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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses
CHAPTER XIV: WHO RULES THE WORLD?
Page 29
As always happens, in this case a plain acceptance of facts gives us the key. What is it that is clearly seen when we study the evolution of any "modern nation," France, Spain, Germany? Simply this: what at one period seemed to constitute nationality appears to be denied at a later date. First, the nation seems to be the tribe, and the no-nation the tribe beside it. Then the nation is made up of the two tribes, later it is a region, and later still a county, a duchy or a kingdom. Leon is a nation but Castile not; then it is Leon and Castile, but not Aragon. The presence of two principles is evident: one, variable and continually superseded- tribe, region, duchy, kingdom, with its language or dialect; the other, permanent, which leaps freely over all those boundaries and postulates as being in union precisely what the first considered as in radical opposition. The philologues- this is my name for the people who to-day claim the title of "historians"- play a most delightful bit of foolery when, starting from what in our fleeting epoch, the last two or three centuries, the Western nations have been, they go on to suppose that Vercingetorix or the Cid Campeador was already struggling for a France to extend from Saint-Malo to Strasburg, or a Spain to reach from Finisterre to Gibraltar. These philologues- like the ingenuous playwright- almost always show their heroes starting out for the Thirty Years' War. To explain to us how France and Spain were formed, they suppose that France and Spain pre-existed as unities in the depths of the French and Spanish soul. As if there were any French or any Spaniards before France and Spain came into being! As if the Frenchman and the Spaniard were not simply things that had to be hammered out in two thousand years of toil! The plain truth is that modern nations are merely the present manifestation of a variable principle, condemned to perpetual supersession. That principle is not now blood or language, since the community of blood and language in France or in Spain has been the effect, not the cause, of the unification into a State; the principle at the present time is the "natural frontier." It is all very well for a diplomatist in his skilled fencing to employ this concept of natural frontiers, as the ultima ratio of his argumentation. But a historian cannot shelter himself behind it as if it were a permanent redoubt. It is not permanent, it is not even sufficiently specific. Let us not forget what is, strictly stated, the question. We are trying to find out what is the national State- what to-day we call a nation- as distinct from other types of State, like the City-State, or to go to the other extreme, like the Empire founded by Augustus.[6]
[6]It is well known that the Empire of Augustus is the opposite of what his adoptive father Caesar aspired to create. Augustus works along the lines of Pompey, of Caesar's enemies. The best book on the subject up to the present is E. Meyer's The Monarchy of Caesar and the Principate of Pompey (1918). Though it is the best, it seems to me greatly insufficient, which is not strange, for nowhere to-day do we find historians of wide range. Meyer's book is written in opposition to Mommsen, who was a formidable historian, and although he has some reason for saying that Mommsen idealises Caesar and converts him into a superhuman figure, I think Mommsen saw the essence of Caesar's policy better than Meyer himself. This is not surprising, for Mommsen, besides being a stupendous "philologue," had plenty of the futurist in him. And insight into the past is approximately proportionate to vision of the future.