Ortega preferred to call himself a liberal rather than a conservative. In The Revolt of the Masses he wrote: “The political doctrine which has represented the loftiest endeavour towards common life (convivencia) is liberal democracy . . . Liberalism — it is well to recall this today — is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet.” Much later, in a 1940 essay on imperial Rome (translated into English as “Concord and Liberty”), Ortega lamented the death of liberalism, which “has passed away without ever receiving a proper obituary”. What he meant by liberalism, however, was a political philosophy that would now go under the name of conservatism: a society and economy governed with a light touch. He was critical of parliamentary paralysis under the constitutional monarchy, or what he called España invertebrada (“Invertebrate Spain”) in a 1921 book of that name, because he wanted what he saw as a backwater to become a truly European country. And so he gave a cautious welcome to the modernising dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, who suspended the Cortes [Parliament] from 1923 to 1930, but executed nobody, imprisoned few and permitted a largely free press. As Editor of Revista de Occidente from 1923 to 1936, Ortega provided the most intelligent commentary on the dramatic political vicissitudes that preceded the Civil War. Though he supported the Second Spanish Republic, Ortega was never a man of the Left. He admired the English political system precisely because, though the most liberal of the democracies, it was rooted in an aristocratic past. In 1930 Ortega ventured into Spanish politics as leader of a group of intellectuals, “the movement for the service of the republic”, who opposed the personal rule of King Alfonso after his dismissal of Primo de Rivera. Ortega’s declaration of war on the monarchy — “Spaniards! Your state is no more! Reconstitute it! Delenda est monarchia!” — caused a sensation and contributed to the King’s decision a few months later to go into exile. But within a couple of years Ortega was disillusioned by the Republic: in 1932 he denounced its brutal suppression of anarchists: “It was not for this that we worked in the days of the monarchy.” Once the Civil War began, Ortega declared his loyalty to the Republic in the famous manifesto of the intellectuals. “But the atrocities and the increasing influence of the Communists,” Hugh Thomas remarks, caused Ortega and his friends to flee abroad, in his case to Portugal and later Argentina. “There they repudiated their support for the Republic.” In 1942, Ortega settled in Estoril, an entrepôt for émigrés and the Allies where he could stay in touch with European intellectuals. After the horrors of the Civil War and its bloody aftermath, in 1945 Ortega returned to Spain and for a few years attempted to revive intellectual life in Madrid under the Franco regime. This was indeed a quixotic enterprise, which alienated other Republican exiles but aroused only suspicion from the Generalíssimo and his followers. He was unable to resume his editorial chair at Revista de Occidente, but he succeeded in publishing his own collected works, Obras Completas, under the journal’s imprint — an important concession by Franco’s otherwise strict censors. Though Ortega’s Institute for the Humanities was closed down in 1950 and he returned to live abroad until his death in 1955, his disciple Julián Marías continued his work until the return of democracy in 1976 after Franco’s death. Today, Ortega’s memory still burns brightly, not only among philosophers but for all who value integrity and humanity.