Burke's last writings, especially in the awesome Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796), project an apocalyptic, nightmare vision of lawless, relentless power, a horrible inversion of the hitherto 'natural' order in civilised states. Here coercion dispenses with allegiance... [T]he Regicide Peace...signals with prophetic accuracy the arrival of a new era in politics. Burke's horrified imaginings were realised to the letter in the slave-states of the 20th century.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Burke's last writings, especially in the awesome Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796), project an apocalyptic, nightmare vision of lawless, relentless power, a horrible inversion of the hitherto 'natural' order in civilised states. Here coercion dispenses with allegiance... [T]he Regicide Peace...signals with prophetic accuracy the arrival of a new era in politics. Burke's horrified imaginings were realised to the letter in the slave-states of the 20th century." in the context of "R. A. D. Grant, 'Edmund Burke', The Salisbury Review, Vol. 4, No. 2 (January 1986), quoted in Roger Scruton (ed.), Conservative Thinkers (1988), pp. 82-83" to mean that wisdom is timeless.