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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses
CHAPTER XIV: WHO RULES THE WORLD?
Page 2
The cases in which at first sight force seems to be the basis of command, are revealed on a closer inspection as the best example to prove our thesis. Napoleon led an aggressive force against Spain, maintained his aggression for a time, but, properly speaking, never ruled in Spain for a single day. And that, although he had the force, and precisely because he had it. It is necessary to distinguish between a process of aggression and a state of rule. Rule is the normal exercise of authority, and is always based on public opinion, to-day as a thousand years ago, amongst the English as amongst the bushmen. Never has anyone ruled on this earth by basing his rule essentially on any other thing than public opinion. It may be thought that the sovereignty of public invention of the lawyer Danton, in 1789, or of Saint Thomas Aquinas in the XIIIth Century. The notion of that sovereignty may have been discovered in one place or another, at one time or another, but the fact that public opinion is the basic force which produces the phenomenon of rule in human societies is as old, and as lasting, as mankind. In Newton's physics gravitation is the force which produces movement. And the law of public opinion is the universal law of gravitation in political history. Without it the science of history would be impossible. Hence Hume's acute suggestion that the theme of history consists in demonstrating how the sovereignty of public opinion, far from being a Utopian aspiration, is what has actually happened everywhere and always in human societies. Even the man who attempts to rule with janissaries depends on their opinion and the opinion which the rest of the inhabitants have of them. The truth is that there is no ruling with janissaries. As Talleyrand said to Napoleon: "You can do everything with bayonets, Sire, except sit on them." And to rule is not the gesture of snatching at power, but the tranquil exercise of it. In a word, to rule is to sit down, be it on the throne, curule chair, front bench, or bishop's seat. Contrary to the unsophisticated suggestions of melodrama, to rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as of the firm seat. The State is, in fine, the state of opinion, a position of equilibrium. What happens is that at times public opinion is nonexistent. A society divided into discordant groups, with their forces of opinion cancelling one another out, leaves no room for a ruling power to be constituted. And as "nature abhors a vacuum" the empty space left by the absence of public opinion is filled by brute force. At the most, then, the latter presents itself as a substitute for the former. Consequently, if we wish to express the law of public opinion as the law of historical gravitation, we shall take into consideration those cases where it is absent, and we then arrive at a formula which is the well-known, venerable, forthright commonplace: there can be no rule in opposition to public opinion.