Visions of Europe in the dark years: Julien Benda and José Ortega y Gasset

Abstract

Une of the effects of the emergence of an anthropology of Europe has been to legitimize, in the eyes of a growing number of anthropologists, certain intellectual pursuits—in particular the history of ideas—that in the past were dismissively called library investigations. The return to Europe, the study of a civilizational space with a rich literary tapestry, has opened up a vast new world for the anthropologist. If you like, the possibility of an ethnography of texts is now a reality, along with the more traditional and more respectable study of fact-to-face relationships. Who could have said, just a few years ago, that Fichete's Discourses to the German Nation or Renan's What is a Nation would have become the object of detailed anthropological analysis?1 At another level, some anthropologists are no longer afraid of treading in the footsteps of their ancestors, and they have become leading exponents in the field of historical sociology.2 Perhaps the day will come when the discipline will be able to state proudly once more that nothing human is alien to it. It is because I intend to delve, unashamedly, into the area of the history of the idea of Europe—a quest that I consider as anthropologically right and proper as the study of how people get married in a small Balearic island or how they earn their living in a populous Neapolitan quarter—that I have prefaced my paper with a pro domo argument. Just prior to World War I Sorel could say in all seriousness that the only idea that united Europe was the idea of war. The European carnage that followed only confirmed the poignancy of Sorel's remark. The voices of pacifism went unheeded—isolated musings in a sea of militaristic patriotism that affected both right and left. With hindsight, one can safely say that the postwar political arrangements did little to stem this state of things: Germany emerged from the war humiliated and offended, seeking revenge. The implementation of Wilson's principle of self-determination was far from felicitous, and the League of Nations was barely more than a forum for political posturing. In a climate in which the aim of the powerful nation-states was one of naked Herrschaft (dominion)—that is, the aggrandizement of the state and/or the creation or maintenance of empires—the idea of a united Europe was confined to a few dissenting, maverick voices. For the Machtstaat the small states were just pawns to be devoured in the inexorable game of chess politics. The Europe imagined by the National Socialists was simply a Germany writ large.3 In the interwar period, and particularly during the hegemonic years of fascism, the European ideal was at a low ebb. Different reasons can be suggested to account for this state of things: the crisis of European civilization (exemplified in Spengler's idea of the decline