The doctrine of innate personality substituted biological birthright for blocked political advancement

Evidence

German intellectuals, though they hardly promoted a political fight for the middle classes to which they belonged, fought an embittered and, unfortunately, highly successful battle for social status. Even those who had written in defense of nobility still felt their own interests at stake when it came to social ranks. In order to enter competition with rights and qualities of birth, they formulated the new concept of the “innate personality” which was to win general approval within bourgeois society. Like the title of the heir of an old family, the “innate personality” was given by birth and not acquired by merit. Just as the lack of common history for the formation of the nation had been artificially overcome by the naturalistic concept of organic development, so, in the social sphere, nature itself was supposed to supply a title when political reality had refused it. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 453

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘innate personality’ — a key concept for how nature substitutes for political rights.
• XREF: Connects to the naturalistic concept of organic development as a substitute for shared national history — a mechanism that reappears in racialized conceptions of nationhood in later Islamophobia readings. — connects to: Birtherism delegitimated Obama by framing his presidency as unconstitutional — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 201