Tea at Trianon: How We All Became Utilitarians

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, June 8, 2025

How We All Became Utilitarians

From The Sacred Images Project:

The French Revolution was the first grand attempt to put the Enlightenment’s theories into practice, to strip society down to its rational foundations and rebuild it according to the dictates of “pure reason”. It ended in blood, chaos, and tyranny. The first attempt to forcibly create a world of pure “liberty, equality, and fraternity” ultimately led to mass executions and the rise of new, even more ruthless forms of despotism.
The experiment was a failure, but the Enlightenment’s ideological project did not die with it. Utilitarianism remained the most popular ideology and metaphysics of the ruling classes across the developed world in the opening of the 20th century. The German experiment was only the latest round.1
Two centuries later, a new set of revolutionaries emerged, determined to succeed where the Jacobins had failed. They would not rely on brute force and sudden upheaval but on a slow, methodical reshaping of society - the “long march through the institutions”. The radical intellectuals of the mid-20th century, armed with the ideas of Foucault, Marcuse, and the Frankfurt School, sought to complete the unfinished work of their Enlightenment and early 20th century predecessors. (Read more.)