Privacy-loving private individuals proved easiest of all to destroy and co-ordinate.

Evidence

The philistine’s retirement into private life, his single-minded devotion to matters of family and career was the last, and already degenerated, product of the bourgeoisie’s belief in the primacy of private interest. The philistine is the bourgeois isolated from his own class, the atomized individual who is produced by the breakdown of the bourgeois class itself. The mass man whom Himmler organized for the greatest mass crimes ever committed in history bore the features of the philistine rather than of the mob man, and was the bourgeois who in the midst of the ruins of his world worried about nothing so much as his private security, was ready to sacrifice everything—belief, honor, dignity—on the slightest provocation. Nothing proved easier to destroy than the privacy and private morality of people who thought of nothing but safeguarding their private lives. After a few years of power and systematic co-ordination, the Nazis could rightly announce: “The only person who is still a private individual in Germany is somebody who is asleep.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 803

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘philistine’ as the bourgeois isolated from his class — the atomized individual produced by the breakdown of the bourgeois class — a key figure in Arendt’s account of mass formation.
• XREF: The atomized individual anticipates the ‘lonely crowd’ and mass-society theory; connects to the breakdown-of-class mechanism that the Islamophobia readings’ account of mass politics will also invoke.