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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses
CHAPTER XIV: WHO RULES THE WORLD?
Page 22
If we study the historical situation immediately preceding the birth of a State, we shall always discover the following lines of development. Various small groups exist, whose social structure is designed so that each may live within itself. The social form of each serves only for an "internal" existence in common. This indicates that in the past they did actually live in isolation, each by itself and for itself, without other than occasional contacts with its neighbours. But to this effective isolation there has succeeded an "external" common life, above all in the economic sphere. The individual in each group no longer lives only in his own circle, part of his life is linked up with individuals of other groups, with whom he is in commercial or intellectual relations. Hence arises a disequilibrium between the two common existences, the "internal" and the "external ." Established social forms- laws, customs, religion- favour the internal and make difficult the external which is a newer, ampler existence. In this situation, the State-principle is the movement which tends to annihilate the social forms of internal existence, and to substitute for them a social form adequate to the new life, lived externally. Apply this to actual conditions in Europe, and these abstract expressions will take on form and colour. There is no possible creation of a State unless the minds of certain peoples are capable of abandoning the traditional structure of one form of common life, and in addition, of thinking out another form not previously existing. That is why it is a genuine creation. The State begins by being absolutely a work of imagination. Imagination is the liberating power possessed by man. A people is capable of becoming a State in the degree in which it is able to imagine. Hence it is, that with all peoples there has been a limit to their evolution in the direction of a State; precisely the limit set by Nature to their imaginations. The Greek and the Roman, capable of imagining the city which triumphs over the dispersiveness of the countryside, stopped short at the city walls. There were men who attempted to carry Graeco-Roman minds further, to set them free from the city, but it was a vain enterprise. The imaginative limitations of the Roman, represented by Brutus, took in hand the assassination of Caesar, the greatest imagination of antiquity. It is of importance to us Europeans of to-day to recall this story, for ours has reached the same chapter. -