Ortega y Gasset reveals the secret tous: About the change within freedom

Abstract

On September 18, 1789, referring to the scope of the constituent power of the National Assembly, Mirabeau asserted the necessity in those times of change to “set aside the suddenness of transition”. In a brilliant 1927 essay devoted to the “Tribune of the People”, José Ortega y Gasset points out that, under the circumstances, “Mirabeau’s politics, as do all genuine politics, start from the premise of the junction of opposites. What is needed is both an impulse and its counterbalancing slowing effect, an acceleration force of social change coupled with one of moderation that may prevent a vertiginous spiral”. This definition by Ortega, who puts the elaboration of a new regime on an equal footing with the method in politics, not only is particularly useful to analyze the situations in which transitional processes are not discontinuous and rupture is somehow negotiated, but makes the author a true social reform theoretician and thus one of political moderation (and of virtue, according to Aristotelian tradition). However, Ortega’s moderating vein does not dry up there. In another previous contemporary work, the Spanish philosopher exposes a dimension that is no less important: the theme of coexistence and conciliation. And he refers to fourteenth-century author Ibn-Khaldun to remind us of the tabula rasa illusion, in order for us to be aware that still in the present day any sustainable change must always resort to a long-standing tradition against a short-lived one and that it is through recurrence that novelty is born. Paraphrasing the title of this second essay, Ortega y Gasset reveals the secret to us: the keys to social transformation within freedom.