Exclusion from elite clubs, not political failure, shaped outsiders’ belief in secret societies

Evidence

Disraeli’s persistent fondness for explaining politics in terms of secret societies was based on experiences which later convinced many lesser European intellectuals. His basic experience had been that a place in English society was much more difficult to win than a seat in Parliament. English society of his time gathered in fashionable clubs which were independent of party distinctions. The clubs, although they were extremely important in the formation of a political elite, escaped public control. To an outsider they must have looked very mysterious indeed. They were secret insofar as not everybody was admitted to them. They became mysterious only when members of other classes asked admittance and were either refused or admitted after a plethora of incalculable, unpredictable, apparently irrational difficulties. There is no doubt that no political honor could replace the triumphs that intimate association with the privileged could give. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 247

Categorization

• QUESTION: Arendt is building a mechanism here worth chasing: how opaque social exclusion produces conspiracy theories about secret institutions guiding politics. This is a reusable explanatory mechanism for the Islamophobia field’s own subject matter.