Invertebrate Spain

Spain has been celebrating the centenary of the birth of the great thinker, José Ortega y Gasset, and I was in Madrid when the celebrations began. Ortega was a thinker in the same mold as James Burnham. In 1922 he published a penetrating long essay, Espana Invertebrada, and some of the commentators naturally recalled it.

I say “naturally,” for it had an uncanny prescience, viewed from the Spain of 1983.