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🪵 The Threshold

Organized ordinary masses out-crime professional criminals under totalitarian rule

Properties2
tagsja-picks, factual_claims, singleton, xref, category/contrarian-or-surprising
aliases@arendt_origins_1951, loc. 139

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Organized ordinary masses out-crime professional criminals under totalitarian rule

Evidence

This necessary illegality, of which every social stratum bore within itself specific forms, was caught up in a series of paradoxes. In its lower regions, it was identified with criminality, from which it was difficult to distinguish it juridically, if not morally: from fiscal illegality to customs illegality, to smuggling, to looting, to the armed struggle against the government’s taxation agents, then against the soldiers themselves and, finally, to rebellion, there was a continuity, in which it was difficult to mark the frontiers; or, again, vagabondage (severely punished according to the terms of ordinances that were never implemented) with the pillage, aggravated theft, even murder that went with it, provided a welcome environment to the unemployed, to workers who had left their employers in irregular circumstances, to domestic servants who had some reason to flee their masters, to ill-treated apprentices, to deserting soldiers, to all those who wished to escape the press-gang. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 139 (#expands, via linked claim)

The split was complete; the people was robbed of its old pride in its crimes; the great murders had become the quiet game of the well behaved. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 124 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: New crime literature dispossessed common people of their criminal glory — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 124; Popular illegality formed a continuum running from tolerated evasion to outright crime — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 139; Mass murder expanded beyond elite cadres to ordinary soldiers (+1 more)

Broader Connections

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