The Origins of Totalitarianism (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Hannah Arendt

He was ready to assert that the Semitic principle ‘represents all that is spiritual in our nature,’ that ‘the vicissitudes of history find their main solution – all is race,’ which is ‘the key to history’ regardless of ‘language and religion,’ for ‘there is only one thing which makes a race and that is blood’ and there is only one aristocracy, the ‘aristocracy of nature’ which consists of ‘an unmixed race of a first-rate organization.’fn50 The close relationship of this to more modern race ideologies need not be stressed, and Disraeli’s discovery is one more proof of how well they serve to combat feelings of social inferiority. For if race doctrines finally served much more sinister and immediately political purposes, it is still true that much of their plausibility and persuasiveness lay in the fact that they helped anybody feel himself an aristocrat who had been selected by birth on the strength of ‘racial’ qualification. That these new selected ones did not belong to an elite, to a selected few – which, after all, had been inherent in the pride of a nobleman – but had to share chosenness with an ever-growing mob, did no essential harm to the doctrine, for those who did not belong to the chosen race grew numerically in the same proportion.