Jose Ortega y Gasset

Spanish philosopher and essayist, professor of the University of Madrid and founder of the magazine Revista de Occidente. Ortega y Gasset’s writings range over history, politics, aesthetics and art criticism, as well as the history of philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. In 1929 Ortega published one of his best known works, The Revolt of the Masses, where he characterized the 20th-century society as dominated by masses of mediocre and indistinguishable individuals. Ortega’s ideas converged those of other ‘mass society’ theorists such as Karl Mannheim, Erich Fromm and Hannah Arendt.