Abstract appeals to justice can prove more politically potent than concrete nationalism

Evidence

The greatness of Clemenceau’s approach lies in the fact that it was not directed against a particular miscarriage of justice, but was based upon such “abstract” ideas as justice, liberty, and civic virtue. It was based, in short, on those very concepts which had formed the staple of old-time Jacobin patriotism and against which much mud and abuse had already been hurled. As time wore on and Clemenceau continued, unmoved by threats and disappointments, to enunciate the same truths and to embody them in demands, the more “concrete” nationalists lost ground. Followers of men like Barrés, who had accused the supporters of Dreyfus of losing themselves in a “welter of metaphysics,” came to realize that the abstractions of the “Tiger” were actually nearer to political realities than the limited intelligence of ruined businessmen or the barren traditionalism of fatalistic intellectuals. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 314

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how the Dreyfus affair’s universalist framing prefigures Arendt’s later account of totalitarian movements’ contempt for ‘concrete’ interests — and to the mobilization of ‘abstract’ bourgeois values that later scholarship on human rights (e.g. Moyn’s ‘The Last Utopia’) traces.