Tag Archives: Hans Karl von Zessner-Spitzenberg

Legitimacy and Legality Part IV: The Situation in Austria

23 Monday Jan 2023

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By Dr. Hans Karl von Zeßner-Spitzenberg

Translated by M. T. Scarince

Translator’s note: This is the final part in a series of posts translating the work of Austrian Legitimist philosopher Hans Karl Freiherr von Zeßner-Spitzenberg (1885-1938), an active member of the Kaiser-Karl-Gebetsliga and a martyr for the cause of Austrian independence from the National Socialist occupation. Read Part I, Part II, Part III. 

II. Let us now apply these principles to the situation in Austria today.

For such an application to the Austrian situation to be of any use, everything else will be self-evident when there is clarity as to whether or not a lawful, legitimate acquisition of power is found at the infancy of today’s public authorities, or a breach of law, the moral wrong of violating existing authorities and better rights of rule. After that, the question of whether we are dealing with a merely legal power, or whether this power is free from any restitution obligation due to foreign violation of rights and therefore can be called a legitimate authority, is decided. 

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Legitimacy and Legality Part III: A Brief Outline of the System 5.-9.

18 Wednesday Aug 2021

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By Dr. Hans Karl von Zeßner-Spitzenberg

Translated by M. T. Scarince

Translator’s note: This is the third part in a series of posts translating the work of Austrian Legitimist philosopher Hans Karl Freiherr von Zeßner-Spitzenberg (1885-1938), an active member of the Kaiser-Karl-Gebetsliga and a martyr for the cause of Austrian independence from the National Socialist occupation. Read Part I, Part II, Part IV.

5. Legality 

Legal refers to a state power which actually exists as a state power, as legislation and guardian of the law, which operates as such and as such has de facto asserted itself in public life. It fulfills the basic moral purpose of the state, the maintenance of public order, and thus the care of the Common Good by means of the basic element of the state’s power of order (i.e. by means of the positive legal regulation of social relations); namely, when it keeps itself bound to the positive legal order given and represented by it, when it sets the predetermined legal ways and measures in place of arbitrary acts of violence. These two moments, the actual establishment of order and one’s own commitment to it, are what make a force legal state power, in contrast to arbitrary and violent rule on the one hand and to revolutionary, adventurist, street-thug or tyrant rule on the other, which do not guarantee the moral original purpose of state power: public order and the Common Good through positive statutes. 

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Legitimacy and Legality Part II: A Brief Outline of the System 1.-4.

17 Tuesday Aug 2021

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By Dr. Hans Karl von Zeßner-Spitzenberg

Translated by M. T. Scarince

Translator’s note: This is the second part in a series of posts translating the work of Austrian Legitimist philosopher Hans Karl Freiherr von Zeßner-Spitzenberg (1885-1938), an active member of the Kaiser-Karl-Gebetsliga and a martyr for the cause of Austrian independence from the National Socialist occupation. Read Part I, Part III, Part IV.

For the purposes of this work, the following system is briefly outlined:

1. Morality and Public Law

Public powers and public legal systems are also essentially subject to the same moral principles and stand within the framework of the same Divine world order as private rights, powers and authorities. Here also, human beings are their bearers, responsible for their institution and exercise. Here also, we are dealing with the powers of individuals or entire communities in the fulfillment of a profession, which, like every profession, must serve (after God’s glory) not only the beneficiary himself or the community which he serves, but also the good of his fellow men.

Indeed, the power-competence in this case is necessarily more strongly directed towards authoritative ordering power of the rights of others than it is elsewhere, on account of the main goal of public order; here also it is only within the framework of the Eternal order, which protects and recognizes the appropriate vested rights and inviolable jurisdiction of individuals. From the moral point of view, therefore, public law can be distinguished from private law in these matters only in its object and in its particular purpose, but not in general demands and basic attitudes.

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Legitimacy and Legality Part I: The Introduction

17 Tuesday Aug 2021

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By Dr. Hans Karl von Zeßner-Spitzenberg

Translated by M. T. Scarince

Translator’s note: This is the first part in a series of posts translating the work of Austrian Legitimist philosopher Hans Karl Freiherr von Zeßner-Spitzenberg (1885-1938), an active member of the Kaiser-Karl-Gebetsliga and a martyr for the cause of Austrian independence from the National Socialist occupation. Read Part II, Part III, Part IV.

True Power lies in Justice

-Klemens Metternich

The law of hereditary succession of European rulers according to the indisputable Rule of Primogeniture is the first amongst all conceived earthly guarantees of any success at all, the foundation of the Legitimacy of all the rest of just relations, thus of national fortune: its violation in a single State is a universal calamity for all co-existing States.

-Adam Heinrich Müller

Condemned: The injustice of an act when successful inflicts no injury on the sanctity of right. It is lawful to refuse obedience to legitimate princes, and even to rebel against them.

-Theses 61 and 63 of the Syllabus of Pius IX

 According to the Catholic social conception, the nature of sovereignty appears most clearly when it is familial, that is to say, when the family is its bearer and the family stands as the sponsor of the body politic. As in the family other rights will be imparted through hereditary inheritance from generation to generation, so in this case also sovereignty. That family, which bears the spirit of the State, or who— as was the case especially in Austria— even created it, gain the hereditary right to preserve it. Nowhere does this appear more obviously than in the development and continuation of the multi-national monarchy of the House of Austria. Continue reading →

Is the De Facto Power Always Legitimate Authority?

24 Saturday Mar 2018

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To despise legitimate authority, in whomsoever vested, is unlawful, as a rebellion against the divine will, and whoever resists that, rushes willfully to destruction.

-Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei

As I was listening to the latest episode of the excellent Josias Podcast, two sentences stood out to me, one referring to revolutions as “intrinsically immoral”, the other stating that “we are obliged to accept the De Facto Power by Catholic Doctrine.” To take the second statement first as it naturally leads to the other, are Catholics always obliged to accept the De Facto Power as legitimate? Is this really the doctrine that was established by Pope Leo XIII?

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“A Revolution, a Breach of Law”

12 Sunday Nov 2017

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The 12th of November, 1918, was a Revolution, a breach of law, a breach of faith, against the Emperor as Emperor, and especially against him as the Sovereign of his countries [Landesfürsten]  and at the same time a revolution against the Crownlands and the authorities of the Crownlands.

The act of November 12th, 1918 can not be objectively judged any differently. It lacks any derivative or original legitimacy. It established usurpatory powers. They have established for themselves a legal state, to be respected as a legal power, but have not eliminated the moral right of the repressed legitimate authority to return, as well as the moral duty of all those today in power to return to the legitimate order as far as is possible; here again, even during such times when the Restoration is impossible, emphasis must be placed on obligation of loyalty.

-Dr. Hans Karl von Zeßner-Spitzenberg, Legitimität und Legalität

Austriae est imperare orbi universo

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On Pope Leo XIII and the Legitimacy of Authorities

25 Friday Aug 2017

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“Did not Pope Leo XIII declare, in an Encyclical to French Catholics, that a new authority might, for the sake of the Common Good, receive the right to rule, when the rightful authorities have been removed and are no longer available, and a chaos has arisen so that the maintenance of order requires that new powers be established?

This is to be answered, new legitimacy comes from such emergency power only when the old Authorities and their rightfully appointed successors are not only removed from power, but no longer actually exist. In that case the path lies open, indeed it creates a new necessity, for the establishment of a new legitimate authority.  So long as the rightful Authorities are merely hindered and incapacitated, the emergency order is only permitted as an emergency order, that is to say as a curator or guardian, for so long as the rightful Authority is repressed and its Restoration hindered. However it must not set itself in opposition to this. It is therefore merely legal.”

-Dr. Hans Karl von Zeßner-Spitzenberg, Legitimität und Legalität

(The full text of Dr. H.K. von Zeßner-Spitzenberg’s Legitimität und Legalität is in the process of being translated and will be published in full on The War for Christendom)

Victory Beyond Defeat: Lessons from the 1938 Legitimists

18 Tuesday Jul 2017

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[This New Order] is something quite different from the Old, the Universal, the peoples-binding, the Christian established position in official life, the boundedness also of the Order of Justice and the Eternal Order proceeding from God, the faith in a moral and not naked power Order among States and Peoples, the Justice also towards men of other language and race.

-Dr. Hans Karl von Zeßner-Spitzenberg

On the morning of March 18th, 1938 in the Church of Mary of Sorrows in Grinzing, Dr. Hans Karl von Zeßner-Spitzenberg was arrested by the Gestapo during the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. He was denied the reception of Holy Communion, taken to the prison on the Elisabethpromenade, and four months later transferred to the concentration camp at Dachau. When asked by the Camp Commander the reason for his imprisonment, he replied, “Because I see in Faith in God and in a Christian Austria under the Leadership of the House of Hapsburg the only Salvation for the Independence and Sovereignty of my Fatherland.” He later died of injuries sustained during his transport to Dachau, giving his life as a witness to the Legitimacy of “the Emperor who never dies.”

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