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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses
CHAPTER XIV: WHO RULES THE WORLD?
Page 33
That enterprise, be its intermediate processes what they may, consists in the long run in the organisation of a certain type of common life. State and plan of existence, programme of human activity or conduct, these are inseparable terms. The different kinds of State arise from the different ways in which the promoting group enters into collaboration with the others. Thus, the ancient State never succeeds in fusing with the others. Rome rules and educates the Italians and the provincials, but it does not raise them to union with itself. Even in the city it did not bring about the political fusion of the citizens. Let it not be forgotten that during the Republic Rome was, strictly speaking, two Romes: the Senate and the people. State-unification never got beyond a mere setting up of communication between groups which remained strangers one to the other. Hence it was that the Empire, when threatened, could not count on the patriotism of the others, and had to defend itself exclusively by bureaucratic measures of administration and warfare. This incapacity of every Greek and Roman group to fuse with other groups arose from profound causes which this is not the place to examine, but which may definitely be summed up in one: the man of the ancient world interpreted the collaboration in which the State inevitably consists, in a simple, elemental, rough fashion, namely, as a duality of governors and governed.[9]
[9]This is confirmed by what at first sight seems to contradict it: the granting of citizenship to all the inhabitants of the Empire. But it turns out that this concession was made precisely when it was losing the character of political status and changing into mere burden and service to the State, or into mere title in civil law. Nothing else could be expected from a State in which slavery was accepted as a principle. For our "nations," on the other hand, slavery was merely a residual fact.