Tea at Trianon: The Realities of Political Life

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

Sunday, November 8, 2020

The Realities of Political Life

From ISI:

Now of course in politics you have debates and somebody has to win, while somebody has to lose. Of course he understood all that. But if you broaden that feature of politics into the whole of social interaction, as if everything is politics, which is of course one of the things that we often hear nowadays—you know, the politics of the family, the politics of the church, police department, the politics of everything—what you’re introducing into it is a way of thinking that precludes any kind of genuine exchange of ideas in which people simply take an interest in understanding, as far as possible, what is to be understood. So I don’t think he was at all naive about the danger to conversationality. What he was trying to do was remind us that there is another dimension of life besides the political, and that winning and losing are not the only things that count in life. As he sometimes said, it’s not in victory or defeat but in the manner in which you conduct yourself—that’s the important thing.

The rationalist idea—the technocratic idea, the reign of the experts, and so on—is not really a conversational attitude. It’s really: I know what’s right, and that’s the end of the argument. That’s the danger of it. I think he also recognized that in some ways he was fighting a difficult or perhaps a kind of losing battle. But on the other hand, I think he also thought that it was never entirely lost and that it was important for people to have a willingness to try to preserve it to the extent they could. (Read more.)