Studies living outside society attribute its outcomes to secret institutions

Evidence

In his naive certainty of the paramount importance of secret societies, Disraeli was a forerunner of those new social strata who, born outside the framework of society, could never understand its rules properly. They found themselves in a state of affairs where the distinctions between society and politics were constantly blurred and where, despite seemingly chaotic conditions, the same narrow class interest always won. The outsider could not but conclude that a consciously established institution with definite goals achieved such remarkable results. And it is true that this whole society game needed only a resolute political will to transform its half-conscious play of interests and essentially purposeless machinations into a definite policy. This is what occurred briefly in France during the Dreyfus Affair, and again in Germany during the decade preceding Hitler’s rise to power. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 248

Categorization

• XREF: This is core scaffolding for the Islamophobia field: the mechanism by which those excluded from a society’s rules come to read the society as secretly controlled — applicable to conspiracy theories about minority groups controlling politics. — connects to: Field researchers studying the unemployed must embed themselves usefully in local life — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 680
• DEFINE: Arendt is effectively defining the outsider’s epistemic position — born outside the framework of society, unable to grasp its rules — which later underpins her analysis of how antisemitic conspiracy theories gain plausibility.