Tea at Trianon: Edmund Burke: An Ambiguous Conservative

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, November 20, 2009

Edmund Burke: An Ambiguous Conservative

He stood for both the ancien régime and classical liberalism. (Via Serge) To quote:

At the same time, there is no denying that Burke would have had nothing but scorn for the notion that we could loose ourselves from our fundamental human obligations by writing them off as something historically contingent. Bromwich reminds us that the same Burke who penned the Thoughts also held that our “social ties and ligaments … in most cases begin, and always continue, independently of our will” and that society is a partnership “not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Bruce Frohnen’s essay on Burke and human rights offers a way of reconciling these apparently conflicting aspects of Burke. On the one hand, Burke held that all men “have a right to the fruits of their industry; and to the means of making their industry fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents; to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring; to instruction in life, and to consolation in death.” On the other hand, he emphasized that the manner in which these rights get their determinate content is conditioned by particular historical and cultural circumstances and that any responsible defense of these rights must be sensitive to these circumstances. Prudence rather than abstract theory must guide the defender of human rights, and reform rather than revolution must be his program.