The Origins of Totalitarianism (Hannah Arendt) p232-3
Burke’s main argument against the “abstract principles” of the French Revolution is contained in the following sentence: “It has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity; as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right.” The concept of inheritance, applied to the very nature of liberty, has been the ideological basis from which English nationalism received its curious touch of race-feeling ever since the French Revolution. Formulated by a middle-class writer, it signified the direct acceptance of the feudal concept of liberty as the sum total of privileges inherited together with title and land. Without encroaching upon the rights of the privileged class within the English nation, Burke enlarged the principle of these privileges to include the whole English people, establishing them as a kind of nobility among nations. Hence he drew his contempt for those who claimed their franchise as the rights of men, rights which he saw fit to claim only as “the rights of Englishmen”.
In England nationalism developed without serious attacks on the old feudal classes. This has been possible because the English gentry, from the seventeenth century on and in ever-increasing numbers, had assimilated the higher ranks of the bourgeoisie, so that sometimes even the common man could attain the position of a lord. By this process much of the ordinary caste arrogance of nobility was taken away and a considerable sense of responsibility for the nation as a whole was created; but by the same token, feudal concepts and mentality could influence the political ideas of the lower classes more easily than elsewhere. Thus, the concept of inheritance was accepted almost unchanged and applied to the entire British “stock.” The consequence of this assimilation of noble standards was that the English brand of race-thinking was almost obsessed with inheritance theories and their modern equivalent, eugenics.
Ever since the European peoples made practical attempts to include all the peoples of the earth in their conception of humanity, they have been irritated by the great physical differences between themselves and the peoples they found on other continents. The eighteenth-century enthusiasm for the diversity in which the all-present identical nature of man and reason could find expression provided a rather thin cover of argument to the crucial question, whether the Christian tenet of the unity and equality of all men, based upon common descent from one original set of parents, would be kept in the hearts of men who were faced with tribes which, as far as we know, never had found by themselves any adequate expression of human reason or human passion in either cultural deeds or popular customs, and which had developed human institutions only to a very low level. This new problem which appeared on the historical scene of Europe and America with the more intimate knowledge of African tribes had already caused, and this especially in America and some British possessions, a relapse into forms of social organization which were thought to have been definitely liquidated by Christianity. But even slavery, though actually established on a strict racial basis, did not make the slave-holding peoples race-conscious before the nineteenth century. Throughout the eighteenth century, American slave-holders themselves Considered it a temporary institution and wanted to abolish it gradually. Most of them probably would have said with Jefferson: “I tremble when I think that God is just.”
In France, where the problem of black tribes had been met with the desire to assimilate and educate, the great scientist Leclerc de Buffon had given a first classification of races which, based upon the European peoples and classifying all others by their differences, had taught equality by strict juxtaposition. The eighteenth century, to use Tocqueville’s admirably precise phrase, “believed in the variety of races but in the unity of the human species.” In Germany, Herder had refused to apply the “ignoble word” race to men, and even the first cultural historian of mankind to make use of the classification of different species, Gustav Klemm, still respected the idea of mankind as the general framework for his investigations.
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