Tag Archives: Legitimacy

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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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)

Europe is the Empire: The Social Order of Tomorrow

02 Thursday Feb 2017

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The West is Europe and Europe is the Empire; Europe is the Empire Revisited; Europe is the Empire: Benedict Edition

The Social Order of Tomorrow by the his late majesty Otto of Austria is book which every true Rightist should read. His vision of the repersonalization of economics brought about by the coming “Atomic Age” has not come to pass, however all of the underlying societal, economic, and especially political principles (with one exception that will be discussed later) remain as true today as they were eight hundred years before the book was written. In examining the political aspect, let us begin where his Majesty began, with this very important principle;

We are not the playthings of blind forces, but free men who, in accordance with the will of God, are able to shape their own lives.

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On Legitimacy Part I: Preliminaries and the Necessity of Legitimacy

26 Wednesday Oct 2016

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Since we believe that there are other will-powers in this universe besides that of God, we have a good right to view all actions and activities critically—to reflect, to speculate, to conform or oppose or resist. Thus it is evident that all power being exercised is subject to critical analysis by investigation of its purpose, its effects, the intentions of its exercisers. An exousia—regardless of whether we translate this Scriptural term as “authority ” or “power”—has to have a positive relationship towards its purpose, the common good. To be theoú diákonos, “a servant of God,” it is necessary that a power be “reasonable,” i.e., ordained towards its natural end.* A ruler in the possession of power, but misusing it by woefully harming the common good, is not a “helpmate of God” (leitourgós theoú) and thus has no claim to authority and to obedience. It can even be argued that power, well established and entrenched, claiming authority but methodically destroying the values of the common good, is diabolic in character. The satanic aspects of such government combining power (a divine attribute) with wickedness and irrationality are usually underscored by a quality of confusion; it rarely opposes the common good on all scores and in every respect, though its positive actions are often means to nefarious ends: for example, even maternity wards, recreational institutions and places of learning established by the state can be designed to build up armies intended for aggressive warfare…

A ruler has the same obligation to the right use of power as the owner of property. Both—power and property—have to be used to foster the common good. Their misuse or abuse should result in confiscation or deposition. But it is also evident that legality (even legality according to international law**) is part and parcel of the common good; and therefore legitimacy, in the political sense, cannot be sneered at. Thus, rebellion against a ” legal ” government (i.e., a government legal in the juridical but not in the moral sense) can be excused only if its continued trespasses against other more important aspects of the common good justify steps which according to the secular (constitutional) law are illegal, but become, under these circumstances, legal according to the natural law.

We have hinted that power acting according to reason, that is, intelligently and virtuously, ordaining its efforts towards the common good and not offending against it through its mere existence (as, for example, an unwarranted military occupation by a foreign power), has authority as a genuine leitourgós theoú, a helpmate of God. It certainly is not diabolic. And this situation is, we think, independent of majority consent. If a vast majority of the citizenry is opposed to good or just government, we do not see why this should obviate authority in the least.

-Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Liberty or Equality

Editor’s Notes:
*”Now the rule and measure of human acts is the reason, which is the first principle of human acts”- St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (II)(I) 4. Treatise on Law
**Ius Gentium, see On the Current Crisis for the proper relation between the Ius Gentium and the State.

The Threefold Legitimacy of the House of Austria

07 Wednesday Oct 2015

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Prophecy of Six Crowns“The most important feature of a well-established and (nationally as well as internationally) recognized monarchy should not be forgotten- legitimacy. Without legitimacy it is impossible to imagine the binding power of agreements, of stability, and peace.”– Erik von Keuhnelt-Leddihn, The Menace of the Herd

The restoration of Catholic government in the Germanies is an essential part of the restoration of Christendom as a whole. It is obvious that this cannot be legitimately accomplished by a Republic or a return to Prussian (or Prussianized) autocratic rule. This raises the problem of legitimate rule, which (though some wish to ignore the fact) is very much a crucial issue. Before discussing legitimacy further, it must first be stated that the in the return of Catholic rule in Europe necessitates the reincorporation of the Germanies (and this includes Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland) as Sovereigns States subsidiarized in the Reich (understood not in the shallow National Socialist sense, but in the deep tradition of Christendom’s Holy Empire).

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