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佐藤栄作 受賞論文集

by the number of individuals who firmly subscribe to such ideals of liberty anddemocracy.Spanish essayist and philosopher Jose Ortega Y Gasset (1883-1955), in his famousessay The Revolt of the Masses (1930), explains that a society is composed by twofactors, namely, minorities and masses. This division is not socially determined, thatis to say, the minority does not represent the upper class, the rich, or the bourgeoisie;the mass, in turn, does not coincide with the lower class, the proletariat, or thepoor. The minorities, or more precisely the select minorities, consist regardless tosuch classifications, of an individual or a group of individuals that, as states OrtegaY Gasset,“make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties”(Op. cit., Ch. I). They are composed by individuals with special qualifications (eithermoral, cultural, religious, or intellectual) and minds built up through discipline andgreat effort, whereas masses comprise the average men, those who are not speciallyqualified and“demand nothing special of themselves”(Op. cit., Ch. I). The mass is thecommonplace, the ordinary, the vulgar, and non-exceptional.Ortega Y Gasset proclaims that the uprising of the masses in the foreground of the‘social life’and the‘social power’4 is the most dreadful characteristic of all the timesProvided that“masses, by definition, neither should nor can direct their own personalexistence, and still less rule society in genera”(Op. cit., Ch. I), their upheaval impingeda severe crisis upon Europe and Western Civilization as a whole in the past century.It is in this context that he enunciates that“The characteristic of the hour is that3004 For the philosopher, the terms‘social’,‘public’or‘mass’may not be understood only in their political meaning, butspecially in their intellectual, moral, cultural, economic and religious dimensions. The mass-man did not exclusivelyadvance in the political field, but in the moral, intellectual, cultural fields as well. Particularly in the latter, theabsence of genuine ideas, of standards on which one can anytime lean, the lack of a sincere frame of mind to accepthigher and select ideas led to“the hermetism of the soul which (...) urges the mass to intervene in the whole of publiclife [and] inevitably leads it to one single process of intervention: direct action”(Op. cit., Ch. VIII). Above all, theabsence of standards signifies, for the essayist, the end of culture.