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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses
CHAPTER XIV: WHO RULES THE WORLD?
Page 20
The square, thanks to the walls which enclose it, is a portion of the countryside which turns its back on the rest, eliminates the rest and sets up in opposition to it. This lesser, rebellious field, which secedes from the limitless one, and keeps to itself, is a space sui generis, of the most novel kind, in which man frees himself from the community of the plant and the animal, leaves them outside, and creates an enclosure apart which is purely human, a civil space. Hence Socrates, the great townsman, quintessence of the spirit of the polis, can say: "I have nothing to do with the trees of the field, I have to do only with the man of the city." What has ever been known of this by the Hindu, the Persian, the Chinese, or the Egyptian? Up to the time of Alexander and of Caesar, respectively, the history of Greece and of Rome consists of an incessant struggle between these two spaces: between the rational city and the vegetable country, between the lawgiver and the husbandman, between jus and rus. Do not imagine that this origin of the city is an invention of mine, of merely symbolic truth. With strange persistence, the dwellers in the Graeco-Latin city preserve, in the deepest, primary stratum of their memories, this recollection of a synoikismos. No need to worry out texts, a simple translation is enough. Synoikismos is the resolution to live together; consequently, an assembly, in the strict double sense of the word, physical and juridical. To vegetative dispersion over the countryside succeeds civil concentration within the town. The city is the super-house, the supplanting of the infra-human abode or nest, the creation of an entity higher and more abstract than the oikos of the family. This is the res publica, the politeia, which is not made up of men and women, but of citizens. A new dimension, not reducible to the primitive one allied to the animal, is offered to human existence, and within it those who were before mere men are going to employ their best energies. In this way comes into being the city, from the first a State. After a fashion, the whole Mediterranean coast has always displayed a spontaneous tendency towards this State-type. With more or less purity the North of Africa (Carthage = the city) repeats the same phenomenon. Italy did not throw off the City-State till the XIXth Century, and our own East Coast splits up easily into cantonalism, an after-taste of that age-old inspiration.[3]
[3]It would be interesting to show that in Catalonia there is a collaboration of opposing tendencies: the nationalism of Europe and the urbanism of Barcelona, where the tendency of early Mediterranean man survives. I have said elsewhere that our East Coast contains the remnant of homo antiquus left in the Peninsula.