Adam S. Rust
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asrust.bsky.social
Adam S. Rust
@asrust.bsky.social
3.4K followers 95 following 530 posts
Lawyer, writes on law things, writings have appeared in Liberal Currents and Balls & Strikes, based in the SF Bay Area.
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Over the next several weeks I am going to live skeet my evening reading of Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism" for no particular reason.
Racism not as the end as in purpose, but end as in death, of the project of Western civilization.
The confusion of the mob (the embittered reminders of all classes of society) and the people (society as the people involved and invested in making society work) by intellectual elites once again emerges.
Imperialist administrators become nationalists independent of the particular life of their home nation. Abstracted from the particulars of their country they begin to see themselves as "above party" when what they are is alienated from the facts on the ground back home.
Of course, this is basically what the US did too. Frederick Jackson Turner understood this in his way.
No one really stopped imperialist expansion because everyone involved in the project understood, however vaguely, that it kicked the can of resolving class conflict just a little further down the road as long as expansion lasted.
As I am reading the Imperialism section in Arendt's book I am constantly thinking of our 21st century tech billionaires. Like Cecil Rhodes, they would annex the planets if they could. And some of them are trying real hard to do so. There is no sense of limits.
Arendt takes a long drive by on Hobbes' "Leviathan" ultimately concluding that property acquisition without limits requires power acquisition without limits. Hobbes' Leviathan has the will to total power acquisition necessary.
Imperialism is what you get when the business class brings a business mindset to the administration of government.
The first branch of government exported from the metropole to the colonial holdings were the police and the military. Meaning all political problems in the colonies were resolved by military and police means — with violence.
I just was not prepared for how much Arendt's analysis of imperialism was going to be economically based.
One recurrent observation Arendt makes without diving into why it is the case, is the asymmetry in a globalized world between cause and effect. Also interesting here is how the modern world garbled our historical concepts.
There is no way to resolve the contradiction between the political outlook of the metropole politician and the colonial administrator ostensibly acting on the metropole's behalf.
The Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century revealed the incompatibility of the nation-state and empire. This didn't stop the imperialists.
Government built on the principle of consent of a unified people (a precondition of the 19th century nation-state) fractures when you try to expand that governing structure across the globe.
The business class believed that the natural equilibrium of the free market existed a universal fact, when in fact the equilibrium relied on independent social and political mores for its support. Good thing we don't have people with silly beliefs like that anymore.
More precisely, his pardon. Not quite the same thing!
Dreyfus gets his exoneration because France doesn't want its party, the Paris Exposition of 1900, spoiled.
This portrait of Picquart is a portrait of a historical type I have a deep admiration for. Probably because it seems like such a Midwest type and I have a soft spot for the moral archetypes of my homeland.
You're welcome! I am really enjoying doing it. This is a really thought provoking book. I see why it has made its way into the political theory canon.
Most of the political activism of the Dreyfus Affair occurred outside of the representative institutions of Parliament. Also, the fact that the Parliament voted for Anti-Dreyfusard results did not equate with supporting the larger right-wing extremism of the Anti-Dreyfusard project.
The confusion of the mob with the people among political elites leads to an aloofness fatal to politicians engaging in the hard work of democratic persuasion.
The coalition that formed the pro-Dreyfusard faction had no other unifying feature than being Against This Sort Of Thing.