Gaos interpreter of the crisis of Modernity as Totalitarianism

Abstract

This paper inquires —studying especially the unpublished notes preserved in his archive— into José Gaos’s concept of totalitarianism as a diagnosis of his own time. Gaos considers that the effects of civil war, Nazism, Stalinism, and Ortega’s thesis of the “revolt of the masses”, must be added to modernization as a process of generalization of laicism, technique, and loss of value of the subject and of social ties. So widened, totalitarianism becomes an anthropological notion, rather than political.