English nationalism’s race-feeling stems from liberty conceived as inherited privilege

Evidence

Burke’s main argument against the “abstract principles” of the French Revolution is contained in the following sentence: “It has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity; as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right.” The concept of inheritance, applied to the very nature of liberty, has been the ideological basis from which English nationalism received its curious touch of race-feeling ever since the French Revolution. Formulated by a middle-class writer, it signified the direct acceptance of the feudal concept of liberty as the sum total of privileges inherited together with title and land. Without encroaching upon the rights of the privileged class within the English nation, Burke enlarged the principle of these privileges to include the whole English people, establishing them as a kind of nobility among nations. Hence he drew his contempt for those who claimed their franchise as the rights of men, rights which he saw fit to claim only as “the rights of Englishmen.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 466

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines how race-feeling emerges from treating liberty as inherited privilege rather than universal right.
• XREF: Connects to the nation-as-imagined-community scaffolding in Anderson; Burke’s ‘inheritance’ model is the ethnic/genetic-coded alternative to civic nationalism. — connects to: Race-thinking supplied a natural aristocracy to replace the feudal nobility; Race-feeling attaches to national identity when liberty is framed as inherited estate; Feudal concepts reaching lower classes made English race-thinking inheritance-obsessed (+2 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 466

Broader Connections

• Race-feeling attaches to national identity when liberty is framed as inherited estate #corroborates (0.95)
• Feudal concepts reaching lower classes made English race-thinking inheritance-obsessed #expands (0.82)