The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset
Published 1930 · 70,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Philosophy, Nonfiction, Political Science
How hard is The Revolt of the Masses to read?
The Revolt of the Masses scores 57 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 70 out of 100
- Philosophical vocabulary from the German tradition combined with terms Ortega coins or redefines, requiring the reader to hold his special senses of mass, noble and vital.
- Sentence structure: 64 out of 100
- Journalistic origins keep the sentences shapely and rhythmic, though the argument runs through long paragraphs of qualification.
- Abstraction: 84 out of 100
- A sustained argument about historical types, sovereignty and the structure of civilisation, illustrated rather than grounded in examples.
- Information density: 72 out of 100
- Demographic history, the sociology of technology, the Roman empire, liberalism and the state are all pressed into a compact book.
- Narrative indirection: 36 out of 100
- Ortega states his thesis in the first chapter and repeats it; nothing is concealed or deferred.
- Symbolic density: 52 out of 100
- The crowded café, the spoiled heir and the specialist in his cell function as recurring figures that do the persuasive work.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- Ortega writes with an aristocratic irony toward the reader he is describing, and never entirely settles whether he is diagnosing the age or scolding it.
- Resolution withholding: 64 out of 100
- The book ends by asking what Europe should command and answering only that it must find something, leaving the prescription deliberately empty.
- Structural complexity: 44 out of 100
- Serially composed chapters that circle a single thesis, with a second part on the state and Europe appended.
How The Revolt of the Masses is regarded
The Revolt of the Masses holds a literary regard score of 77 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.