Tea at Trianon: Sources of Authority: The Roots of the Great American Identity Crisis

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, September 19, 2025

Sources of Authority: The Roots of the Great American Identity Crisis

From The Imaginative Conservative:

According to the classical mind, the ultimate root of social order is authority. To know what this means, we should explain the various words. “Order” is a unified multiplicity, a whole in which the many and diverse parts are all related to each other because they are related to a common principle that transcends them. In this respect, there cannot be an order without a source of unity that transcends what it unifies; every order has a principle, just as every principle implies an order. In a social order, or in other words in a society that is not simply a set of self-contained and unrelated individuals who just happen to occupy the same geographical space (Aristotle compares such a “society” to cows feeding at the same trough), there must therefore be some unifying principle that is able to bind the individuals together in a genuine whole. This unifying principle must be, on the one hand, transcendent of the individual members of the whole, and indeed of the whole itself, in order to bring it about as a unity, but on the other hand it has to be a reality immanent within the whole in order for its unifying power to be effectively communicated. This is the role, in a social order, of authority, which represents the originating principle in the community as one of its members, and at the same time as distinguished from the members of the community through office. The word “authority” denotes an asymmetrical bond between human beings that arises through (as opposed to “merely” symbolic) representation of a transcendent principle of order by one person to another. This transcendent principle—the “auctor,” originator, appealed to in auctoritas—unites the holder of office and those that are subject to the office within a more basic order: since they are both originated by it. (Read more.)