Mortality prevents property from grounding a durable political order

Evidence

Property by itself, however, is subject to use and consumption and therefore diminishes constantly. The most radical and the only secure form of possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and forever ours. Property owners who do not consume but strive to enlarge their holdings continually find one very inconvenient limitation, the unfortunate fact that men must die. Death is the real reason why property and acquisition can never become a true political principle. A social system based essentially on property cannot possibly proceed toward anything but the final destruction of all property. The finiteness of personal life is as serious a challenge to property as the foundation of society, as the limits of the globe are a challenge to expansion as the foundation of the body politic. By transcending the limits of human life in planning for an automatic continuous growth of wealth beyond all personal needs and possibilities of consumption, individual property is made a public affair and taken out of the sphere of mere private life. Private interests which by their very nature are temporary, limited by man’s natural span of life, can now escape into the sphere of public affairs and borrow from them that infinite length of time which is needed for continuous accumulation. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 398

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt’s core mechanism: private wealth escapes mortality by borrowing ‘infinite time’ from public affairs, which is how accumulation becomes a political rather than private matter.
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox — destruction is the only secure ownership, and death is the fatal limit to property’s political pretensions — is a dense, paradigm-shifting move that resists one-sentence summary.
• XREF: Connects to how the bourgeoisie’s imperative of endless accumulation prefigures the expansion-drive of totalitarian imperialism later in this same book — and to Marx’s account of capital’s self-expansion in Capital.