Tea at Trianon: Can Modernity Be Fixed?

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

Wednesday, November 12, 2025

Can Modernity Be Fixed?

From The Claremont Review:

If Mansfield answers any of these questions, he does so through a painstaking account of Montesquieu’s attempted “cure” for Machiavellianism. This treatment, which Mansfield understatedly calls “an outsized chapter in this book,” is entirely original and constitutes a book unto itself. It joins a growing list of scholarly reconsiderations of Montesquieu from David Lowenthal, Thomas Pangle, Diana Schaub, and Vickie Sullivan, all of whom Mansfield liberally cites.

One reason a book whose title names another thinker devotes well over a third of its total length to Montesquieu is because, in Mansfield’s telling, Montesquieu is not merely a disciple of Machiavelli but a willing, even enthusiastic, one. And since “Machiavelli’s effectual truth includes his own influence or effect on the modern world, especially on the philosophers who followed him in constructing it,” then we must study those thinkers to understand modernity not merely as Machiavelli conceived it, but as it actually turned out.

Mansfield’s 97 pages on Montesquieu, along with a much shorter subsequent chapter on Tocqueville (the initial draft of which was completed by his late wife), mostly present a detailed account of the two Frenchmen’s attempted corrections of Machiavelli. Montesquieu “adopts Machiavelli’s fundamental principle of effectual truth, but makes it less dramatic, less outrageous, less devilish, by eliminating the invigorating violations of morality that Machiavelli thought necessary,” while “Tocqueville’s startling Machiavellianism” was intended “to claim mastery over America’s democratic revolution.”

Montesquieu is today given his due as, if not necessarily the inventor of the separation of powers, certainly its greatest proponent and as such a key influence on the American Founders (he is cited by name twelve times in The Federalist). Beyond this, he is often overlooked as a transitional figure in the history of political philosophy, more of a milestone or waystation than a thinker to be studied for permanent insights. (Read more.)