Mystified arbitrary power becomes immune to legal restraint

Evidence

Pan-Slavists were less opposed to the state than their Pan-Germanist colleagues. They sometimes even tried to convince the Czar to become the head of the movement. The reason for this tendency is of course that the Czar’s position differed considerably from that of any European monarch, the Emperor of Austria-Hungary not excluded, and that the Russian despotism never developed into a rational state in the Western sense but remained fluid, anarchic, and unorganized. Czarism, therefore, sometimes appeared to the Pan-Slavists as the symbol of a gigantic moving force surrounded by a halo of unique holiness. Pan-Slavism, in contrast to Pan-Germanism, did not have to invent a new ideology to suit the needs of the Slavic soul and its movement, but could interpret—and make a mystery of—Czarism as the anti-Western, anticonstitutional, antistate expression of the movement itself. This mystification of anarchic power inspired Pan-Slavism with its most pernicious theories about the transcendent nature and inherent goodness of all power. Power was conceived as a divine emanation pervading all natural and human activity. It was no longer a means to achieve something: it simply existed, men were dedicated to its service for the love of God, and any law that might regulate or restrain its “limitless and terrible strength” was clearly sacrilege. In its complete arbitrariness, power as such was held to be holy, whether it was the power of the Czar or the power of sex. Laws were not only incompatible with it, they were sinful, man-made “snares” that prevented the full development of the “divine.” The government, no matter what it did, was still the “Supreme Power in action,” and the Pan-Slav movement only had to adhere to this power and to organize its popular support, which eventually would permeate and therefore sanctify the whole people—a colossal herd, obedient to the arbitrary will of one man, ruled neither by law nor interest, but kept together solely by the cohesive force of their numbers and the conviction of their own holiness. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 628

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt here defines how power mystification works: power conceived as divine emanation becomes law-exempt and arbitrary by definition.
• XREF: Connects to biopolitics/necropolitics readings on sovereign power that stands outside law; also to Weber’s rational state vs. patrimonial despotism. — connects to: Power cannot punish simulation because law itself is only a second-order simulacrum — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 78; Unprecedented power cannot be constrained by law made before it exists — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1637; The Rule of law opposes both sovereign despotism and the police state — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 916 (+11 more)
• ADDENDUM: The sanctification of arbitrary power-as-end parallels the sacrifice-stabilizing logic in ‘On Sacrifice,’ where ritual power legitimizes stratification without law.