The idealist appeal of unity concealed a permanent-war dynamic that went undetected

Evidence

Such language was bound to attract and delude precisely those persons who still retained a spark of political idealism. The cry for unity resembled exactly the battle cries which had always led peoples to war; and yet, nobody detected in the universal and permanent instrument of unity the germ of universal and permanent war. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 418

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Marcuse justified government war work by treating theory-practice unity as utopian — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 297; Raison d’Etat abandoned imperial ambition for permanent competitive equilibrium among states. — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 154