Totalitarian domination begins by destroying a person’s juridical standing

Evidence

The first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man. This was done, on the one hand, by putting certain categories of people outside the protection of the law and forcing at the same time, through the instrument of denationalization, the nontotalitarian world into recognition of lawlessness; it was done, on the other, by placing the concentration camp outside the normal penal system, and by selecting its inmates outside the normal judicial procedure in which a definite crime entails a predictable penalty. Thus criminals, who for other reasons are an essential element in concentration-camp society, are ordinarily sent to a camp only on completion of their prison sentence. Under all circumstances totalitarian domination sees to it that the categories gathered in the camps—Jews, carriers of diseases, representatives of dying classes—have already lost their capacity for both normal or criminal action. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1004

Categorization

• XREF: The juridical-person destruction prefigures Arendt’s later ‘right to have rights’ argument, and connects directly to the statelessness readings in the reader’s Islamophobia module on race-thinking and exclusion.
• DEFINE: ‘Killing the juridical person’ is a core concept — the stripping of legal standing as the first stage of total domination.