Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke (1790)

Burke remembers Marie Antoinette glittering at Versailles and grieves that ten thousand swords did not leap from their scabbards to defend her; the age of chivalry is gone, he mourns, and a colder age of calculators has come in its place. _Reflections on the Revolution in France_ is the great cry against the faith that reason alone can raze a civilization and build a better one from the bare ground. Burke had cheered the American colonists and spent years prosecuting the plunder of India, so his fury at Paris stunned the friends who took him for a friend of liberty. What he defended was the inherited wisdom no philosopher can recover from first principles, a partnership, he calls it, between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born. He wrote it before the guillotine had taken a single head, naming the Terror and the soldier-despot who would follow, and watched the future arrive exactly as he had said. You can resist every line and still feel the chill of a man who could see in the dark.