Political disenfranchisement privatizes the individual and reduces social relations to competition governed by chance.

Evidence

Deprived of political rights, the individual, to whom public and official life manifests itself in the guise of necessity, acquires a new and increased interest in his private life and his personal fate. Excluded from participation in the management of public affairs that involve all citizens, the individual loses his rightful place in society and his natural connection with his fellow-men. He can now judge his individual private life only by comparing it with that of others, and his relations with his fellow-men inside society take the form of competition. Once public affairs are regulated by the state under the guise of necessity, the social or public careers of the competitors come under the sway of chance. In a society of individuals, all equipped by nature with equal capacity for power and equally protected from one another by the state, only chance can decide who will succeed. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 387

Categorization

• XREF: This is the core Arendt move — the privatization and apoliticization of the citizen — which carries forward into her analysis of how the masses become available for totalitarian mobilization in later chapters. — connects to: Rawls’s well-ordered society eliminates politics by relegating conflict to private life. — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 129
• DEFINE: Establishes Arendt’s account of how the bourgeois individual is produced by the state’s monopolization of public life — a foundational mechanism for the whole book.