Tea at Trianon: The Shaky Case For the Borderless Utopia

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, June 18, 2026

The Shaky Case For the Borderless Utopia

From Splice Today:

There’s a utopian vision shared by a sizable number of people in Western nations (i.e. the nations that the people of the world want to emigrate to) that involves opening up the borders and letting everyone in—like a free concert in Central Park.

An episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast I listened to dealt with the question of whether or not nations have the right to keep people out. Sarah Fine, a professor of political philosophy at Kings College London, explained why they don’t have that right in the moral sense; they do obviously have the legal right to choose who crosses their borders.

Fine came out of the gate limping. When the podcast host expressed skepticism about his guest’s opinion, Fine brought up the hypothetical of a country not allowing the spouse of a citizen to enter, suggesting that this scenario might make him feel differently about the issue. That was disingenuous, as she knows that opponents of open borders (the majority view in the U.S.) aren’t fixated on denying entry to spouses, unless they happen to be, for example, known terrorists or convicted pedophiles.

The professor said that the usual defense of the right to exclude is, “The state is the kind of entity that needs the right to exclude because it’s essential to the functions of the state.” Countering, Fine cited the fact that some states once claimed to have rights that’ve since been discredited, such as the right to control exit from the state and the right to control the movement of individuals within the state. She asked, “Why should we think that the right to exclude is one of those rights that states are able to still claim with impunity.”(Read more.)