German Romanticism’s playful arbitrariness made race-thinking one of many free-floating opinions

Evidence

Political romanticism has been accused of inventing race-thinking, as it has been and could be accused of inventing every other possible irresponsible opinion. Adam Mueller and Friedrich Schlegel are symptomatic in the highest degree of a general playfulness of modern thought in which almost any opinion can gain ground temporarily. No real thing, no historical event, no political idea was safe from the all-embracing and all-destroying mania by which these first literati could always find new and original opportunities for new and fascinating opinions. … One of these romanticized objects was the people, an object that could be changed at a moment’s notice into the state, or the family, or nobility, or anything else that either—in the earlier days—happened to cross the minds of one of these intellectuals or—later when, growing older, they had learned the reality of daily bread—happened to be asked for by some paying patron. Therefore it is almost impossible to study the development of any of the free competing opinions of which the nineteenth century is so amazingly full, without coming across romanticism in its German form. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 449

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the scaffolding theme of how ideologies gain generic currency — relevant to later Islamophobia readings on how race-thinking circulates before hardening into doctrine.