“The Noble Task Of Governing Worlds”

Abstract

This chapter examines José Ortega y Gasset’s influence on the emergence of Spanish fascism. Drawing on untranslated writings by Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, Ernesto Giménez Caballero, and José Antonio Primo de Rivera, it shows that Ortega’s analysis of Spain’s post-imperial condition—and his call for ambitious, regenerative politics—strongly appealed to fascist thinkers in the years preceding the Civil War. Tracing these lines of influence through Ortega’s parliamentary interventions on Catalan autonomy in the 1930s, which fascist ideologues adopted with minimal revision, the chapter argues that early Spanish fascists saw Ortega as a brilliant diagnostician of interwar crises of authority. At the same time, it insists that Ortega’s liberalism cannot be equated with fascism. Despite their admiration for his analysis, Spanish fascists ultimately dismissed Ortega as an ineffectual political actor constrained by liberal commitments he refused to relinquish, while Ortega himself condemned fascism as a regressive and barbaric politics incapable of renewing Europe’s global standing or sustaining “liberal civilization.” Even so, the chapter concludes that Ortega’s influence on Falangist thought demonstrates how a shared commitment to global hierarchy could blur the boundaries between liberalism and fascism in the aftermath of imperial collapse.