Emancipation’s practical motivations were deliberately concealed behind universal principle

Evidence

The special conditions which had led to emancipation, though well known to everybody concerned, were now hidden as if they were a great and terrible secret. The edict itself, on the other hand, was conceived as the last and, in a sense, the most shining achievement of change from a feudal state into a nation-state and a society where henceforth there would be no special privileges whatsoever. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 129

Categorization

• XREF: Arendt’s point that the universalist norm covers over particular interests prefigures the gap she will later expose between the emancipatory promise and the Jews’ actual stateless condition — key scaffolding for the Islamophobia-modernity readings. — connects to: Beckett and Helms absolutized predecessors’ principles into necessity free of the individual
• DEFINE: Illustrates her core methodological move: the ideology of the nation-state hides the concrete conditions that produce it.