Unlimited expansion logically destroys all political communities that provide stabilizing limits

Evidence

This contradiction, inherent in all ensuing power politics, however, takes on an appearance of sense if one understands it in the context of a supposedly permanent process which has no end or aim but itself. Then the test of achievement can indeed become meaningless and power can be thought of as the never-ending, self-feeding motor of all political action that corresponds to the legendary unending accumulation of money that begets money. The concept of unlimited expansion that alone can fulfill the hope for unlimited accumulation of capital, and brings about the aimless accumulation of power, makes the foundation of new political bodies—which up to the era of imperialism always had been the upshot of conquest—well-nigh impossible. In fact, its logical consequence is the destruction of all living communities, those of the conquered peoples as well as of the people at home. For every political structure, new or old, left to itself develops stabilizing forces which stand in the way of constant transformation and expansion. Therefore all political bodies appear to be temporary obstacles when they are seen as part of an eternal stream of growing power. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 374

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Arendt ties capital accumulation to power accumulation as twin self-feeding motors, and derives the destruction of all political structure from expansion logic—a dense mechanism worth sitting with.
• XREF: The self-feeding power motor parallels the machine logic in We and foreshadows how totalitarian domination uses expansion to erase every stabilizing human structure.