Caste arrogance rests on unearned privilege by birth, which merit-based middle-class claims cannot match.

Evidence

Disraeli’s ambition to distinguish himself from other mortals and his longing for aristocratic society were typical of the middle classes of his time and country. Neither political reasons nor economic motives, but the impetus of his social ambition, made him join the Conservative Party and follow a policy that would always “select the Whigs for hostility and the Radicals for alliance.” In no European country did the middle classes ever achieve enough self-respect to reconcile their intelligentsia with their social status, so that aristocracy could continue to determine the social scale when it had already lost all political significance. The unhappy German philistine discovered his “innate personality” in his desperate struggle against caste arrogance, which had grown out of the decline of nobility and the necessity to protect aristocratic titles against bourgeois money. Vague blood theories and strict control of marriages are rather recent phenomena in the history of European aristocracy. Disraeli knew much better than the German philistines what was required to meet the demands of aristocracy. All attempts of the bourgeoisie to attain social status failed to convince aristocratic arrogance because they reckoned with individuals and lacked the most important element of caste conceit, the pride in privilege without individual effort and merit, simply by virtue of birth. The “innate personality” could never deny that its development demanded education and special effort of the individual. When Disraeli “summoned up a pride of race to confront a pride of caste,” he knew that the social status of the Jews, whatever else might be said of it, at least depended solely on the fact of birth and not on achievement. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 234

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the mechanism distinguishing caste conceit (privilege by birth, no effort) from bourgeois status claims (which require individual effort and education).
• XREF: The race-as-birth-status mechanism connects directly to how Orientalism and racialized selfhood readings treat race as inheritable, non-achieved identity.