Tea at Trianon: Metaphysics of Care

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, October 17, 2025

Metaphysics of Care

From Mary Harrington at First Things:

And yet, as I discovered as a new mom, our social world is ordered to obscure this reality. Women become mothers in a world structurally blind to interdependence, pattern, and ordinary need. As Sargeant shows, the result is a mismatch between what we believe reality is and what reality is for women. This mismatch extends all the way from individual efforts to reconcile the embodied relations of pregnancy and breastfeeding with an employment environment that only grudgingly accommodates this ordinary feature of human life to the struggles faced by policymakers in responding to the kaleidoscopic range of social care needs across areas such as health, housing, and welfare.
And for those feminists who otherwise believe in the supposed interchangeability of men and women, the result has often been, in Sargeant’s words, “helping women be better men”—that is, directing the full force of economic and technological innovation at flattening every last trace of our difference. The Dignity of Dependence is a persuasive tour of all those ways in which the contemporary world relies on our continued willingness to respond to one another’s need, all while treating this (like the sock fairy) as mere backdrop to, or fuel for, “real” (which is to say economic) life. Sargeant is at her most gently polemical, and rhetorically moving, in the chapter that shows how the price is ultimately paid by those most dependent of all: unborn babies.

But the price of our lack of care is also, Jackson argues, visible in the ecological crisis now unfolding across our planet. It isn’t merely a matter of economic theory. Our difficulty in thinking through the dimension of care seems bound up in our deepest values, and especially in relations between the sexes. It is thus, as Jackson notes, principally feminists who have sought to theorize care. Those feminist authors, though, oppose care to violence and link violence with men. This framing of violence as the antonym of care, whether in “patriarchal” hierarchies or in extractive relations to the planet, is the most conceptually underdeveloped aspect of the book, for reasons I will return to. But it accurately sketches the association between our blindness to care and the forces that are disordering sex relations and ecologies. (Read more.)