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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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Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 9d

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.

Picture of the Library of America edition of Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism" with a glass and decanter of bourbon adjacent for no particular reason.

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Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 7h

Racism not as the end as in purpose, but end as in death, of the project of Western civilization.

"Racism may indeed carry out the doom of the Western world and, for that matter, of the whole of human civilization. When Russians have become Slavs, when Frenchmen have assumed the role of commanders of a force noire, when Englishmen have turned into "white men," as already for a disastrous spell all Germans became Aryans, then this change will itself signify the end of Western man. For no matter what learned scientists may say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death."

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 8h

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.

"The rise of the mob out of the capitalist organization was observed early, and its growth carefully and anxiously noted by all great historians of the nineteenth century. Historical pessimism from Burckhardt to Spengler springs essentially from this consideration. But what the historians, sadly preoccupied with the phenomenon in itself, failed to grasp was that the mob could not be identified with the growing industrial working class, and certainly not with the people as a whole, but that it was composed actually of the refuse of all classes. This composition made it seem that the mob and its representatives had abolished class differences, that those standing outside the class-divided nation were the people itself (the Volksgemeinschaft, as the Nazis would call it) rather than its distortion and caricature. The historical pessimists understood the essential irresponsibility of this new social stratum, and they also correctly foresaw the possibility of converting democracy into a despotism whose tyrants would rise from the mob and lean on it for support. What they failed to understand was that the mob is not only the refuse but also the by-product of bourgeois society, directly produced by it and therefore never quite separable from it. They failed for this reason to notice high society's constantly growing admiration for the underworld, which runs like a red thread through the nineteenth century, its continuous step-by-step retreat on all questions of morality, and its growing taste for the anarchical cynicism of its offspring. At the turn of the century, the Dreyfus Affair showed that underworld and high society in France were so closely bound together that it was difficult definitely to place any of the "heroes" among the Anti-Dreyfusards in either category."

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 8h

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.

"The truth was that only far from home could a citizen of England, Germany, or France be nothing but an Englishman or German or Frenchman. In his own country he was so entangled in economic interests or social loyalties that he felt closer to a member of his class in a foreign country than to a man of another class in his own. Expansion gave nationalism a new lease on life and therefore was accepted as an instrument of national politics. The members of the new colonial societies and imperialist leagues felt "far removed from the strife of par-ties," and the farther away they moved the stronger their belief that they "represented only a national purpose."60 This shows the desperate state of the European nations before imperialism, how fragile their institutions had become, how outdated their social system proved in the face of man's growing capacity to produce. The means for preservation were desperate too, and in the end the remedy proved worse than the evil-which, incidentally, it did not cure."

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 8h

Of course, this is basically what the US did too. Frederick Jackson Turner understood this in his way.

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 8h

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.

"The curious weakness of popular opposition to imperialism, the numerous inconsistencies and outright broken promises of liberal statesmen, frequently ascribed to opportunism or bribery, have other and deeper causes. Neither opportunism nor bribery could have persuaded a man like Gladstone to break his promise, as the leader of the Liberal Party, to evacuate Egypt when he became Prime Minister. Half consciously and hardly articulately, these men shared with the people the conviction that the national body itself was so deeply split into classes, that class struggle was so universal a characteristic of modern political life, that the very cohesion of the nation was jeopardized. Expansion again appeared as a lifesaver, if and insofar as it could provide a common interest for the nation as a whole, and it is mainly for this reason that imperialists were allowed to become "parasites upon patriotism.""

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 9h

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.

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Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 9h

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.

"Hobbes's insistence on power as the motor of all things human and divine (even God's reign over men is "derived not from Creating them... but from the Irresistible Power") sprang from the theoretically indisputable proposition that a never-ending accumulation of property must be based on a never-ending accumulation of power. The philosophical correlative of the inherent instability of a community founded on power is the image of an endless process of history which, in order to be consistent with the constant growth of power, inexorably catches up with individuals, peoples, and finally all mankind. The limitless process of capital accumulation needs the political structure of so "unlimited a Power" that it can protect growing property by constantly growing more powerful. Granted the fundamental dynamism of the new social class, it is perfectly true that "he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath at present, without the acquisition of more." The consistency of this conclusion is in no way altered by the remarkable fact that for some three hundred years there was neither a sovereign who would "convert this Truth of Speculation into the Utility of Practice," nor a bourgeoisie politically conscious and economically mature enough openly to adopt Hobbes's philosophy of power."

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Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 10h

Imperialism is what you get when the business class brings a business mindset to the administration of government.

"Imperialism must be considered the first stage in political rule of the bourgeoisie rather than the last stage of capitalism. It is well known how little the owning classes had aspired to government, how well contented they had been with every type of state that could be trusted with protection of property rights. For them, indeed, the state had always been only a well-organized police force. This false modesty, however, had the curious consequence of keeping the whole bourgeois class out of the body politic; before they were subjects in a monarchy or citizens in a republic, they were essentially private persons. This privateness and primary concern with money-making had developed a set of behavior patterns which are expressed in all those proverbs-"nothing succeeds like success," "might is right," "right is expediency," etc. that necessarily spring from the experience of a society of competitors."

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Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 10h

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.

"The new feature of this imperialist political philosophy is not the predominant place it gave violence, nor the discovery that power is one of the basic political realities. Violence has always been the ultima ratio in political action and power has always been the visible expression of rule and government. But neither had ever before been the conscious aim of the body politic or the ultimate goal of any definite policy. For power left to itself can achieve nothing but more power, and violence administered for power's (and not for law's) sake turns into a destructive principle that will not stop until there is nothing left to violate."

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 10h

I just was not prepared for how much Arendt's analysis of imperialism was going to be economically based.

"WHAT IMPERIALISTS actually wanted was expansion of political power without the foundation of a body politic. Imperialist expansion had been touched off by a curious kind of economic crisis, the overproduction of capital and the emergence of "superfluous" money, the result of oversaving, which could no longer find productive investment within the national borders. For the first time, investment of power did not pave the way for investment of money, but export of power followed meekly in the train of exported money, since uncontrollable investments in distant countries threatened to transform large strata of society into gamblers, to change the whole capitalist economy from a system of production into a system of financial speculation, and to replace the profits of production with profits in commissions. The decade immediately before the imperialist era, the seventies of the last century, witnessed an unparalleled increase in swindles, financial scandals, and gambling in the stock market."

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 10h

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.

"That a movement of expansion for expansion's sake grew up in nation-states which more than any other political bodies were defined by boundaries and the limitations of possible conquest, is one example of the seemingly absurd disparities between cause and effect which have become the hallmark of modern history. The wild confusion of modern historical terminology is only a by-product of these disparities. By comparisons with ancient Empires, by mistaking expansion for conquest, by..."

"... neglecting the difference between Commonwealth and Empire (which pre-imperialist historians called the difference between plantations and possessions, or colonies and dependencies, or, somewhat later, colonialism and imperialism, by neglecting, in other words, the difference between export of (British) peo-ple and export of (British) money, 24 historians tried to dismiss the disturbing fact that so many of the important events in modern history look as though molehills had labored and had brought forth mountains."

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 15h

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.

"In contrast to true imperial structures, where the institutions of the mother country are in various ways integrated into the empire, it is characteristic of imperialism that national institutions remain separate from the colonial administration although they are allowed to exercise control. The actual motivation for this separation was a curious mixture of arrogance and respect: the new arrogance of the administrators abroad who faced "backward populations" or "lower breeds" found its correlative in the respect of old-fashioned statesmen at home who felt that no nation had the right to impose its law upon a foreign people. It was in the very nature of things that the arrogance turned out to be a device for rule, while the respect, which remained entirely negative, did not produce a new way for peoples to live together, but managed only to keep the ruthless imperialist rule by decree within bounds. To the salutary restraint of national institutions and politicians we owe whatever benefits the non-European peoples have been able, after all and despite everything, to derive from Western domination. But the colonial services never ceased to protest against the interference of the "inexperienced majority"-the nation-that tried to press the "experienced minority"-the imperialist administrators"in the direction of imitation," namely, of government in accordance with the general standards of justice and liberty at home."

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 15h

The Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century revealed the incompatibility of the nation-state and empire. This didn't stop the imperialists.

"The inner contradiction between the nation's body politic and conquest as a political device has been obvious since the failure of the Napoleonic dream. It is due to this experience and not to humanitarian considerations that conquest has since been officially condemned and has played a minor role in the adjustment of borderline conflicts. The Napoleonic failure to unite Europe under the French flag was a clear indication that conquest by a nation led either to the full awakening of the conquered people's national consciousness and to consequent rebellion against the conqueror, or to tyranny."

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 16h

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.

"In contrast to the economic structure, the political structure cannot be expanded indefinitely, because it is not based upon the productivity of man, which is, indeed, unlimited. Of all forms of government and organizations of people, the nation-state is least suited for unlimited growth because the genuine consent at its base cannot be stretched indefinitely, and is only rarely, and with difficulty, won from conquered peoples. No nation-state could with a clear conscience ever try to conquer foreign peoples, since such a conscience comes only from the conviction of the conquering nation that it is imposing a superior law upon barbarians. The nation, however, conceived of its law as an outgrowth of a unique national substance which was not valid beyond its own people and the boundaries of its own territory."

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 16h

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.

"With the slogan "expansion for expansion's sake," the bourgeoisie tried and partly succeeded in persuading their national governments to enter upon the path of world politics. The new policy they proposed seemed for a moment to find its natural limitations and balances in the very fact that several nations started their expansions simultaneously and competitively. Imperialism in its initial stages could indeed still be described as a struggle of "competing empires" and distinguished from the "idea of empire in the ancient and medieval world (which) was that of a federation of States, under a hegemony, covering... the entire recognized world."" Yet such a competition was only one of the many remnants of a past era, a concession to that still prevailing national principle according to which mankind is a family of nations vying for excellence, or to the liberal belief that competition will automatically set up its own stabilizing predetermined limits before one competitor has liquidated all the others. This happy balance, however, had hardly been the inevitable outcome of mysterious economic laws, but had relied heavily on political, and even more on police institutions that prevented competitors from using revolvers. How a competition between fully armed business concerns-"empires"-could end in anything but victory for one and death for the others is difficult to understand. In other words, competition is no more a principle of politics than expansion, and needs political power just as badly for control and restraint."

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Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 16h

Go off, Hannah.

"Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limitations to its economic expansion. The bourgeoisie turned to politics out of economic necessity; for if it did not want to give up the capitalist system whose inherent law is constant economic growth, it had to impose this law upon its home governments and to proclaim expansion to be an ultimate political goal of foreign policy."

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 18h

Get ready gang.

"PART TWO

IMPERIALISM

I would annex the planets if I could. - CECIL RHODES"

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Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 18h

More precisely, his pardon. Not quite the same thing!

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 18h

Dreyfus gets his exoneration because France doesn't want its party, the Paris Exposition of 1900, spoiled.

"Thay the Dreyfus drama was a comedy became apparent only in its final act. The deus ex machina who united the disrupted country, turned Parliament in favor of a retrial and eventually reconciled the disparate elements of the people from the extreme right to the socialists, was nothing other than the Paris Exposition of 1900. What Clemenceau's daily editorials, Zola's pathos, Jaurès' speeches, and the popular hatred of clergy and aristocracy had failed to achieve, namely, a change of parlia-mentary feeling in favor of Dreyfus, was at last accomplished by the fear of a boycott. The same Parliament that a year before had unanimously rejected a retrial, now by a two-thirds majority passed a vote of censure on an anti-Dreyfus government. In July, 1899, the Waldeck-Rousseau cabinet came to power. President Loubet pardoned Dreyfus and liquidated the entire affair. The Exposition was able to open under the brightest of commercial skies and general fraternization ensued: even socialists became eligible for government posts; Millerand, the first socialist minister in Europe, received the portfolio of commerce."

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Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 18h

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.

"So long as there was only the Dreyfus family trying with bizarre methods to rescue their kinsman from Devil's Island, and so long as there were only Jews concerned about their standing in the antisemitic salons and the still more antisemitic army, everything certainly pointed that way. Obviously there was no reason to expect an attack on the army or on society from that quarter. Was not the sole desire of the Jews to continue to be..."

"... accepted in society and suffered in the armed forces? No one in military or civilian circles needed to suffer a sleepless night on their account.69 It was disconcerting, therefore, when it transpired that in the intelligence office of the General Staff there sat a high officer, who, though possessed of a good Catholic background, excellent military prospects, and the "proper" degree of antipathy toward the Jews, had yet not adopted the principle that the end justifies the means. Such a man, utterly divorced from social clannishness or professional ambition, was Picquart, and of this simple, quiet, politically disinterested spirit the General Staff was soon to have its fill. Picquart was no hero and certainly no martyr. He was simply that common type of citizen with an average interest in public affairs who in the hour of danger (though not a minute earlier) stands up to defend his country in the same unquestioning way as he discharges his daily duties."

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 20h

Thank you!

Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 20h

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.

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Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 21h

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 disturbing thing about the Dreyfus Affair is that it was not only the mob which had to work along extraparliamentary lines. The entire minority, fighting as it was for Parliament, democracy, and the republic, was likewise constrained to wage its battle outside the Chamber. The only difference between the two elements was that while the one used the streets, the other resorted to the press and the courts. In other words, the whole of France's political life during the Dreyfus crisis was carried on outside Parliament. Nor do the several parliamentary votes in favor of the army and against a retrial in any way invalidate this conclusion. It is significant to remember that when parliamentary feeling began to turn, shortly before the opening of the Paris Exposition, Minister of War Gallifet was able to declare truthfully that this in no wise represented the mood of the country. 85 On the other hand the vote against a retrial must not be construed as an endorsement of the coup d'état policy which the Jesuits and certain radical antisemites were trying to introduce with the help of the army. 86 It was due, ..."

"... rather, to plain resistance against any change in the status quo. As a matter of fact, an equally overwhelming majority of the Chamber would have rejected a military-clerical dictatorship.

Those members of Parliament who had learned to regard politics as the professional representation of vested interests were naturally anxious to preserve that state of affairs upon which their "calling" and their profits depended. The Dreyfus case revealed, moreover, that the people likewise wanted their representatives to look after their own special interests rather than to function as statesmen. It was distinctly unwise to mention the case in election propaganda. Had this been due solely to antisemitism the situation of the Dreyfusards would certainly have been hopeless. In point of fact, during the elections they already enjoyed considerable support among the working class. Nevertheless even those who sided with Dreyfus did not care to see this political question dragged into the elections. It was, indeed, because he insisted on making it the pivot of his campaign that Jaurès lost his seat."

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Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 21h

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.

"Had Clemenceau possessed enough self-confidence at that time to consider only those who heeded him the true people of France, he would not have fallen prey to that fatal pride which marked the rest of his career. Out of his experiences in the Dreyfus Affair grew his despair of the people, his contempt for men, finally his belief that he and he alone would be able to save the republic. He could never stoop to play the claque to the antics of the mob. Therefore, once he began to identify the mob with the people, he did indeed cut the ground from under his feet, and forced himself into that grim aloofness which thereafter distinguished him."

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Adam S. Rust @asrust.bsky.social · 21h

The coalition that formed the pro-Dreyfusard faction had no other unifying feature than being Against This Sort Of Thing.

"Who then, in broad terms, were the supporters of Dreyfus? Who were the 300,000 Frenchmen who so eagerly devoured Zola's J'Accuse and who followed religiously the editorials of Clemenceau? Who were the men who finally succeeded in splitting every class, even every family, in France into opposing factions over the Dreyfus issue? The answer is that they formed no party or homogeneous group. Admittedly they were recruited more from the lower than from the upper classes, as they compromised, characteristically enough, more physicians than lawyers or civil servants. By and large, however, they were a mixture of diverse elements: men as far apart as Zola and Péguy or Jaurès and Picquart, men who on the morrow would part company and go their several ways. "They come from political parties and religious communities who have nothing in common, who are even in conflict with each other.... Those men do not know each other. They have fought and on occasion will fight again. Do not deceive yourselves; those are the 'elite' of the French democracy."

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