Politics & Power Quote by Jose Ortega Y Gasset

A new political animal is Ortega y Gasset's real subject here: the militant who treats power not as a means to implement a program, but as a replacement for argument itself. By framing Syndicalism and Fascism as "species" of the same genus, he collapses left and right into a shared cultural pathology. The provocation is deliberate. Ortega isn't tallying policy differences; he's diagnosing a temperament that thrives on the refusal of reasons.

The line turns on a chilling inversion of the Enlightenment bargain. European liberalism, for all its hypocrisies, is built on the premise that public claims must travel through justification: you persuade, you compromise, you accept the possibility of being wrong. Ortega describes a man who opts out of that social contract. "Does not want to give reasons or to be right" is more than anti-intellectualism; it's a rejection of the very idea that truth is something you arrive at together. What remains is the performance of resolve: certainty as theater, willpower as credential.

Context sharpens the warning. Writing in the interwar period, Ortega watched mass politics surge, parliaments weaken, and street movements learn that intimidation can be faster than debate. His target is not only the extremist leader but the follower who finds dignity in discipline and belonging, and who experiences complexity as humiliation. The subtext is anxious and elitist, but not frivolous: when politics becomes the art of imposing opinions, disagreement stops being a civic routine and becomes an enemy to be crushed.