Medieval citizenship ideology was replaced by race and Herrenvolk to rationalize capitalist domination

Evidence

The contrasts of wealth and power between labor, capital, and the middle classes had become too stark to sustain the continued maintenance of privileged classes at home and the support of the engines of capitalist domination abroad. New mystifications, more appropriate to the times, were required, authorized by new lights. The delusions of medieval citizenship, which had been expanded into shared patrimony and had persisted for five centuries in western Europe as the single great leveling principle, were to be supplanted by race and (to use the German phrase) Herrenvolk, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The functions of these latter ideological constructions were related but different. Race became largely the rationalization for the domination, exploitation, and/or extermination of non-“Europeans” (including Slavs and Jews). — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 208

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharpens the definition of ‘Black radical tradition’ by distinguishing internal-European Herrenvolk ideology from race ideology applied to non-Europeans — core boundary question for the reader.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how ‘shared patrimony’ medieval citizenship actually functioned as a leveling principle before its replacement.