Early race-obsessed intellectuals were politically harmless and ideologically uncommitted

Evidence

Significant as this and similar confessions may be of the state of mind of modern intellectuals, who are the true heirs of romanticism whatever opinion they happen to hold, they nevertheless indicate the essential harmlessness and political innocence of people who probably could have been forced into line by each and every ideology. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 464

Categorization

• XREF: Foreshadows Arendt’s later argument that ideology recruits pliable individuals; relevant to how bureaucratic rationality later enables exclusion. — connects to: Admiration for aristocratic rule slid logically into racial contempt — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 224