I begin this installment of The Origins of Totalitarianism with a painting by Gustav Moreau, "Messalina." Most of what I "know" about Messalina, the historical figure, comes from The Annals of Imperial Rome of Tacitus, chapter ix. There we learn that Gaius Silius, Messalina's youthful lover, managed to persuade the Emperor's consort to marry him with all due rituals. This, with a grand festival in the heart of Rome. Tacitus declares that he cannot believe the events he is describing" "It will seem fantastic. I know, that in a city where nothing escapes notice or comment, any human beings could have felt themselves so secure..." Then, "What I have told, and shall tell, is the truth. Older men heard and recorded it."

The outcome, naturally, was quite unsurprising:

They were pounced on and arrested separately by staff-officers of the Guard, in the streets or in hiding places... Claudius, it was widely said afterwards, contradicted himself incessantly, veering from invective against Messalina's misconduct to reminiscences of their marriage and their children's infancy...Messalina was still uselessly weeping and moaning when the men violently broke down the door....

One might declare that Messalina and her "husband" had succumbed to Weltschmerz to an extreme degree. Unable to cope with the meaninglessness of life, having reduced it to nothing but struggle for supremacy, they put themselves on a collision course with the men whose lives depended on the survival of the Emperor. It was tolerable to the ones who still lived that Messalina was boffing men of every class and every nation, but the person the imperial consort consorted with, was surely the emperor. Now, we turn to the adoption of expansion as an economic and political agenda:

Expansion as a permanent and supreme aim of politics is the central political idea of imperialism. Since it implies neither temporary looting nor the more lasting assimilation of conquest, it is an entirely new concept in the long history of political thought and action. The reason for this surprising originality—surprising because entirely new concepts are very rare in politics—is simply that this concept is not really political at all, but has its origin in the realm of business speculation, where expansion meant the permanent broadening of industrial production and economic transactions characteristic of the nineteenth century.

In the economic sphere, expansion was an adequate concept because industrial growth was a working reality. Expansion meant increase in actual production of goods to be used and consumed. The processes of production are as unlimited as the capacity of man to produce for, establish, furnish, and improve on the human world. When production and economic growth slowed down, their limits were not so much economic as political, insofar as production depended on, and products were shared by, many different peoples who were organized in widely differing political bodies.

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.
[Chapter Five: The Political Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie]

Also of great importance was the new ideology of victory. To the left is a painting of a man rejected by the paing jury of 1866. Declaring he had no talent, he took his own life.¹ In our times, we would probably regard this man's decision as tragically misguided; but in the 19th century, it was considered good taste for losers to quietly shuffle off the stage. The genocide of aboriginal peoples around the world was often defended by the top scientific minds of the day as an inevitable part of the march of progress. It was inevitable, and useful; objecting to massacres was often denounced as false humanitarianism. This mentality has never really left us; like many fads of the social sciences, it contained a grain of truth, and more than a few grains of expedience, so it has remained. That grain or so was, of course, never sufficient to justify the industrial murders that established European ethnic predominance. However, it did become the new foundation of social organization:

According to bourgeois standards, those who are completely unlucky and unsuccessful are automatically barred from competition, which is the life of society. Good fortune is identified with honor, and bad luck with shame. By assigning his political rights to the state the individual also delegates his social responsibilities to it: he asks the state to relieve him of the burden of caring for the poor precisely as he asks for protection against criminals. The difference between pauper and criminal disappears—both stand outside society. The unsuccessful are robbed of the virtue that classical civilization left them; the unfortunate can no longer appeal to Christian charity.

[Thomas] Hobbes liberates those who are excluded from society—the unsuccessful, the unfortunate, the criminal—from every obligation toward society and state if the state does not take care of them. They may give free rein to their desire for power and are told to take advantage of their elemental ability to kill, thus restoring that natural equality which society conceals only for the sake of expediency. Hobbes foresees and justifies the social outcasts' organization into a gang of murderers as a logical outcome of the bourgeoisie's moral philosophy. Since power is essentially only a means to an end a community based solely on power must decay in the calm of order and stability; its complete security reveals that it is built on sand. Only by acquiring more power can it guarantee the status quo; only by constantly extending its authority and only through the process of power accumulation can it remain stable.
[Chapter Five, ii.]

Domestic enterprises, in order to keep pace with high profits from foreign investment, turned likewise to fraudulent methods and attracted an increasing number of people who, in the hope of miraculous returns, threw their money out of the window. The Panama scandal in France, the Gründungsschwindel in Germany and Austria, became classic examples. Tremendous losses resulted from the promises of tremendous profits. The owners of little money lost so much so quickly that the owners of superfluous big capital soon saw themselves left alone in what was, in a sense, a battlefield. Having failed to change the whole society into a community of gamblers they were again superfluous, excluded from the normal process of production to which, after some turmoil, all other classes returned quietly, if somewhat impoverished and embittered. [...] As long as the owners of superfluous capital were content with investing "large portions of their property in foreign lands," even if this tendency ran "counter to all past traditions of nationalism," they merely confirmed their alienation from the national body on which they were parasites anyway.
[Ibid., iii.]

The economic losses of so much of the bourgeoisie let to the survivors' reliance on the mob:

Occasional warnings against the Lumpenproletariat, and the possible bribing of sections of the working class with crumbs from the imperialist table, did not lead to a deeper understanding of the great appeal which the imperialist programs had to the rank and file of the party. In Marxist terms the new phenomenon of an alliance between mob and capital seemed so unnatural, so obviously in conflict with the doctrine of class struggle, that the actual dangers of the imperialist attempt-to divide mankind into master racks and slave races, into higher and lower breeds, into colored peoples and white men, all of which were attempts to unify the people on the basis of the mob-were completely overlooked.
[Ibid., iii.]

(Part 4)

EXCELLENT EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: "Hannah Arendt on the Concept of Power," Pat Duffy Hutcheson, 1996