Race ideology offered a substitute aristocracy to displaced elites.

Evidence

What Gobineau was actually looking for in politics was the definition and creation of an “elite” to replace the aristocracy. Instead of princes, he proposed a “race of princes,” the Aryans, who he said were in danger of being submerged by the lower non-Aryan classes through democracy. The concept of race made it possible to organize the “innate personalities” of German romanticism, to define them as members of a natural aristocracy destined to rule over all others. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 461

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the historical function of race-thinking: not biology per se, but a means of re-founding aristocratic privilege in modern terms.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to the ‘On Sacrifice’ interest in how ideologies legitimize stratified hierarchy — race replaces sacral kingship as the new justification for ruling elites.