The bourgeoisie ruled economically while leaving politics to the state

Evidence

The central inner-European event of the imperialist period was the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie, which up to then had been the first class in history to achieve economic pre-eminence without aspiring to political rule. The bourgeoisie had developed within, and together with, the nation-state, which almost by definition ruled over and beyond a class-divided society. Even when the bourgeoisie had already established itself as the ruling class, it had left all political decisions to the state. Only when the nation-state proved unfit to be the framework for the further growth of capitalist economy did the latent fight between state and society become openly a struggle for power. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 339

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt’s core definition of the bourgeoisie as the first economically dominant class without political aspiration — a key concept to carry into later readings.
• XREF: The state-society distinction and the claim that capitalism outgrows the nation-state framework previews the biopolitics readings where capital expansion required racial-Other governance.