José Ortega y Gasset was a 20th-century Spanish philosopher still known for his theory of the mass-men (including mass-women if it is necessary to add). My Regulation review of his 1932 The Revolt of the Masses (1930 for the original Spanish edition) suggests that, despite some oddities or errors, Ortega can be read as a philosopher in search of liberalism.
For Ortega, the mass-man is the person who is blind to the conditions necessary for the maintenance of a liberal civilization. To quote a few passages of my review:
Mass-men are those “for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection.” It should be noted this is not class theory. Ortega makes clear that we often see “nobly disciplined minds” in working classes, while in the upper classes of surviving nobility and among intellectuals we frequently find “the mass and the vulgar.”
Ortega’s mass-men seem to prefigure the obscurantist era that
we seem to be entering today. The mass-man is not interested in
the conditions of civilization, even in the conditions of science,
which provides him with “his motor-car … but he believes that it
is the spontaneous fruit of an Edenic tree.” He is like a primitive
with no knowledge of history and who cannot but repeat mistakes
of the past.
Ortega considers the typical scientist as “the prototype of the mass-man”:
Science is essential, of course: “China reached a high degree of technique without in the least suspecting the existence of physics,” he writes. “It is only modern European technique that has a scientific basis, from which it derives its special character, its possibility of limitless progress.” But science requires narrow specialization. Thus, the scientific man has no culture. Contrary to Einstein, “who needed to saturate himself with Kant and Mach before his own synthesis,” the typical scientific man is “astoundingly mediocre, and even less than mediocre.” He is “a learned ignoramus.” Perhaps a good example in our own days is the public health expert. (See “The Dangers of ‘Public Health,’” Fall 2015.)
We may wonder if many if not most economists aren’t also mass-men.
READER COMMENTS
Richard Fulmer
Oct 4 2023 at 7:11am
Schools and purveyors of popular culture, with their self-esteem lifting messages of “you’re fine just as you are,” seem perfectly designed to produce mass-men.
David Seltzer
Oct 4 2023 at 12:27pm
Richard, well said. I studied econometrics at Chicago under the wonderful statistician, Harry Roberts. When discussing science, mathematics and life in general, he counseled that for one to progress, one should remain curious and skeptical.
Thomas L Hutcheson
Oct 4 2023 at 11:17am
I have not seen any other professions from the inside, so I do not know, but I think Economics is very likely to lead one to seek other forms of knowledge, at least physical sciences, mathematics, philosophy, and history.
Pierre Lemieux
Oct 4 2023 at 1:06pm
Thomas: Indeed that is a big advantage of economics (although I am not sure that physics has much to do with economics–see Hayek’s The Counter-Revolution of Science). I think that if Ortega was alive now, he might however have noticed the trend for economists to ignore the philosophical and methodological dimensions of the economic enquiry, as well probably as their tendency to play down the lessons of history.
Richard Fulmer
Oct 4 2023 at 4:19pm
To the extent that economists are concerned with the production and maintenance of physical goods, they should care about the physical laws that control them.
Although the Second Law of Thermodynamics does not imply that an institution will require upkeep, it certainly implies that a factory will.
Institutions are ideas and, as such, are not subject to physical laws. Humans beings, goods, and capital goods are physical entities and are subject to physical laws.
Thomas L Hutcheson
Oct 4 2023 at 6:46pm
Not in refutation, but for enjoyment may I point you to Sean Carroll’s “Mindscape”
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/
He is very much interested in philosophy and the “foundations” of physics.
Monte
Oct 4 2023 at 12:26pm
We should, of course, pay homage to scientists who take as their duty the passionate defense of objective facts as the ultimate determinants of scientific truth. It is only when they conform to scientific orthodoxy in deference to authority that they forsake that duty and become mass-men. In the words of Gasset:
Pierre Lemieux
Oct 4 2023 at 1:30pm
Monte: I think that Ortega’s point was wider. Whether the scientific man is in his discipline’s mainstream or not, what makes him a mass-man is to ignore the philosophical implications and the methodological foundations of their work as well as how his own specialty tells him precious nothing about society and civilization work. I think it is David Friedman (but I can’t find where right now) who told the story of his physicist father-in-law (if I remember correctly) who thought he knew as much, if not more, about economics as him.
Monte
Oct 4 2023 at 5:44pm
Pierre,
Yes, there have been many mass-men dedicated to their discipline or the prevailing orthodoxy of the time who refused to consider the normative implications of their contributions to science. Those rare specialists who did develop some sense of humanity usually did so only after experiencing an epiphany of the world into which they were born and what they accomplished.
One such individual who comes to mind (thanks to the movie’s recent release) is Oppenheimer, who uttered the now famous line from Hindu scripture, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”, after witnessing the detonation of the first atom bomb. Subsequent to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he spent the remainder of his life campaigning for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
Dylan
Oct 4 2023 at 7:40pm
I think there is a natural inclination for people who study any subject deeply to think their chosen discipline has a monopoly on the truth.
I’ve always been something of a dilettante, and in university I was studying a lot of different subjects at the same time and so I’d often hear anecdotes about those in another field that showed how stupid they were to have missed something obvious. An economics professor talking about how a physicist friend insisted that a natural gas turbine couldn’t get any more efficient due to Carnot’s theorem, but ignoring the potential economic value of waste heat. Anthropologists laughing at economists that developed a great monetary history except for the fact that there wasn’t any historical record for it. The psychologists bashed the sociologists and vice versa. The hard scientists bashed the soft. The mathematicians and philosophers bashed everyone.
What was particularly amusing to me about all of this was, in many of these classes we were studying the same thinkers, just focusing on different elements of their work. I learned more about Bentham’s utilitarianism in sociology than in philosophy or economics as just one example.
Jason S.
Oct 4 2023 at 3:00pm
Great post. Yes, most economists are mass-men in this sense. They don’t typically understand how to connect purely scientific economic findings to moral philosophy in order to generate social or policy recommendations, and they usually make a mess of it when they try.
Roger McKinney
Oct 4 2023 at 7:43pm
Hayek said somewhere that an economist who knows only economics is a poor economist.
Ben Franklin said an educated person should be a jack of all trades and master of one. But such people are rare.
steve
Oct 4 2023 at 8:51pm
There are some scientists who live up to the stereotype of total geek knowing their chosen field/interest well and not knowing much about anything else. However, my experience is that those are pretty few and far between. There are also some who think they know more about everything than everyone else. I dont know if that would fit his definition but that certainly extends well beyond scientists and into other professions like economics, medicine, law and engineering (maybe the worst IMHO having a family full of engineers). But then, that also extends to people in the trades and working class.
Steve
nobody.really
Oct 4 2023 at 10:47pm
What about judges?
“I venture to believe that it is as important to a judge called upon to pass on a question of constitutional law, to have at least a bowing acquaintance with Acton and Maitland, with Thucydides, Gibbon and Carlyle, with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton, with Machiavelli, Montaigne and Rabelais, with Plato, Bacon, Hume and Kant, as with the books which have been specifically written upon the subject. For in such matters everything turns upon the spirit in which he approaches the questions before him. The words he must construe are empty vessels into which he can pour nearly anything he will….”
Learned Hand, In commemoration of fifty years of federal judicial service, 264 F.2d xxxvii (2d Cir. 1959).
This invites the question, what percentage of libertarians would fit this label? Hayek emphasized the need for people to conform to received rules of conduct (albeit with some opportunity, after great deliberation, to revise those rules). The we-don’t-need-a-state-because-we-impose-limits-on-ourselves school of libertarianism runs squarely against the “libertine” school of libertarianism.
“[T]he most objectionable feature of the conservative attitude is its propensity to reject well-substantiated new knowledge because it dislikes some of the consequences which seem to follow from it – or, to put it bluntly, its obscurantism…. I can have little patience with those who oppose, for instance, the theory of evolution….”
F.A. Hayek, “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” published in The Constitution of Liberty (1960). So maybe obscurantism is a more consistent phenomenon than we imagine.
“[W]hen experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
George Santayana, The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense.
Ironically, Thomas Kuhn condemns scientific man for the exact opposite problem: They are TOO MUCH men of culture, and their culture cannot help but inform/distort their interpretation of their observations.
“What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see. In the absence of such training there can only be, in William James’s phrase, ‘a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion.'”
Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolution (1962), Chap. 10, “Revolutions as Changes of World-View”
“The antipathy of … scholars toward atomic theory can indubitably be traced back to their positivistic philosophical attitude. This is an interesting example of the fact that even scholars of audacious spirit and fine instinct can be obstructed in the interpretation of facts by philosophical prejudices.”
Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes (1949).
Jose Pablo
Oct 5 2023 at 2:44pm
We may wonder if many if not most economists aren’t also mass-men.
If you think economists are terrible in this regard check with CEOs and C-suite executives in general. In a significant number of cases, you will be appalled by their “general” ignorance. Particularly, by the way, regarding economics.
They don’t hold a very positive view of this “science”. To the point that Warren Buffett once said: “If you have one economist in your payroll, you have one too many.“
Comments are closed.