Economic growth weakened political factors and made economic capacity the modern prerequisite of power

Evidence

The enormous growth of industrial and economic capacity produced a steady weakening of purely political factors, while at the same time economic forces became dominant in the international play of power. Power was thought to be synonymous with economic capacity before people discovered that economic and industrial capacity are only its modern prerequisites. In a sense, economic power could bring governments to heel because they had the same faith in economics as the plain businessmen who had somehow convinced them that the state’s means of violence had to be used exclusively for protection of business interests and national property. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 179

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt’s distinction between power proper and its modern economic prerequisites is a concept the Islamophobia field inherits — the subordination of state violence to economic interests as a precondition for later totalitarian capture.
• XREF: connects to: Postwar suffrage, planning confidence, and national treaties empowered politics against economy — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 113; Economic reason usurped political subjectivity only near the end of the twentieth century. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 172