Adam S. Rust
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asrust.bsky.social
Adam S. Rust
@asrust.bsky.social
3.4K followers 94 following 490 posts
Lawyer, writes on law things, writings have appeared in Liberal Currents and Balls & Strikes, based in San Jose, CA.
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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.
I have received it. Will @paulcrider.liberalcurrents.com get his Katznelson book back? Who's to say?
More like Soarin' Kierkegaard amirite.

This skeet brought to you by my frantic text to @jcrider.bsky.social to find my copy of Feminist Interpretations of Søren Kierkegaard so I can finally give it to @asrust.bsky.social.
Disraeli's vision of politics as the product of the machinations of secret cabals arose from his experience trying to enter the UK's poshest clubs.
The structural economic reasons sons of Jewish bankers broke left and the working class was never really antisemitic, per Arendt.
"The Jews control everything," whispers secularized Jew Benjamin Disraeli, "and it is AWESOME."
Reading Disraeli going on about a global Jewish conspiracy a la "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and then going "but, like, it's totally rad" is wild.
Buried in here Arendt is giving the first hint of where she will be going in her imperialism section. It is ominous, of course.
Arendt making the observation that while race theorizing can be used as a tool to justify inferiority, they can also be used to fight it. It can be a sort of aristocratic marker for a newly emerging mass society.
Arendt's portrait of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli is a lot of fun. Her observations on how the secret marker of aristocracy is "pride in privilege without individual effort", and how Disraeli leveraged his Jewish ancestry to make his version of that secret marker, is fascinating.
Arendt doing a job of showing the pathologies that emerge when we force our private lives to bear the burden of unresolved political problems.
I'm starting to clock that when Arendt uses words like "psychological" and phrases like "personal problem" she signaling something Not Good is happening.
The ping pong of the Prussian government's position on Jewish civic and political rights during the early 19th century turned on whether Prussia controlled eastern territories containing the "bad" type of Jew.
Also the passage above is giving me a sense of what Arendt is getting at when she distinguishes the social and the political version of the Jewish question. Social questions are "hearts and minds" questions, political questions are questions of legal and political structures.
The sentence "It has been one of the most unfortunate facts in the history of the Jewish people that only its enemies, and almost never its friends, understood that the Jewish question was a political one." giving me a thousand mile stare feeling.
Read "odd" in the skeet above as "hard to parse in a way that cashes out".
Gotta confess I find the opening section for this chapter a little odd. Hoping Arendt's fleshing out of these ideas in the chapter will clear things up.
This footnote only really works if you give maximum generosity to the qualifier "less endangered" as indicating a difference of degree. And even then it is a bit confounding to an American reader. Arendt never quite got a handle on US racial politics.
Equality as a working principle for political organization basically leads to something like the rule of law, equality as an intrinsic feature of individuals can lead to distinctions between normal and abnormal humans. Arendt probably winding up to how this creates problems.
Arendt opening the chapter "The Jews and Society" drawing a distinction between the motivations for political antisemitism, arising from Jewish distinctiveness, and social discrimination, which arose because of Jewish integration into society. Curious where she will take this.
NYC cannot stand the thought of California having more of anything can they?
For Arendt, perhaps the most decisive factor in French antisemitism never developing into a totalitarian ideology was France's lackadaisical commitment to its empire. For Arendt, it looks like the intersection of antisemitism and imperialism is the secret sauce of totalitarianism.
This whole section discussing the national Jew/foreign Jew distinction is a first time the discussion of antisemitism has really shed some light on our current anti-immigrant moment. It really captures a double accounting ("we don't want the BAD immigrants") that is important to Trump supporters.
Arendt drawing attention to the distinction made by some French antisemites between native French Jews and foreign Jews "invading" from Eastern Europe. Familiar conceptual distinction in our own political moment.
French Left antisemitism continues into the early to mid 19th century because of the Rothschild financial backing of, in turn, the restored Bourbon monarchy and later Napoleon III.
Arendt points out that until the Dreyfus Affair, the French Left viewed its antisemitism as being of a piece with its anticlericalism. (Cf. the New Atheists of the early 2000s on evangelical Christianity and Islam.)
Fascinating discussion of how French antisemitism was left coded in the 18th century, but became right coded in the 19th century. This is the sort of fact that a friend of mine points to when he asks "do you ever wonder why you believe in anything?"