Expansionist competition among empires required political and police restraint, not market self-regulation

Evidence

With the slogan “expansion for expansion’s sake,” the bourgeoisie tried and partly succeeded in persuading their national governments to enter upon the path of world politics. The new policy they proposed seemed for a moment to find its natural limitations and balances in the very fact that several nations started their expansions simultaneously and competitively. … This happy balance, however, had hardly been the inevitable outcome of mysterious economic laws, but had relied heavily on political, and even more on police institutions that prevented competitors from using revolvers. How a competition between fully armed business concerns—“empires”—could end in anything but victory for one and death for the others is difficult to understand. In other words, competition is no more a principle of politics than expansion, and needs political power just as badly for control and restraint. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 347

Categorization

• XREF: Foreshadows Arendt’s later claim that capital accumulation requires political violence; connects to the ‘expansion for expansion’s sake’ logic the reader will meet again in readings on racial capitalism and settler colonialism. — connects to: Market economies require deliberate political construction, not natural emergence — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 364; War exposed the market’s self-regulating capacity as inadequate for total production — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 106