Burke and the Age of Chivalry

Abstract

On an intuitive level, I think, it has always been evident that the most famous passage in the Reflections on the Revolution in France ('The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever'),1 somehow holds the solution to the enormously complex problem of Burke's political philosophy, and especially of his last expression of that philosophy under the terrible pressure of events in revolutionary France. Burke's impassioned vision of an 'age of chivalry' indeed seems to me to be the centre around which revolve the remainder of Burke's argument in the Reflections, all of the Thoughts on French Affairs, A Letter to a Noble Lord and the Letters on a Regicide Peace, and much of Burke's correspondence after I790. So I take the passage, much discussed as it has been, as my text for what follows. What does follow, if I may set out my argument in short compass, is the contention that behind Burke's lament for a lost age of chivalry there lies, remote in the moral and temporal distance, the sustaining vision of an heroic age in human society, a time when, there having occurred no fateful cleavage between the rational and the emotional, man's nature was yet whole. This is the context, one which must today be reconstructed from other eighteenthcentury writing, in which the Reflections gazes through the local events of 1789 in France (in particular 'the atrocious spectacle of the sixth of October') to, as Burke says, 'the most important of all revolutions, which may be dated from that day, I mean a revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opinions' (p. 175). The issue on which this argument comes to bear, in turn, is one almost universally recognized to constitute the major problem of Burke's political philosophy: namely, whether there indeed lies, among the scattered and occasional utterances of a long political maturity, anything that may be called a political philosophy in the sense of a systematic and internally consistent set of abstract principles. With specific regard to the Reflections and Burke's other writings on the French Revolution, this becomes the problem of whether Burke's denunciation of the revolutionists and the state of affairs