Tea at Trianon: The Humaneness of the Historical Mind

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

Saturday, September 26, 2020

The Humaneness of the Historical Mind

From the Kirk Center:

Imperialism is the logical result of the idyllic imagination, the self-understanding that one has the true vision of proper political order and a call to impose that idyllic order upon the world. Justin Litke applies Babbitt’s and Ryn’s ideas of ethical constraint in foreign policy to distinguish between imperialism and republicanism in the American political tradition. The idyllic imagination yields an imperialist foreign policy and the moral imagination, with its emphasis upon restraint, yields a restrained foreign policy consistent with a republican political order. Republicanism requires Babbitt’s “inner check,” the humility and self-restraint of a people to remain home, to insist that they do not have answers to the world’s problems. The idea of America as a propositional nation, rather than an historical nation, lent itself to an idyllic vision. Such an abstractionist understanding could become imperialist. If we have the right ideas instantiated in our national institutions, don’t we owe it to the world to make sure they have those ideas instantiated as well? Gamble and Litke, following Babbitt and Ryn, answer “no” and argue that most Americans through American history would have said “no” as well. (Read more.)