Tea at Trianon: Re-Civilize or Die

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

Thursday, October 9, 2025

Re-Civilize or Die

An interview with Philip Pilkington. From Post-Liberal Order:

To a large extent late liberalism just cannabilised what was left of the pre-liberal social capital. On my reading, liberalism is an inherently unstable and destabilising ideology because it pushes people to reject all social hierarchies and therefore all social structures. It can only really survive by marrying itself to non-liberal aspects of a society. I think this is basically what happened in the case of the global economy. After the Second World War Western economies were managed and a key goal of this management — you find it at the center of the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 — is to ensure that trade imbalances are limited. That system evaporated in 1973 when Nixon closed the gold window but even then concerns about trade imbalances persisted, as we see with the Plaza Accords that sought to close the US trade deficit that was pursued by the Reagan administration. It was in the 1990s and 2000s, under Clinton and Bush that the system was allowed to completely unravel. (Read more.)