Formal political equality coexisted with birth-determined class inequality in Europe

Evidence

The fundamental contradiction between a political body based on equality before the law and a society based on the inequality of the class system prevented the development of functioning republics as well as the birth of a new political hierarchy. An insurmountable inequality of social condition, the fact that class membership on the continent was bestowed upon the individual and, up to the first World War, almost guaranteed to him by birth, could nevertheless exist side by side with political equality. … The fully developed class system meant invariably that the status of the individual was defined by his membership in his own class and his relationship to another, and not by his position in the state or within its machinery. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 89

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the analytical distinction between the political sphere (formal equality before law) and the social sphere (class position) that runs through Arendt’s scaffolding.
• XREF: This political/social split prefigures the public/private and state/society distinctions Islamophobia scholarship later deploys. — connects to: Formal legal equality obscures real inequality because equivalence as a legal norm ignores difference — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 786; Democratic equality cannot exist without a correlate of inequality and exclusion — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 173; Formal political equality and market exchange produce economic domination when property is unequal — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 582