Political equality made society secretly more hierarchical than before

Evidence

The middle classes, on the other hand, had not acquired social self-respect, although they had in the meantime risen to wealth and power. The absence of a political hierarchy in the nation-state and the victory of equality rendered “society secretly more hierarchical as it became outwardly more democratic.” Since the principle of hierarchy was embodied in the exclusive social circles of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, each society in France “reproduced the characteristics more or less modified, more or less in caricature of the society of the Faubourg Saint-Germain which it sometimes pretended …to hold in contempt, no matter what status or what political ideas its members might hold.” Aristocratic society was a thing of the past in appearance only; actually it pervaded the whole social body (and not only of the people of France) by imposing “the key and the grammar of fashionable social life.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 269

Categorization

• XREF: This is the key social-theory mechanism — formal legal equality generating informal status hierarchies — that carries directly into how the nation-state treats the Jew as the excluded exception in later chapters. — connects to: The abstract ideal of human equality secretly serves totalitarian homogenization — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 117; Attacking hierarchy-producing binaries actually magnified the differences they sought to erase. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 832; Mechanism suppressed radical egalitarian organicism while keeping its hierarchical side — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 534 (+1 more)
• SEED: Article angle: formal equality as the engine of informal hierarchy — how the disappearance of legal rank spawns social distinction as the new ranking principle in modern societies.