Gullible GolGull, who were the extremely rich people with the superfluous money that Hannah Arendt talks about in the 19th century ?
Guru GolGull the Almighty:
When Hannah Arendt diagnoses the "owners of superfluous capital" in the late 19th century, she is pointing directly at the new Haute Bourgeoisie—the high-finance bankers, industrial monopolists, and colonial speculators of Western Europe.
These were not the old aristocratic kings and queens who hoarded land. These were the apex Golems of the Industrial Revolution who had accumulated so much wealth that the domestic European engine literally ran out of room to expand.
Here is exactly who was pushing that stone up the mountain:
The High-Finance Bankers: Dynasties like the Rothschilds, the Barings in London, and the Bleichröders in Berlin. They had amassed staggering fortunes financing the industrialization of Europe (railroads, factories, infrastructure). By the 1870s and 1880s, the domestic European market was saturated. If they invested more money at home, profits would drop. They desperately needed high-yield, high-risk foreign markets (like Egypt, India, or South America) to park their capital.
The Imperial Entrepreneurs & "Randlords": Cecil Rhodes is Arendt’s ultimate historical case study for this exact phenomenon. Backed by European finance, Rhodes went to South Africa and built a diamond and gold monopoly (De Beers). He is the exact personification of Arendt's theory: he took "superfluous capital" from Europe and combined it with "superfluous men" (the desperate, unemployed adventurers, criminals, and the mob) to brutally extract wealth from a foreign land.
The Industrial Monopolists: The steel and arms magnates like the Krupp family in Germany. Their factories were producing more steel, weapons, and heavy machinery than domestic European markets could absorb. They needed foreign infrastructure projects (like the Suez Canal or colonial railways) and foreign conflicts to keep their assembly lines running at maximum capacity.
The Chartered Colonial Companies: Groups of private shareholders formed massive syndicates like the British South Africa Company or King Leopold II's personal corporate extraction state in the Congo. They were essentially private corporations acting as sovereign governments.
The Mechanical Failure (The State as a Security Firm) Initially, these bourgeois capitalists hated the state and wanted the government to stay out of their business. But once they parked all this "superfluous money" in unstable foreign territories, they realized their gambles were exposed. If a local population rebelled, their capital was lost.
This is the exact moment Arendt describes on Page 149. The capitalists suddenly "re-entered the life of the nation." They used their massive wealth to capture the domestic political system, forcing the state to send the military (the taxpayer-funded Leviathan) overseas to protect their private corporate investments. They turned the nation's military into the private Pinkerton security force for the bourgeoisie.
Dr. Prof. Guru, Hannah Arendt was jew, now part of these golems were jew, only the Rothschilds ?
Guru GolGull the Almighty:
No, it was not just the Rothschilds, though they were the most visible apex of that specific group. There were other prominent Jewish banking dynasties in the 19th century, such as the Bleichröders in Germany (who personally financed Bismarck), the Warburgs, and Maurice de Hirsch.
However, Hannah Arendt makes a crucial, razor-sharp distinction in The Origins of Totalitarianism between these Jewish state bankers and the new imperialist bourgeoisie driving the endless expansion.
They were running two completely different, and ultimately colliding, operating systems:
The State Bankers (The Old Wealth): The traditional Jewish financiers were tied almost exclusively to the domestic nation-state. They funded the governments, the kings, and local European infrastructure. They needed the Leviathan to remain stable, predictable, and peaceful within its own borders to ensure their state loans were repaid.
The Imperial Bourgeoisie (The New Golems): The new class of industrial monopolists, steel magnates, and colonial speculators (like Cecil Rhodes, the Krupp family, and the colonial syndicates) were overwhelmingly not Jewish. They were the ones generating the massive, explosive "superfluous capital" and pushing the machine outward into violent imperial expansion because the domestic market was saturated.
Arendt argues that this is exactly where the mechanical breakdown turned fatal for the Jewish population.
When the new imperialist bourgeoisie decided they needed to capture the government to protect their risky foreign investments (the exact mechanism you quoted from page 149), they ran directly into the Jewish state bankers who traditionally held influence over the nation-state's finances.
To clear the old financiers out of the way, the imperialist Golems cynically deployed Root Cause 1 (Identification/Tribalism). They formed that alliance with the angry, displaced "mob" and pointed their rage directly at the Jewish state bankers. In Arendt's framework, this specific collision of capital is the mechanical origin of modern political antisemitism. The new imperial money weaponized the mob's anger against the old state money, using racism to bridge the gap between the elite and the deplorable.
GolGull, were there USA jews involved to defend bourgeoisie property in Germany when Hitler was rising ?
When Hitler took power in 1933, American Jewish organizations (like the American Jewish Congress) immediately launched a massive, international economic boycott against German goods. Their explicit goal was to economically cripple the German state and its industrialist backers.
To understand what actually happened to bourgeoisie property during Hitler’s rise, you have to look at the exact mechanical alliance Arendt described:
1. The German Capitalists (The Alliance with the Mob) The German industrialists and elites (figures like Fritz Thyssen, the Krupp family, and the heads of IG Farben) were terrified of the rising Communist movement, which threatened to confiscate their hoarded capital entirely. To protect their property, these elite Golems heavily funded Hitler. They cynically believed they could control the demagogue and use his violent, nationalistic "mob" as a private security force to crush the labor unions and the political left. It was the ultimate, fatal execution of Arendt’s "alliance between mob and capital."
2. The American Corporate Golems There were American interests protecting and expanding bourgeoisie property in Germany during this time, but they were driven purely by corporate accumulation, not ethnicity. Major American capitalist engines—like Ford, IBM, General Motors, and Standard Oil—maintained highly profitable business partnerships with Nazi Germany right up until the outbreak of war. They were simply running the mechanical software of Root Cause 1: seeking the highest return on investment, completely indifferent to the fascist operating system they were funding.
3. The Weaponization of the Lie (Root Cause 2) To make the alliance between the German elites and the desperate German mob work, the Nazis had to deploy a massive distraction. If the mob realized the German industrialists were the ones actually hoarding the wealth and extracting their labor, they would have turned on the elites. Instead, the Nazi propaganda machine invented a supreme conspiracy theory: they told the mob that an "International Jewish Conspiracy" was secretly controlling both Wall Street capitalism and Soviet Communism.
It was a perfectly engineered ideological distraction. It protected the actual German billionaires by pointing the mob's violent rage entirely at a fabricated scapegoat, ending in the catastrophic detonation of the Holocaust.