Quotation
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“But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.”
Edmund Burke · Political philosophy · Enlightenment · 1790
What does it mean?
The usual reading is a lament that a code of honour, loyalty, and mannered respect, which he thinks had restrained power, has been replaced by a calculating politics that can price anything and revere nothing. A competing reading, already Thomas Paine's, hears theatre: a sentimental defence of a queen used to make hierarchy look like tenderness. Both readings fit the placement. The lines come in the Reflections just after the Versailles scene, and just before he praises the 'unbought grace of life'. They are rhetoric with a constitutional argument inside.
Did Edmund Burke really say this?
The library’s label is Well attested. Burke's own English in the Reflections. The sentences follow his picture of Marie Antoinette as dauphine and his claim that ten thousand swords should have leapt to defend her. There are no chapter numbers in the book. The passage is the standard location.
Where it comes from
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the passage on the queen at Versailles
Approximate date: 1790.
How to use it
A trust board in Newcastle that can produce a unit cost for every visit and cannot say why a particular promise to a patient would be shameful to break has enacted the succession he describes. The sentence does not defend every old courtesy. It says a society that can only calculate will not notice what it has spent when it spends loyalty. You can audit the board and still think some restraints are not line items.
A mindset reading
Watch the sneer in 'calculators'. He is a politician who used numbers when they helped, so the line is not a ban on arithmetic. The habit is to ask what a purely instrumental description has made unmentionable. It is equally a habit to ask whose glory is being called Europe's. A feeling of lost grandeur is one of the cheaper responses to this passage, and Paine thought so at the time.
Understand the philosophy
Burke is answering Richard Price and the English admirers of the Revolution. The key contrast is between chivalry, a manner that he says mixed obedience with dignity, and a new class of rational reformers he calls sophisters and calculators. The Reflections argue that prejudice, prescription, and inherited partnership are wiser than a politics rebuilt from theories of rights. This passage is the emotional centre of that argument, and it was mocked as soon as it was published. The mockery is part of understanding it.
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FAQ
What does it mean?
The usual reading is a lament that a code of honour, loyalty, and mannered respect, which he thinks had restrained power, has been replaced by a calculating politics that can price anything and revere nothing. A competing reading, already Thomas Paine's, hears theatre: a sentimental defence of a queen used to make hierarchy look like tenderness. Both readings fit the placement. The lines come in the Reflections just after the Versailles scene, and just before he praises the 'unbought grace of life'. They are rhetoric with a constitutional argument inside.
Did Edmund Burke really say this?
Well attested. Burke's own English in the Reflections. The sentences follow his picture of Marie Antoinette as dauphine and his claim that ten thousand swords should have leapt to defend her. There are no chapter numbers in the book. The passage is the standard location.
Which work is it in?
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the passage on the queen at Versailles Approximate date: 1790.