Evolutionist doctrines fused heredity with individual merit to excuse political elites from responsibility

Evidence

The most dangerous aspect of these evolutionist doctrines is that they combined the inheritance concept with the insistence on personal achievement and individual character which had been so important for the self-respect of the nineteenth-century middle class. This middle class wanted scientists who could prove that the great men, not the aristocrats, were the true representatives of the nation, in whom the “genius of the race” was personified. These scientists provided an ideal escape from political responsibility when they “proved” the early statement of Benjamin Disraeli that the great man is “the personification of race, its choice exemplar.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 476

Categorization

• XREF: Directly scaffolds the Islamophobia field’s concept of how ‘race’ validates existing power arrangements — connects to hegemony and Gramscian common sense readings.
• DEEPTHINKING: Arendt’s key move: the marriage of inherited-genius with middle-class self-respect is what makes race-thinking genuinely dangerous — the mechanism, not just the prejudice.