The bourgeois commonwealth runs on delegated power with no legitimation from right or wrong
Evidence
This new body politic was conceived for the benefit of the new bourgeois society as it emerged in the seventeenth century and this picture of man is a sketch for the new type of Man who would fit into it. The Commonwealth is based on the delegation of power, and not of rights. It acquires a monopoly on killing and provides in exchange a conditional guarantee against being killed. Security is provided by the law, which is a direct emanation from the power monopoly of the state (and is not established by man according to human standards of right and wrong). And as this law flows directly from absolute power, it represents absolute necessity in the eyes of the individual who lives under it. In regard to the law of the state—that is, the accumulated power of society as monopolized by the state—there is no question of right or wrong, but only absolute obedience, the blind conformism of bourgeois society. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 386
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- XREF: The state as monopoly on killing exchanged for conditional guarantee against being killed — a necropolitical bargain that resonates with Foucault’s later biopolitics and Mbembe’s necropolitics.
- DEFINE: Defines the key Arendtian distinction between delegation of power versus delegation of rights, foundational for understanding how law legitimates exclusion.
Broader Connections
- The State is domination plus the active consent of the ruled
#complicates(0.80) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 915