal as a vehicle for Spain’s regeneration. Instead, he likens his—and by extension Spain’s—situation to that of an Indian myth, which tells “of a loner whom the gods threw from the sky of Indra.” “By the strength of his thought and the vigor of his spiritual concentration,” Ortega writes, this loner “came to create a new world and a new sky.” ⁶⁰ It is this “labor of constructing a new nation,” a “new world” “upon the ruins of another,” that Ortega’s “liberalism discovers itself commissioned.” ⁶¹

Disoriented Liberalism

The year 1898 thus imbued Ortega with a clear sense of Spain’s problem: disorientation. To understand how Ortega thought this problem could be solved, we must turn to his early political writings. Almost every comprehensive study of Ortega depicts him as a liberal political thinker, even though he drew from sources some might consider outside the liberal tradition. That said, in no case is the relationship between the particular emphases of Ortega’s liberalism and the immediate context within which he developed it—namely, the ruins of the Spanish Empire—fully examined. This leads not only to a partial understanding of Ortega’s motivations but also to the neglect of a “new liberalism” that, uniquely informed by the experience of imperial loss, is calibrated to the task of “creating a new world” for disoriented, postimperial Spain. Before turning directly to Ortega’s early political thought, however, it is worth stressing two points regarding the nature of his relationship to liberalism. Together, they point to the strength of this interpretive framework as a means of understanding his political thought.

First, there can be little doubt that Ortega intended to contribute to liberal discourses, given his self-description as a theorist of a new liberalism that would aid in national regeneration. Indeed, Ortega’s claim that “the Spanish problem is a problem of liberalism” indicates that he saw Spain’s crisis as commensurate with liberalism’s stagnation. ⁶² His virulent criticisms of the “domesticated Liberal Party,” then, must be understood in conjunction with his call for a more vibrant and flexible version of liberalism. ⁶³ Apart from Ortega’s intentions, it is also worth noting that countless contemporaneous interpreters and interlocutors—many of whom were themselves liberal—received Ortega’s political writings as articulations of liberalism. ⁶⁴ Indeed, up until 1913—when he penned an incendiary article labeling the Spanish Liberal Party “a national nuisance” due to its lack of direction and ideological innovation ⁶⁵ —Ortega published most of his essays in the Liberal Party newspaper El Imparcial. He thus wrote for, spoke to, and first achieved prominence among an audience primarily of self-described liberals, most of whom were themselves politicians or political actors. ⁶⁶ For historical reasons alone, then, Ortega’s early political thought deserves to be included among those “arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognised as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, across time and space.” ⁶⁷

The second point concerns the basic substantive features of Ortega’s political thought and the extent to which they are identifiably “liberal.” Ortega borrowed inspiration from a wide range of thinkers across the political spectrum, and the influence of some of these thinkers (e.g., Fichte, Nietzsche, Renan, Simmel) partly explains the elitist and even organicist bent that differentiates Ortega’s arguments from other forms of liberalism. ⁶⁸ Though Ortega integrated these elements into his thought, he subordinated them to a broader concern over the advancement of human liberty. In this regard, the strongest influence on Ortega’s early political thought—apart from Joaquín Costa—appears to have come from Marburg, where Ortega studied neo-Kantianism in 1907 and 1911. ⁶⁹ Indeed, his writings on liberalism during these years notably reflect the ethical philosophy of prominent Marburgian Paul Natorp, specifically, in emphasizing “social pedagogy” as a necessary precondition to the exercise of individual freedom. Without such pedagogy, Ortega came to believe, human beings and their communities would become enslaved to instinct and barbaric “natural” impulses. This led him to understand freedom, and by extension liberalism, not simply as the absence of state interference, but rather as the progressive and perhaps even state-assisted pursuit of cultural ideals emerging from one’s “organic community.” ⁷⁰ As Ortega declared in a speech to his “League of Political Education,” “we are liberals” inasmuch as “we believe in . . . a social and political state in which the prosperity of the nation and the wellbeing of each citizen is one and the same thing.” ⁷¹ In his emphasis on education and acknowledgement of the state’s role in ensuring the conditions for liberty, Ortega’s early tendencies have precedents and echoes among other thinkers commonly recognized as “modern” liberals. The French Doctrinaires, the British “New Liberals”—themselves influenced by German intellectual trends—and even the nineteenth-century Spanish liberales all sought to carry liberalism and liberty in more collectivist and occasionally even socialist directions. ⁷² What distinguishes Ortega’s thought is that he constructs his liberalism in terms that respond directly to the loss he perceived in the Desastre. In this sense, his liberalism appears conditioned by the “sudden annihilation” of 1898.

In keeping with his general disposition toward the Restoration’s Liberal Party, Ortega’s earliest writings on liberalism consist of calls for “renovation” rather than wholesale replacement. For him, the problem with the “old individualist liberalism” propounded by the dynastic Liberals of the Restoration—the belief that “man in his native state is good,” while “regulated society makes him bad”—is its commitment to the “sin of romanticism”: the belief that, if one destroys regulated society, “human goodness will be reborn upon its ruins, like an immortal hedge mustard.” ⁷³ This assumption errs, according to Ortega, because it misleadingly attributes the Desastre to an overabundance of bad laws and hence incorrectly identifies popular spontaneity as the solution to Spain’s disorientation. For Ortega, spontaneity is nothing other than “the immediate reaction of the self to environmental influences to establish a vital equilibrium.” If “the environment has changed,” Ortega argues, and the Spanish self has become decadent thanks to the long absence of a viable national culture, then it would be foolish and imprudent to accept old liberalism’s prescription for mass spontaneity. ⁷⁴

The renovation of liberalism that Ortega imagines therefore goes beyond the promotion of individual freedom. For him, Spain’s intergenerational malaise cannot be treated at that level, because the people have themselves absorbed Spanish backwardness and anachronism. But it also cannot be treated through the issuance of new laws. Indeed, Ortega upbraids Restoration politicians for even attempting the “reform of customs” through legislation, portraying their work as a futile struggle with the symptoms of a much deeper problem: cultural disorientation. ⁷⁵ To address this root problem, he insists, it is necessary to have an orientation to offer. Since the existing “liberal idea is dying” and unable to serve this end, the renovation liberalism requires after 1898 is first and foremost of its ideas. “When there is no political idea,” he writes, “only the conservative emotion remains”—meaning that the absence of vital political ideas all but ensures the perpetuation of the status quo. ⁷⁶ The task of Ortega’s liberalism “in rebirth” is thus to supply these new “political ideas” and thereby give collective life substantive meaning and direction. ⁷⁷

A series of crucial conceptual linkages follow. Like the “old individualist liberalism,” Ortega’s “new liberalism” is centrally concerned with liberty. But for him, liberty is not reducible to laissez-faire, freedom from interference (negative freedom), or a fixed slate of natural rights. Rather, as Ortega states in 1908, “liberty is the law of culture,” and “culture is that which does not fit under nature.” ⁷⁸ Ortega’s liberalism—like that of a strand of modern liberalism more generally—refers to “the progressive elaboration and enrichment of the specifically human,” which requires a clear sense of the culturally defined “line along which the degrees of advance must be marked.” ⁷⁹ By conserving the status quo form of liberalism, Ortega suggests, Restoration liberals ignore this line of advancement and risk losing the ability to detect or appreciate cultural progress. This is particularly problematic in the aftermath of the “cultural shipwreck” of 1898, which exposed the decrepitude of Spain’s existing national culture. ⁸⁰ The mission “to conserve liberty,” then, involves regenerating a sense of human freedom as a constantly evolving and essentially progressive endeavor. ⁸¹ Ortega’s liberalism is therefore defined by its devotion to “the perpetual admonition of the unwritten law, the ethical law that condemns all stagnation of the political law”—the unyielding commitment, in short, to “conserve the progress of liberty.” ⁸²

Ortega thus calls for a new liberalism to disseminate a political culture that can orient “all ethnic organs” of Spain toward the active pursuit of liberty. ⁸³ The purposive striving that would accompany such a collective cultural orientation constitutes, in his view, the realization of liberalism more so than any fixed substantive platform. However, given that Spain’s immediate past is corrupted with the seeds of decadence, the first task of Ortega’s new liberalism must be to create a vital culture without depending upon extant historical resources. Ortega clarifies this creative mission by describing the basic features of new liberal culture: first, it must foster unity, and second, it must orient Spaniards toward a future goal.

Ortega captures the former in his claim that culture’s task is to synthesize “the objects of all kinds which life, in its perpetual surge, throws at our feet like the useless remains of a shipwreck.” ⁸⁴ The ancient Greeks clearly understood this imperative, he argues, as they “sought unity and harmonious ordering with loves of fire” and “transformed the world” “into a universe, into a cosmos, by which is meant order and good orientation.” ⁸⁵ But where the Greeks succeeded, Ortega observes, a variety of contemporary ideological currents have failed. “We live in a negative Spanish epoch,” he contends, in which “everyone seems to force themselves to delineate their intellectual physiognomy, their political posture, by way of the negation of their neighbor.” Ortega posits Marxism as a prime case of this, both by reading its framework of class struggle as an admission that “the unity of man does not exist” and by implicitly denying the Marxist claim that the working class stands for the interests of all. ⁸⁶ Catalan regionalism is rejected on similar grounds—Ortega labels the movement “particularist” for declining to contribute to the project of Spanish national unity ⁸⁷ —as is the Liberal Party itself, due to its divisive obsession with “anti-clericalism.” ⁸⁸ Rather than “purely negative” and exclusionary political platforms like these, Ortega contends, Spain’s postimperial condition requires “constructive and organic principles” that cultivate the “radical community that governs and gives its decisive hue to even our greatest discrepancies.” ⁸⁹ Such inclusive principles, he believes, must act as the consensual foundation for the practice of new liberalism, itself characterized by a communal striving for ever more expansive forms of liberty. ⁹⁰

The culture Ortega envisions as an antidote to the end of the empire, then, will unify Spain’s diverse groups around an arsenal of shared values. Given that Ortega sees the pursuit of liberty as a collective endeavor, this common bedrock of cultural ideals stands as the basis for new liberalism’s enactment. Beyond this, though, Ortega puts forth an additional stipulation: the culture of new liberalism cannot ground itself upon Spain’s past or present practices. Rather, he argues, the core of this new culture must consist in a common national orientation toward a future goal. Ultimately, it is this future-directedness that Ortega finds most important to restore in the wake of 1898’s “sudden annihilation.” “For me,” he writes, “this is the nation: what in the morning we think we will have to do by the afternoon.” ⁹¹ In other words, to be a liberal nation in the proper sense, Spain must eschew cultural nostalgia and coalesce around a broad, positive project for the future. In its early days, Ortega would later point out, the empire had been this project for Spain. “Spanish unity was achieved” out of its disparate regions, he declares, not so that Spaniards could “live together, sitting round the home fire, looking at each other, like old women in the winter.” On the contrary, it was “achieved in order to hurl the energy of Spain to the four winds, to flood the planet, to create an even vaster empire.” At its very inception, then, the Spanish imperial project was “born in the mind of Castile not as an idea of something real, but as an ideal project of something possible.” ⁹² It fostered the required elements of a vital culture: unification, a sense of “the line along which the degrees of advance must be marked,” and a future orientation. Yet the empire had since fallen into neglect, becoming little more than a hollow myth invoked by Restoration politicians to bolster their own legitimacy. In the aftermath of 1898, Spain therefore had no choice but to “unite in a modern ideal” that would chart a new path forward. ⁹³

Ortega’s desire for a unified, future-oriented national culture in response to the “sudden annihilation” of 1898 may seem to test liberalism’s boundaries. ⁹⁴ However, Ortega’s point is not that opinion should be made homogenous or that it should be coercively regimented. Rather, the intention of his early political writing, like that of new liberalism in other national contexts, is to shake Spanish liberalism out of its ideological complacency and insist that it respond authentically to concrete national circumstances—that is, to Spain’s lack of a viable national culture in the ruins of empire. These circumstances require thinking beyond regnant laissez-faire forms of liberalism, Ortega thought, and embracing a new liberalism that focuses on the generation and propagation of cultural ideals with broad national appeal. These are to be the basis, he maintains, for renewed collective unity. But to establish this unity while simultaneously realizing the promise of liberalism in its deepest sense, Ortega believes that Spanish liberals must also seek the progressive amplification of freedom. As he puts it, the truly “liberal party looks for and proclaims the way” by “harboring at all times that ultimate, categorical demand, that gives direction and orients its steps”: “the expansion of liberty.” ⁹⁵ Liberalism is an ideological tradition and impulse, in other words, that for Ortega presupposes a future orientation—not a slate of preordained stipulations. Yet in the postimperial context, Ortega contended that Spanish liberals had failed to offer any such plan for the future. “Finding peace soft and taking a siesta,” he writes, they had “given themselves over to bourgeois delight” instead of pursuing a dynamic new “moral ideal.” ⁹⁶ It is precisely this, Ortega thinks, that new liberalism must recover and propagate in the form of national culture.

What remains unclear is how Ortega believed that partisans of a new liberalism could foster this national cultural reorientation. The answer he gave in 1908 was, for better or worse, the same he would give twenty years later in The Revolt of the Masses: the work of orienting the people was that of “the chosen ones,” the “intellectually responsible people” who were “in charge of having determinate, unique, and particular opinions.” ⁹⁷ This “select minority” would seek “to awaken consciousness of the social world in the individual” and “convert men into citizens,” a process that must as a matter of necessity involve “the few, the elect, the moral aristocracies.” ⁹⁸ Even a well-oriented people would require guidance; indeed, as Ortega puts it in The Revolt of the Masses, “in a right ordering of public affairs, the mass is that part which does not act of itself,” but instead “needs to submit its life to a higher court, formed of the superior minorities.” ⁹⁹ Such sentiments again highlight the influence that potentially illiberal thinkers like Nietzsche had upon Ortega’s thought. ¹⁰⁰ Unlike Nietzsche, though, Ortega’s elitism is deployed in the service of political liberalism: by taking up the task of cultural orientation via a program of social pedagogy, he thought, partisans of a new liberalism could form an elite capable of enticing a perhaps illiberal people toward dynamic new ideals.

By defining liberty as “the progressive elaboration and enrichment of the specifically human,” and then referring to culture as the standard by which progress is made possible, Ortega thus renders national culture central to his project of liberalism. Furthermore, given that his conception of culture emphasizes the value of collective orientation above all else, Ortega’s “new liberalism” demands positive collaboration in a common task. It is therefore evident that Ortega—who described the loss of Cuba and the Philippines purely in terms of cultural discontinuity and disorientation—forged his understanding of liberalism in response to what he believed Spain had been deprived of in the Spanish–American War.

Conclusion

Navigating the aftermath of the Spanish–American War, Ortega consistently stressed that Spain’s losses in 1898 involved something more than just its colonies in Cuba and the Philippines. The empire, depleted and frail as it might have been, was the last vestige of Spanish cultural and historical continuity, and given the Restoration regime’s reliance on Spain’s imperial legacy, its “sudden annihilation” meant the sudden annihilation of Spain’s collective orientation. Ortega believed that life without common culture beckons disintegration, chaos, and aimlessness—conditions antithetical, in his view, to liberalism properly understood. In the final analysis, the loss of the empire in Spain amounted to the unearthing of precisely these illiberal conditions. For Ortega it followed that new liberalism had no choice but to assign intellectuals the task of cultivating new sources of unity and direction. These, he hoped, could be utilized politically to regenerate the collective purpose and cultural dynamism Spain lost along with its overseas empire. In this sense, Ortega’s liberalism was fundamentally shaped by the traumatic experience of imperial loss.

One lingering question about my analysis of Ortega’s new liberalism is whether he considered imperial renewal to be a possible ideological vehicle for Spanish regeneration. Could it be that, like Tocqueville and some republican thinkers, Ortega was drawn to empire as a means of reversing domestic political ills? ¹⁰¹ To be sure, Ortega’s commitment to embracing his circumstances afforded him little opportunity to consider such a possibility; after the war with the United States, Spain was not economically, politically, or militarily capable of credibly pursuing large-scale colonial expansion. And yet, even though 1898 marked the end of the global Spanish Empire and wiped out any serious aspirations for overseas expansion, Spain did attempt another imperialist venture shortly after the Spanish–American War.

In 1904, following negotiations with France, the Restoration government accepted a “sphere of influence” in northern Morocco, one spanning approximately one-fifth of the country’s total territory. The eventual ramifications of this move for Spanish politics were enormous—historians have gone so far as to link the decision to the Restoration regime’s downfall and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. ¹⁰² But Ortega greeted it with a mixture of curiosity and cautious optimism, publishing numerous essays on Moroccan history and France’s previous colonial efforts in the region, all with a view to situating Spain’s role there. He advocated foregoing war as the primary mode of interaction and instead organizing

diffuse action of the Spanish people over the coastal Moroccan people, so that the bits of culture and civilization that we possess . . . upgrade the indigenous Africans, artificially if it is necessary, such that . . . something of the Spanish structure penetrates the physiology of Berber society. ¹⁰³

For Ortega, this would be a “politics of people to people”—rather than one “of government to government”—and would work upon the Moroccan people’s “inferior elements that, [once] fertilized and purified, can improve the rest of their diffuse and decadent souls.” ¹⁰⁴ Given Ortega’s prior predilection for seeing empire only in terms of its effect on Spain, this sudden regard for the colonized is fairly exceptional.

Yet when it became evident that Moroccans in the mountainous Rif region were uninterested in being “fertilized and purified,” and that the only real question was whether to embark upon a violent colonial invasion, Ortega set benevolent sentiments aside and turned his focus back to Spain. For him, the decisive consideration became whether the invasion would be undertaken as a collective national project. Indeed, in Ortega’s view, the very worst thing the Spanish government could do was decide the question with the same rationale they initially used when entering Morocco: “because yes.” ¹⁰⁵ The regime, Ortega demanded, must instead engage in “the organization of the public spirit,” meaning that “those from above” must “explain to those below what they should do.” Without extensive prior organization, he thought, “the national mass” could not be expected to willfully engage in colonial violence. But with organization, Ortega thought, the masses might possibly “be polarized into a sense of warlike emotion” and hence energized into sending “the enemy the ardent and vibrant arrow of their enthusiasm.” ¹⁰⁶ The question for Ortega, then, was not one of approving or disapproving of colonial violence but of actively investing “the public spirit” in such violence. If the government were to neglect such a campaign and nevertheless attempt colonization, it would simply deepen Spain’s disorientation. But if handled properly, Ortega thought, Spain’s nascent invasion of Morocco might function as a “cultural mission” and, consequently, fuel for national reorientation. ¹⁰⁷

Ortega’s provisional support for Spain’s occupation of Morocco carries notable similarities to thinkers like Tocqueville, who believed colonial projects could cultivate “widespread enthusiasm for a common political project” and thus draw “the French population back into public life.” ¹⁰⁸ Also like Tocqueville, and unlike Mill, Ortega’s reflections focused above all on the benefits that might accrue to the colonizer from imperial aggrandizement, suggesting that the interests of the colonized carried far less importance for him. But there are also significant differences between the two thinkers stemming from the distinct problem Ortega faced. Whereas Tocqueville sought an antidote to the contemporaneous degeneration of civic virtue in France, Ortega addressed a Spain that had suffered comprehensive cultural disorientation. This problem, coupled with Spain’s dim prospects for imperial renewal, led Ortega to dedicate his energies primarily to the search for alternative collective tasks that could fill the cultural void 1898 left behind. ¹⁰⁹ Unlike Tocqueville, then, Ortega did not single out imperial expansion as a uniquely appealing solution to the problem of Spain. He was instead more inclined to make gestures toward “Europeanization” or “science” (hardly the sorts of visions likely to inspire enthusiasm among the disillusioned Spanish masses).

Ortega’s willingness to entertain a war in Morocco was also much more intimately related to his formulation of liberalism than was Tocqueville’s promotion of Algerian colonization—which, as many scholars have shown, was inspired by the “historical and national contexts” he faced and perhaps was even intended as an antidote to liberalism’s enervating and effeminating consequences at home. ¹¹⁰ For Ortega, on the other hand, the colonization of Morocco follows from the actual precepts of his liberalism. Granted, Ortega does not explicitly link the Morocco question to new liberalism. But if the immediate goal of his new liberalism is the articulation of national ideals that can solicit the active collaboration of all, and the question of whether to wage a colonial war upon Morocco hinges on whether it is utilized as such an ideal, then Ortega’s provisional approval of Moroccan colonization can only be understood as emerging from the premises of his liberalism. It was, in short, one possible avenue for national reorientation, which he hoped would reestablish cultural continuity and, by extension, the progress of human liberty in Spain. This qualified affirmation of Moroccan colonization therefore stands as the logical ramification of Ortega’s revision of liberalism in response to 1898.

Attending to Ortega’s early thought thus sheds light on a form of liberalism whose values and goals are dramatically impacted by imperial loss. It also indicates that, to fully appreciate the relationship between empire and liberalism, political theorists must not only decenter the experiences of canonical thinkers and dominant powers but also move beyond the exclusive study of cases where empire and liberalism exist simultaneously. As Ortega’s early writings demonstrate, the experience of imperial loss can inflect liberal thought in ways that stoke decidedly anti-individualist tendencies. Motivated by the experience of 1898, Ortega declared that “the problem of Spain is the problem of liberalism,” and proceeded to saturate his new liberalism with collective and nationalistic concerns. ¹¹¹ Narrowly, this led him to consider colonial pursuits like Morocco as potentially consistent with the goals of his liberalism. More broadly, it pressed Ortega to deemphasize liberalism’s staid individualist themes and instead insist that it seek dynamic, large-scale missions that would regenerate Spain’s cultural unity, collective direction, and national cohesion. It is perhaps unsurprising that, two decades later, the founder of Falange Española would point to none other than the liberal Ortega as a major source of inspiration—albeit for a political project with an emphatically antiliberal bent.