UNDERGRADUATE

national interest had priority over law.” 37 These groups
were being denied rights, not because of criminality, but
because of their racial status. The fact that these groups
of citizens were denied their natural rights under the
prescription of the law directly links back to Locke. The
racialized society created a government based on racist
national interests, thus distorting Locke’s theoretical
assertion that the government works for the good of the
whole. At this point, Arendt argues, “The language of the
mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of
hypocrisy and restraint.” 38 In this case, prerogative power
to bend the law in exceptional cases ended up being
utilized to destroy the democratic nation-state and leave
groups of certain races without access to any civil or
inalienable rights.
Locke’s theory of prerogative power made it possible
for Nazis to legally rise to power under a constitutional
democracy, declare a state of exceptional national
circumstance and suspend parts of their constitution to
legally implement measures eventually leading up to
the Holocaust. When the citizenry and the government
became racialized, equality for all disappeared under
the law and both civil rights and human rights became
bound to the whim of the government. “Without this
legal equality, which originally was designed to replace
the older laws and orders of the feudal society, the
nation-state dissolves into an anarchic mass of over- and
underprivileged individuals.” 39
In Lockean terms, the stateless and the minorities
consented to civil society, but they were denied protection
of their most basic rights. Locke’s model inextricably links
the man to his rights, independent of any citizenship.
However, Arendt shows how the decline of the nationstate
ended up dissolving this relationship between man
and rights. “The Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable,
proved to be unenforceable—even in countries whose
37 Arendt, 275.
38 Arendt, 275.
39 Arendt, 290.
constitutions were based upon them—whenever people
appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign
state.” 40 Human rights failed because the inalienability of
the rights was supposed to be so completely obvious, that
no enforcement was necessary. In reality, when the law
disappears completely for a group of people they become
“superfluous” and completely rightless. 41 They are missing
something “much more fundamental than freedom and
justice, which are rights of citizens… they are deprived, not
of the right to freedom, but the right to action… the right to
opinion.” 42 Arendt points out the poignant irony that “only
with a completely organized humanity could the loss of
home and political status become identical with expulsion
from humanity altogether.” 43
Locke’s prescription for prerogative power was a
dangerous addition to an otherwise fair theory. Again, the
impact of the prerogative was not clear to Locke at the time
of its creation. Nevertheless, this specific power ended up
justifying the denationalization of an assimilated group
of citizens and their eventual extermination. It began
with the rise of Hitler and his ability to manipulate the
masses through propaganda. Arendt herself states that
Hitler rose to power legally. In fact, “it was the first large
revolution in history that was carried out by applying
the existing formal code of law at the moment of seizing
power.” 44 Through the Nazi appeal to the masses, the
breakdown of the European nation-state system, and
Hitler’s legal rise to power, the democratic freedoms
of all citizens before the law were permanently altered.
These democratic freedoms could be negotiated under a
racialized nation because these freedoms “acquire their
meaning and function organically only where the citizens
belong to and are represented by groups or form a social
or political hierarchy.” 45 It was through Locke’s prerogative
40 Arendt, 293.
41 Arendt, 296.
42 Arendt, 296.
43 Arendt, 297.
44 Hans Frank, Recht und Verwaltung (1938), 7, cited in Arendt, 306.
45 Arendt, 312.
122 CREATING KNOWLEDGE