Unlimited accumulation demands political power and generates a docile subject

Evidence

Hobbes was the true, though never fully recognized, philosopher of the bourgeoisie because he realized that acquisition of wealth conceived as a never-ending process can be guaranteed only by the seizure of political power, for the accumulating process must sooner or later force open all existing territorial limits. He foresaw that a society which had entered the path of never-ending acquisition had to engineer a dynamic political organization capable of a corresponding never-ending process of power generation. He even, through sheer force of imagination, was able to outline the main psychological traits of the new type of man who would fit into such a society and its tyrannical body politic. He foresaw the necessary idolatry of power itself by this new human type, that he would be flattered at being called a power-thirsty animal, although actually society would force him to surrender all his natural forces, his virtues and his vices, and would make him the poor meek little fellow who has not even the right to rise against tyranny, and who, far from striving for power, submits to any existing government and does not stir even when his best friend falls an innocent victim to an incomprehensible raison d’état. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 400

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the bourgeois type and the Hobbesian Commonwealth mechanism: never-ending acquisition requires endless power generation, which inverts the man-of-power into a passive subject.
• XREF: This is the core contradiction — the ‘sovereign individual’ who is actually utterly powerless — that will recur in Arendt’s later chapters on race-thinking and bureaucracy, and connects to the subject-formation debates in colonial psychology this reader is scaffolding toward. — connects to: Political power grows as domination merges into everyday leisure and consumption — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 418
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion — that the power-idolizing bourgeois is actually society’s powerless meek ‘cog’ — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting insight about how the sovereign individual was always an illusion.