Arendt’s Imperialism

1. Arendt’s Imperialism

2. RIGHT OF MAN • We are not born equal; we become equal members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights. (p. 301.) Hannah Arendt, Imperialism inThe Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt, Inc., 1976. • 1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good. John Hall Stewart. “The Declaration of the Rights of Man” in A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution. New York: Macmillan, 1951. P. 113.

3. RACE THINKING What Gobineau was actually looking for in politics was the definition and creation of an ‘elite’ to replace the aristocracy. Instead of princes, he proposed a ‘race of princes’, the Aryans, who he said were in danger of being submerged by the lower non-Aryan classes through democracy[….]Thanks to race an ‘elite’ would be formed[…] the acceptance of a race, the race ideology as such, would become conclusive proof that an individual was well bred, that ‘true blood’ ran through his veins and that a superior origin implied superior rights (173.) To transform the whole nation into a natural aristocracy from which choice examples would develop into geniuses and supermen (180.)

4. EQUAL RIGHTS AND THE SLAVE … the Christian tenet of the unity and equality of all men, based upon common descent from one original set of parents (177.) Slavery was “…in America and some British possessions, a relapse into forms of social organization which were thought to have been definitely liquidated by Christianity” (177.)

5. THE STORY OF RACISM What we have followed so far is the story of an opinion in which we see only now after all the terrible experiences of our times, the first dawn of racism (183.)

6. RACE AND BUREAUCRACY … the stage seemed to be set for all possible horrors. Lying under anybody’s nose were many of the elements which gathered together could create a totalitarian government on the basis of racism. ‘Administrative massacres’ were proposed by Indian bureaucrats while African officials declared that “no ethical considerations such as the rights of man will be allowed to stand in the way of white rule” (221.)

7. HUMAN VALUES …when European men massacred [the Africans] they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder. (192.) …they themselves were more than human and obviously chosen by God to be the gods of black men” (195.)

8. PAN-MOVEMENTS The pan-movements preached the divine origin of their own people as against the Jewish-Christian faith in the divine origin of man (233, emphasis mine.) Racism, which denied the common origin of men and repudiated the common purpose of establishing humanity, introduced the concept of the divine origin of one people as contrasted with all others, thereby covering the temporary and changeable product of human behaviour with a pseudomystical cloud of divine eternity and finality (234.)

9. CHOSEN-NESS What drove the Jews into the centre of these racial ideologies more than anything was the even more obvious fact that the pan-movements claim to chosen-ness could clash seriously only with the Jewish claim” (240.) … (in the words of Chesterton) “The individual is himself the thing to be worshipped; the individual is his own ideal and even his own idol.” From now on, the old religious concept of chosen-ness was no longer the essence of Judaism; it became instead the essence of Jewishness (74.)

10. LAW OF EXCEPTION the man without a state was an anomaly for whom there is no appropriate niche in the framework of the general law—an outlaw by definition—he was completely at the mercy of the police (283.) (Hitler’s motto that ‘Right is what is good for the German people’…)… A concept of law which identifies what is right with the notion of what is good for—for the individual, or the family, or the people, or the largest number—becomes inevitable once the absolute and transcendent measurements of religion or the law of nature have lost their authority (299.)