Race theories surface when aristocracies doubt their inherited superiority and upstarts adopt them.

Evidence

Disraeli went even a step further. He knew that the aristocracy, which year after year had to see quite a number of rich middle-class men buy titles, was haunted by very serious doubts of its own value. He therefore defeated them at their game by using his rather trite and popular imagination to describe fearlessly how the Englishmen “came from a parvenu and hybrid race, while he himself was sprung from the purest blood in Europe,” how “the life of a British peer (was) mainly regulated by Arabian laws and Syrian customs,” how “a Jewess is the queen of heaven” or that “the flower of the Jewish race is even now sitting on the right hand of the Lord God of Sabaoth.” And when he finally wrote that “there is no longer in fact an aristocracy in England, for the superiority of the animal man is an essential quality of aristocracy,” he had in fact touched the weakest point of modern aristocratic race theories, which were later to be the point of departure for bourgeois and upstart race opinions. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 235

Categorization

• XREF: Arendt’s claim that race theory springs from upstart social anxiety connects to the modern racism readings in the Islamophobia field, where race-thinking emerges from status insecurity.