Order and Legitimacy
Note: Francis Graham Wilson (1901-1976) was an eminent political scientist, and a central figure in the postwar American conservative intellectual movement. Wilson was also a correspondent of Eric Voegelin’s for the majority of his life. Since Wilson’s death in 1976, four new or revised volumes of his scholarship have appeared as part of Transaction/Rutgers’ and Routledge’s ongoing series devoted to introducing Wilson to a new generation of scholars. These volumes include an edition of his The Case for Conservatism (Transaction/Rutgers, 1990); Political Philosophy and Cultural Renewal (Transaction/Rutgers, 2001; reprinted, Routledge, 2018), a collection of Wilson’s published and unpublished scholarly articles; Order and Legitimacy: Political Thought in National Spain (Transaction/Rutgers, 2004; reprinted, Routledge, 2017), a revised and extended version of his earlier work on Spanish political thought; and, a new edition of A Theory of Public Opinion (Transaction/Rutgers, 2013; reprinted, Routledge, ), Wilson’s seminal refutation of the behavioral ascendency in the study of politics. The essay presented here was discovered by Dr. H. Lee Cheek, Jr., among Wilson’s unpublished papers, and is included in Order and Legitimacy (pp. 159-182).
It is not the purpose of this essay to give a universal history of the idea of legitimacy. It is rather to discuss the spirit of the present hour, in which our own legitimacy seems increasingly to be called in question. The emergence of constitutional crisis signifies the erosion of order and the spiritual quality or the authority of a regime which is the substance of its legitimacy.[1] We are engaged in these essays in reflections on the Latin mind, and what is needed here is not universal history, but the interpretation of history that has been given by some notable thinkers of the Latin tribe. To the Latin, there is the almost personal sense of the fall of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire is his, just as the Italy or Spain of today is his. Though order and legitimacy are problems of the intellectuals, as well as that of the practical political leader, it is the modern crisis–the continuing crisis from the French Revolution—the serves as the basis for both intellectual continuity and intellectual experiment. The old terms of explanation from classical times blend with the nineteenth century effort to provide new words for old behavior. To some, Alexis de Tocqueville and Karl Marx seem the inventive minds of the age, but their explanations were different. Today, more than ever, people of all ideological stamps read Tocqueville, but they read also Marx, Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, August Comte, and British liberals like John Stuart Mill. Just as the nineteenth century was the time in which new ideological terms came into being, it was also ripe for the exploration of words like community, authority, status and class, religion and the sacred element of life, by political scientists and sociologists.
I
One of the greatest of the modern students of legitimacy was the Italian historian and intellectual, Guglielmo Ferrero, who was invited to visit the White house by Theodore Roosevelt, apparently just to talk; they were both writers of some reputation. But it is doubtful that any other President of the United States has invited an intellectual, here a Latin intellectual, to the White House just to talk. Ferrero was a noted historian, but in the course of his life he became a famous social and political philosopher. Of Ferrero it might be said that we should not be envious of his contribution; we should be thankful that he existed.
On the evanescence of Roman legitimacy, he is lucid. Alexander Severus was killed in 235 A.D. by his revolted legions. At this time, the empire was at its height of influence in every way. But fifty years later, Greco-Roman civilization and polytheism were in their death agonies, and Christianity was a rising force which was prophetic of some new unity in the classical world. There was simply no dynastic principle, no principle on the succession to power which could be sustained. And Ferrero argued that “no human effort could succeed in preventing the final catastrophe.”[2] The point he makes is that for centuries the Roman Senate had been the primary organ of government and the source of legitimacy in the choice of rulers. The election of an emperor was validated by the Senate, but when Marcus Aurelius ignored the Senate and tried to introduce the dynastic principle, an absolute military dictatorship was erected on the ruins of the authority of the Senate. The revolt of 235 A.D. began a half-century in which the ruling class was destroyed, although Vespasian made efforts to rebuild the Roman aristocracy by inscribing a thousand provincial families in the Senatorial and Equestrian orders. Legitimacy as principle, however, disappeared, and new religious cults, such as Sol Invictus and Latinized Mithraism could not prevent the dissolution of the Empire. Likewise, efforts to rebuild the Empire on the Asiatic model lasted only a limited time. In its stead, and because of Christianity, the divinity of the emperor had to be abandoned, but Christian heresy, such as the terrible struggle over Arianism, did not provide a principle of effective legitimacy and unity.[3] Ferrero ventured the opinion that the triumph of Christianity, which Diocletian lived long enough to see, marked the end of ancient civilization. Though Diocletian dropped the cultus of the emperor, his hope that orthodoxy would be the bulwark of empire itself failed.
The nineteenth-century struggle for legitimacy between monarchy and popular sovereignty looked back to the issues of legitimacy in the ancient world. Today we can consider the failures of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the destruction of Europe by the Russian Revolution in March 1917; we can look back at the nineteenth-century discussion of its own problems of establishing legitimate government. Germans such as Karl Jaspers will tell us that the destructions of the German spirit of independence in the Thirty Year’s War has never been overcome, and Ferrero affirmed that the fall of religion in that war was one of the reasons for the ruin of the West.[4] Without Transcendence at the center of the mind, the popular will becomes a formality by which to legitimize a military dictatorship founded on force. This authority emerging from “popular will” is absolute and far more tyrannical than monarchy with its limitations in the national tradition. But alternatively, the revolutions of the people, as the revolutions of 1848, came to nothing. The sovereignty of the people lasted, and seems always to last, but a moment. Europe came through the first half of the twentieth century with two principles of authority–monarchy and the people–neither of which has been able to sustain continuity in order and legitimacy. And much the same may be said of Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses, that is, the barbarism of Communism and fascism. One hopeful item is, indeed, that all sensible people seem to be afraid of further mad political and economic adventures in the West. Only argument and not war must be used to deflate the totalitarian systems.
In the nineteenth century, the study of revolution in France, especially, drove scholars to the theory of social status and class. The loss of legitimacy became a loss in the minds of those who belonged to a social class. Such an effort at interpretation was not by any means limited to the Marxians, the socialists, or revolutionaries. Lorenz Von Stein was one of the seminal minds of the last century. His analysis of French society, as distinguished from the French government or state, was prophetic of future social theory. But it was an analysis founded in a theory of social classes which was to provide ideas for revolutionary thought, as well as the European defense of capitalism and tradition in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It has been the destiny of capitalism to be viewed almost always in terms of the operation of a social class of men known as “capitalists.” Von Stein perceived the capitalist class as the foundation of government. Indeed, the combination of capitalists and bourgeois monarchists under Louis Philippe was the basis of that society. Like Ferrero, von Stein could appreciate the search for legitimacy in the years from 1830 to 1848. Monarchy was traditionalist, and European monarchists and aristocrats in general were against the principle of Louis Philippe, that is, the Charte, simply because of the industrial-bourgeois basis of the new order. No doubt the failure of the regime of 1830 may be interpreted as the incompatibility of the bourgeois capitalist order and monarchy. Yet such a view is based on the idea that traditionalism is impossible under industrialism, and this is surely not the case. For traditionalism is the foundation of an effort toward the development of industrialism in the Mediterranean societies of the present day. The industrial revolution in Spain, fostered under Catholic leadership, is a case in point. Von Stein declared:
Since the time when the term légitimité had been used at the Congress of Vienna, it had been interpreted in diverse ways. Usually it was intended to designate a certain, not very clearly defined complex of princely rights. Actually, legitimacy is nothing else but the essence of true monarchy, which makes it the absolute prerequisite of any constitution. In this sense the princes of Europe called themselves legitimate rulers. The same idea is expressed by the phrase ‘by the Grace of God,’ which had originated in Europe at the same time that the principalities were becoming aware of the importance of their position…. But since the crowns had been distributed by the victory of armies, particularly by Napoleon, legitimacy, as a claim of the princes to the throne by birth right, found its opponent in the princes whom the Revolution had raised to the throne. Only by contrast to the revolutionary monarchies did the old principalities gain a clear concept of legitimacy.[5]
It may well be suggested that in the nineteenth century the problem of legitimacy was often discussed simply as the legitimacy of power over the proletariat.
II
In 1849, Juan Donoso Cortés, in writing to the Conde de Montalembert, said that he owed his conversion to a conservative position to divine mercy and to the profound study of revolutions.[6] We have been wearied of “crisis” in the twentieth century, and we are constantly driven to consider as profoundly as we can the course of revolutions. Crisis means in one fashion the failure of government to command the obedience or acceptance of the citizenry, and crisis, therefore, is another way of speaking of the failure of legitimacy. Or, perhaps we can perceive the outlines of constitutional crisis as we probe the meaning of the revolutionary age which began with the French Revolution, as we have noted. Revolution drives people then and now into the study of legitimate government, since the revolution itself overthrows the older and inherited principles of public order. We have a widespread crisis in legitimacy in the world today because of the failure of the nineteenth-century political systems to be accepted by various national traditions. The revolutionary regimes of Marxism, fascism, totalitarianism, pseudodemocratism, and the quasi-legitimate regimes of Africa and Asia are common indeed. The future achievement of peace and efficiency depend on the attainment of political legitimacy.
Some have become convinced that the age of revolution ends when there are no longer aristocrats to lead them. But the profound study of revolution leads one to compare the roles of the nobility, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, and the modern exponents of efficiency. Out of this the conclusion has emerged that just as once the babel of tongues produced a confusion of ideas, today the confusion of all ideas has resulted in a confusion of political and ideological language. We have little interest in the forms of government today. We strengthen the executive and strive for the concentration of power, the automatic operation of political institutions, and the stabilization or neutralization of political forces. It has been said that from the fall of the Bastille to the fall of the bomb on Hiroshima, we have progressed from liberty to the ideal of security, and from the uncertainties of representation to the ideal of efficiency. From ideology, political parties, and the revolution, we seem to be struggling toward a legitimacy that is based on the efficiency of scientists in a technological society. In the last century, the symbols of legality were substituted without success for the symbols of legitimacy, but the troubled age was not resolved into peace through the charms of the parliamentary order.[7] It is often uncertain on just what grounds we should try to found the order and legitimacy of the future.
Guglielmo Ferrero has said there are four basic principles of legitimacy. There are the aristo-monarchic principle, the hereditary principle, the elective principle, and the democratic principle of government. The literature in the West to be found on the subject of legitimacy is sparse–the most prominent of which are some pages of Talleyrand’s Mémoires–and some thoughts from Pascal. But when one of these four principles is accepted there is public order and there is no revolution. The profound study of the revolution led the historian Ferrero back to Talleyrand, who had said:
I speak of the legitimacy of governments in general, whatever their form, and not only that of kings, because it must be applied to everything. A legitimate government, be it monarchial or republican, hereditary or elective, aristocratic or democratic, is always the one whose existence, form, and mode of action have been strengthened and sanctioned over a long period of years, I might even say over a period of centuries. The legitimacy of sovereign power stems from the ancient state of possession, as also, in the case of individuals, does the legitimacy of the law of property.[8]
When order breaks down we have crisis, the Greek “judgment” of a regime. Only when the demonic fear that is mutual between the rulers and the ruled has been placated, can legitimacy be established and in consequence a public order in which the technology of our age may flourish. Legitimacy in the government must penetrate into society as the foundation of order.[9] It is much the same in any principle of legitimacy, whether monarchy, aristocracy, or the technique of parliamentarism which liberalism has used as the foundation of the post-Napoleonic age. The revolutions destroyed the older principles and the governed would not accept the new, even to the present day in the scattered and partial acceptance of the Western principles of democratic and industrial progress. And authority exists when there is a legitimate system of society and government.
The nature of effective authority under order has been a perennial inquiry. As a rule, legitimacy must be effective, that is, it must maintain itself through the fact of public order. In Bodin, Hobbes, Locke, and Grotius, for example, the response to the disorders of the age was the defense of the state as sovereign and the guarantor of public order. Hans Barth has suggested there are three elements to be distinguished in the conception of order: 1) “spiritual unity, which is determined by the meaning and purpose of order which expresses itself in consensus and loyalty; 2) the complex of sanctions which is entrusted with the protection and maintenance of order; and 3) authority, which makes society capable of decision and action.” Finally, he pointed out that the state is itself an order which includes within it a multitude of other forms of order.[10] Legitimacy is always a central problem for a state with a crisis of order, obedience, and the constriction of liberty for the preservation of the state. The failure of the nineteenth century was a failure to penetrate or to remake society. Those who seized power had little time to justify themselves, and their new statements of doctrine failed to become traditional. As Ferrero might say, we have dictators because people do not understand either the old or the new formulations of legitimacy that are offered them for the exorcism of the ancient fears of politics.
III
Let us turn to some brief consideration of the historical justifications of power, both in the spiritual penetration into society of metaphysical principles of justice, and the down-to-earth statements of legitimacy. For, indeed, the justifications of order are pragmatic; they are seldom worked out in the practice which is claimed for them. The practical problem is the embodiment of legitimacy in some form of acceptable governing elite, or the institutional pattern of a directing minority. Ferrero argued such principles are simply not transcendent, for they are positive, practical and operational. But to the individual committed to a principle of legitimacy, there is a standard of validity or truth behind the practical and operational. One may argue that any system of rulership is disconnected from a metaphysical principle, and that the social implications of monarchy or democracy are nil. But in general, it is only the empirical mind which can take such a position. What one will argue, in fact, is that a given principle of justification, in the actual historical situation, comports best with some institutional arrangement of government.
In the twentieth-century crisis of regimes, where voting rights have been expanded and political parties dominate the political landscape, the presumed objectives of an orderly society have not been obtained. The rightist criticism of liberalism attacked the prevailing assumptions of such a political order as merely representing Rousseauistic, plebiscitarian democracy. Rousseau became the evil demon of the post-World War I democratic and parliamentary order. The literature on this question is immense. Defenders of parliamentarism did not turn to Rousseau, but the critics of parliamentarism used Rousseau as the symbol of political original sin.[11] It is most curious that in this debate the defenders of the parliamentary order seemed never to use Aristotle. Why could they not have said: “Our democracy is based on the Greek principle of Aristotle’s polity, a mixture of oligarchy and democracy, and this is the most legitimate form of government we can imagine. The American system is more a polity than a democracy; the United States Constitution is the best modern regime in accordance with the Stagirite.”
Such an argument should be related to the proposition that the objective of political theory is, according to the Greeks, the discovery of the best political regime. At least this is one of the objectives of Aristotle. The best regime has the best right to rule. But the best regime might be so-not because of its institutional structure–but rather because it was committed to teaching the truth of society and defending that social truth in the structure of its order.[12] Many suggestions have been made. Xenophon in his Memorabilia paid tribute to the deeply religious spirit of Socrates; it was, of course, a probing traditional spirit which led Socrates in his talks with the son of Pericles to urge the restoration of tradition, as we discussed in Chapter One.[13] Socrates urged consulting the oracle and he seemed not unfriendly toward divination as a means of discovery of the justified course to follow. Socrates was frequently in communion with his demon, or we can say “guardian angel.” Xenophon may be cited as affirming that kings and rulers “know how to rule,” and thus they rule rightfully or legitimately. They are not legitimate because they are simply in power, or chosen by the multitude, or by lot, or that they have acquired power by force and deception. Rather, they have the knowledge of rulership that legitimizes, much as Plato might speak of the science of government in his Statesman.[14]
In Aristotle’s Ethics it is the mature man, the spoudaios who has the right to engage in ethical discussion,[15] and this maturity might also give him the right to govern. He can engage in the pedagogy which Plato argued in the Laws. The mature man is the teacher, the pedagogue, and the ruler of the state. As ruler he is the sovereign, but as teacher he is teacher of the truth, and he speaks for the gods and philosophers. Men who have the truth can speak of the laws; legality in this transcendent sense stands far above the consent of those who are either ignorant or corrupted. The wise man, as with St. Thomas, or the spoudaios in the mind of the Greek philosopher, may engage in the legitimate discussion and in the proper determination of public questions. In spite of angry comments about the “royal fiction,” as Cornford states it, Plato does not seem serious about it. What he is trying to do is to suggest in the myth, which is a gateway to knowledge and a statement of the truth, the order the people should obey. In this way, he sought to gain consent for the teachings of the philosopher.[16]
In the Greek discussions of legitimacy in rulership, there are several principles to mention. Since there is the institution aureoled by philosophical truth, we may say that power comes from “above” and that it also comes “before” the human situation. There is no practical legitimacy without continuity because both institutions and the teaching of political truth occur in continuity. However, the educable young tyrant might well be an instrumentality for bringing into effect the principles of Plato’s teaching.[17] But he would be educable only if he showed a capacity to be a member of the sacred brotherhood of the Academy. While the Greeks had a variety of legitimate systems, it is forcefully true of the modern age that legitimacy is institutionally narrowed either to some form of monarchy or executive concentration, or to some form of democracy related in practice to representative government. Plato’s Laws speaks of at least seven manners in which a legitimate ruler or governing elite might be chosen. The father and the mother rule the children, and the state by analogy is a kind of household. The noble should rule over the ignoble, the older over the younger, masters over slaves, the stronger over the weaker, wise men over those lacking in understanding, and those who may in the most democratic of ways be chosen by lot. But whatever the form of government, there is the perennial danger of the “king’s disease” of pride and ignorance.[18]
But is it not curious that the Greek writers hardly mention the military? Aristotle speaks of it after the first decline, but otherwise, and except in relation to the discussion of Sparta, there seems to be little or no focus on it. From the time of the murderous civil wars between the Roman legions down to the present, some are inclined to see practically every government backed by its armed forces. Hispanic-American government is dependent on the army, every Communist dictatorship of the party has the army behind it, and similarly in the disorderly African states the army is the engine of government. One may say that the military as the carrier of legitimacy is vastly more important now than it was in Greek society. It becomes one of the symbols of teacher and doctrine in any social order where the traditional nineteenth-century parliamentary, party, and judicial system has broken down. Here the military must assume the burden of order, or principle, and of continuity in the legitimacy of government. Its responsibility is social peace. To place a civilian at the head of the state is often merely a formality, a kind of Platonic myth which covers the deeper modes of teaching through the legions. The army may become the school of virtue; and it may well teach acceptance of the civil order. To this we must return at a later juncture.
IV
The interpretation of history is philosophical for the past and “probable” for the future. One of the profoundest, most prolonged, and bitterest of arguments among Western man is the role that Christianity has played in the formation of the modern principles of justice and legitimacy. In a more precise sense, one may say that the Catholic Church is the greatest of historical issues. It has not been primarily a question of the legitimacy of a particular form of government. Christianity has adjusted itself to practically all of the systems of government under which it has been forced to exist with persecution, or permitted to flourish with freedom. From liberalism, through socialism to Communism, and any other forms of proletarian revolutionary thought, attack has been directed at Christianity as an institution, but even more so against Christianity as a teacher of doctrines and philosophy. In other words, the leftwing revolution has attacked social teachings that have come from the Bible, from Christian tradition, and from the decisions of councils, prelates, theologians, and philosophers.
In the West it has not been as in Ethiopia, ancient China, or modern Japan, an issue of the divine institution of a particular government. It has been a question, first, whether Christianity labored for the progress of humane feelings and institutions in Western history; and, second, it has been a philosophical question: Is Christian teaching, morality, and philosophy true, and thus a foundation for justice? Or, is it an illusion, which must give place before the truth of the secularized philosophies of liberalism and revolutionism? That Christian practices added much to the creation of political institutions is generally admitted, as parliaments, legal procedure, the administrative systems of the modern state, and many of the practices in voting and in the forms of majority control emerged during the Middle Ages. We recognize the continuity of governmental institutions from the medieval period–of both Church, or state–began to take shape.[19]
Guglielmo Ferrero has referred to “the great humanization and demilitarization of the West that Christianity accomplished.”[20] Probably the greatest nineteenth-century defense of Christianity in the light of history is the reply of Jaime Balmes to Guizot, defending the melioration of manners and the extension of charity into all areas of social life.[21] Balmes cites council after council in the long struggle against slavery and the oppression of women, which were legacies from the decadent civilization of Greece and Rome. Christian charity and humanity was a public orthodoxy throughout the West. Virtue and care for the common good gave a people the right to select their magistrates. With St. Augustine, the virtue of a people gave them the right to govern themselves and their city under the eternal law of God, with whatever form of government they might find best suited to the attainment of this end.[22] The Christian conception of a public orthodoxy is grounded in the principle of eternal and natural law, though the form of government may be chosen in accordance with the wishes of the people. Orthodoxy limits toleration, but toleration itself, one may observe, may sometimes bring about public disorder and sometimes it may establish social peace.[23] In our present age it is difficult to see how Christians can favor the toleration of the anti-Christian revolution of dialectical materialism. Can the public orthodoxy of Communism live with the public orthodoxy of Christian morality? For the long course of Christian social thinking, legitimacy had depended, as with the Greeks, on the justice of social theory and the virtue in the standards defended by the law.
The issue has been especially acute when a political society has approved in its public law a religious faith, or, indeed, where a religious creed has formed part of its tradition to such an extent that the creed has shaped or created the national style, and the contours of the national soul. A public philosophy of religious pluralism, such as exists in the United States, is more the exception than the rule in world history. In the present age the argument for popular ecumenism (not the official Decree of the Vatican Council in 1964 on the subject) seeks to expand good will and tolerance throughout the world. When the confessional state exists, there may be tolerance for others, as in the Catholic and Protestant confessional states of Europe, but the official religion has privileges the others do not have. The religious style of the society provides the basis of legitimacy in public policy.
In much of Western history there has been a movement like a pendulum toward and away from what might be called popular or democratic control of government. The pattern of the defeat of Greek democracy is clearly one that has been repeated. One may cite the preservation of “republican words” in Rome when the imperial power was being created with such “republican” notions as the tribunitian power. The lex regia was invented as an idea to explain imperial centralization. Much the same is true in Christian history as in the invention of the Donation of Constantine. Monarchy has been until quite recent times the approved political order though the principle has long been accepted that there should be some popular participation in any legitimate government. St. Thomas stressed the function of wise men on different questions, but there should also be a clearly recognized right of the people to remove a tyrant if they find him unbearable. The Western Christian pattern has been monarchy with estates or parliaments for the representation of social institutions. Actually, it would seem today that many of the areas where democracy has been stable have established churches, that is, the confessional state and the institution of constitutional monarchy. Thus, a religious and a monarchical legitimacy have emerged from the past in the preservation of national tradition. Should one remember that after the Congress of Vienna, which preserved monarchic legitimacy, there was general peace in Europe for about a century?
One thing to be kept in mind is that as the modern age emerged, the state required something more than just a tradition of monarchy and some system of the Estates of the Realm. Hobbes’ affirmation is probably correct: A legitimate government must work. There is, thus, a pragmatic principle in our thinking about the modern state. This is a part of the whole system of legitimacy: philosophy, structure, and efficiency. The idea of efficiency was added to the principle of the good prince. A legitimate government is a virtuous prince who at the same time is reasonably efficient in attaining the goals of government. Such efficiency does not suggest that the people should be authorized to tell the good prince what to do, but the good prince will be just and effective.[24]
In revolution and war, Christianity has to be concerned with the survival of the Church and preeminently its freedom to conduct public worship and to administer the sacraments. The concordat is an agreement with a government when there has been trouble with the government, though this can cause criticism later, as for example the relation of the Vatican with various governments during the two world wars.[25] On the other hand, in more peaceful times in orderly societies, Christian social theory becomes concerned with the details of economic and social order. In America the leftwing clergy seek to attain social legislation for the protection of the workers and for racial minorities. In the postwar prosperity of the United States, the reformers could turn more and more toward a revolution in racial relations as part of the Christian principle of a legitimate or just society. But it would seem impossible for the exponent of Christian ethics to accept as valid any and every strictly constitutionalized expression of majority will. The Christian majority must be Christian in its judgment of what is proper in a political society.
Ethics in politics is no simple subject. In the end, however, the ethical approach to politics demands that public judgment be based on the acceptance of values grounded in acceptable ethical principle. Here and only here can one discover legitimate power. An important distinction is to be made: The ethical principle must be “open-ended,” that is, the specific application depends on situations or on prudential judgment. Applications will change in time and in different cultures. And a mere proportional representation of opinion–mass opinion let us say–ought not and cannot be the ground for a true democratic procedure. Ultimately, sovereign opinion must contain a recognition of at least a situational moral order.
The larger issue for the European Christian has been the secularism, materialism, and the anti-Christian philosophy of the French Revolution. For Americans, it has been possible to ignore such an issue under the proposition that the American Revolution was the same as the French.[26] For the European, legitimacy in the sovereign was historical and traditional. It was grounded in the law, in the natural rights of men, but not under the egalitarian individualism which has been associated with Rousseau. The Revolution was against the liberty of the Church. For the continental Christian, down almost to the present day, the legitimacy of any institution has been its conformity with the law. But the law includes all of the possible extensions of the word, and for that reason legitimacy is in accordance with divine, natural, positive, human, and customary law (even if it is written) when these laws have an historical, traditional, and rational foundation. Thus, legitimacy in such a view is also legality. In these views there is no compatibility between a society shaped by Christian tradition and the revolutionary systems of Europe as they emerged from the French Revolution.[27]
V
We must now consider some contemporary problems in the formulation of the legitimate political system. Our problem emerges, as has been said, from the failures of the nineteenth century in its restatement of legitimacy. That failure is the crisis of our time.
(A) Justice was surely fundamental in the minds of the Romans. The legal system presumably embodied higher principles of justice and order. But justice and order went together, and in its better time the Roman lawyers would surely have preferred, as in the statement of an English legalist, injustice to public disorder. Whatever the scheme of justice, order, and legitimacy, they all implied some form of higher principle, which might, however, be formulated as one of the maxims of the Roman civil law. Under the classical Roman constitution the army was simply an instrumentality of the SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus)–the Senate and Roman people. Polybius and Cicero described the classical features of the system, the Consuls, the Senate, and the people under the Tribunes and in their tribes, centuries, and other forms of corporations.[28] The will of the people was in theory the source of legitimacy and justice. But the Senate was select, its members were supposedly wise, though in imperial times the Senate became an essentially sycophantic body, praising the wisdom of the one man.[29] Senators had abdicated in favor of charismatic personalities, who were the legislators, and perhaps even prophets. By analogy, the will of the Emperor was like a Roman last will and testament naming an heir, and the Emperor could name his successor for the approval of the Senate. Such a selection by the concentration of testamentary authority was not as firm as a direct and known hereditary succession. It did, however, validate the concentration of the authority of the people in one person through its transfer from the larger to the smaller unity.
The end was reached in the creation of the legions as the symbol of the justice of the Roman city. The dream of the constitution evaporated in the dominance of the army. But the symbol of justice remained in the writings of Vergil and later in Dante, for whom the age of Augustus still lived. Such was the pattern of political evolution. In the present age of confusion, it seems that only the army is capable of embodying the principles of some societies. The military becomes the ruling power, the ruling legitimacy, in a time of crisis when the ordinary political procedures have given place to a more stern efficiency. Some Latin American conservatives have argued that army leaders do not show any real intellectual independence from those who surround them, for example, and they surrender to foreign capitalists. Ferrero has stressed the mutual fear between the rulers and the ruled, but in a time of fear the military commanded; the colonel or the general is a natural symbol of authority to which one may turn. Armies are simply one of the common expedients which recur in human history. In the disorders of emergent nations, the army has seemed to be the natural point to return for the creation of the state.[30]
At its best, however, army discipline can be the creative force in making a nation. The Spaniard may say that the Catholic Church created the Spanish nation and the Spanish tradition, but he will also assert that the creation of the modern state under the Catholic Sovereigns produced the military style of life which served as the foundation of Spanish power. The army was the exponent both of a style of life and the values of the national society. It supported public order and the necessity of rebellion when a government has deserted the national tradition.[31] One may trace the rise and fall of the national spirit of service in the characteristics of the military system. Military morality may be and usually is close to Christian morality: the military virtues may be called simply the virtues of good men. Both the civilian and the soldier should symbolize a legitimate social order. When the parliamentary order has disintegrated and when the military as a disciplined system of order has taken over, the leaders of the government who are military men assert their right to formulate the national tradition and the national style in history. Thus, in our time, when the army or the colonels take over, they will say that social politics, mass progress, or some such formula, is the primary problem of the age. For the age in which peace, progress, and liberty are to be realized, the military declares that a well-organized power is needed, a strong and centrally functioning army, and a highly self-conscious and precisely stated social policy. The army comes to symbolize the level of national vitality and national morality. In this sense, the army is the mainstay of loyalty to whoever is the head of state.[32]
In the struggles maintained by the United States against Communist imperialism, we have tried to insist on civilian control of anti-Communist governments. We have had our anti-Communist revolutions, as in Guatemala, and our revolutions which have overthrown anti-Communist governments, as in South Vietnam. But the necessities of the worldwide struggle against Communist ideological expansion are forcing us toward accepting allies when and where we may find them. The just government is the government that is against Communism. We are slowly, but it might seem with certainty, moving toward the acceptance of army systems of legitimacy. We can accept them as not inconsistent with “democracy” since we regard them as transient governments, which will give way to some version of civilian government at least remotely related to the nineteenth-century representative and party governments.[33]
(B) When the French Revolution and its filiated political explosions destroyed the thousand-year-old system of hereditary, monarchic, and aristocratic legitimacy, there was in fact nothing to put in its place. There were the ancient principles of elected rulers (or oligarchies) and the democratic system which was beginning to take shape as a part of the republican ideas at the base of American and French doctrines. The people have a right to give themselves a government, indeed they have no right to refrain from doing so; but at the same moment there is the idea that the people must represent reason, and obedience to a constitution or to a system of fundamental law. The nineteenth-century vision of the Doctrinaires of a new legitimate order in society was deeply rooted in the past. The system of parliaments and parties was to be the expression of the sovereignty of reason, for reason would be the pre-condition of all systems of legitimate republican government, as well as constitutional monarchies.
Royer-Collard’s vision of nineteenth-century legitimacy is one of the most moving of his time. He was one of the Doctrinaires who believed in the sovereignty of reason as the foundation of the Charte and of a new constitutionalism. His ideas influenced thinkers outside of France, for many of the early ideas of Juan Donoso Cortés in Spain in his constitutional and liberal period were drawn from him. For Royer-Collard, it was necessary to formulate a principle of legitimacy in order to remake society. The democracy which he saw under Louis XVIII was a strong current which was bringing prosperity, industry, and riches into the new France. But democracy was not limited, simply because there had been a destruction of the principles of legitimacy. Democracy might return to its primeval nature of violence, war, and the bankruptcy of the state. It was said of Royer-Collard that he wept neither for the Bourbons nor for the past; he despaired of the future, and one day he addressed to one of his political conferees the saying: “To perish is also a solution.” If one struggled as did many a European leader of the nineteenth century to restore society through the sovereignty of reason, it had to be done through copying the British system of parliamentary government. One must hope that the political parties, the new factions in politics, might behave in a manner something like the Liberals and the Conservatives (or Tories) of the British political forum.[34]
As the century wore on, the experience of France, Spain, and Italy, became more and more disturbing to the students of politics who thought of themselves as leaders in a new age of economic and social progress. Such a study is the core of Ferrero’s analysis of legitimacy. The nineteenth century is an example of the wavering between the new theories of legitimacy, the democratic and the elective principles. Men simply did not learn to accept restraint in relation to those they hated. They did not love political parties, the freedom of elections, the right of the opposition to speak in the press and on the floor of parliament; withal they did not love the parliamentary system of majority control which had emerged in England and which was being “borrowed” in Western Europe. Where the parliamentary system could be combined with monarchy–the acceptance of kings who sometimes reigned but did not govern–the parliamentary system seemed to take root. Democracy and monarchy worked well together, though the principle of legitimacy was not primarily hereditary, aristocratic, or monarchic. Even the aristocracy and the monarchy were grounded in the system of elective government. Where parliamentary legitimacy did not work, the seedlings of revolution and totalitarian system began to grow; the newer systems were only quasi-legitimate at best.
The corruption of the democratic legitimacy has often been recounted. Friedrich Meinecke, among others, observed the growing unscrupulousness of the politicians, their Catalinian natures, their rascality, their stupidity, their brutal phantasy as directed against their political enemies, and their willingness to lie and to live with fraud. The campaign process itself had often been a corroding experience. But in the present time, “ideologies no longer sit so very securely at the stage where a culture has shadowed out into a civilization.” It is the age predicted by Jacob Burckhardt, the age of the “terrible simplifiers.”[35] The political party has tended to become a conspiracy of interest, or the coalition of interests that it has represented. As Montesquieu observed of political behavior under the Roman Republic, every public meeting became a conspiracy against the orderly existence of the government. In the practice of such party factionalism, every effort was made to bring about the servitude of the masses to the new forces which were seeking power. Votes could be stolen, but there can be a generalized corruption of the electoral system, including the failure to count the votes or to count them incorrectly.
The pistoleros and the preparation for the revolution marched together shot by shot. But where money would serve, violence was unnecessary, and propaganda often assumed the office of corrupting education and civic organization. The political party became, thus, a “political sect” with no sense of responsibility to the total society. It has bordered on revolution very often, and the use of violence has been justified by ideology. The Rome of Pius IX illustrates the process of violence used to corrupt the election, and the madness of political claims as henchmen were led shouting into the streets. There is a strange lunacy in much of the Italian Risorgimento patriotism in the nineteenth century, but much the same might be said of France and Spain. The principles of opposition, discussion, criticism, and the free press were honored in the breach. Finally in the mass movements of the twentieth century these ideas were either destroyed or forgotten.[36]
It is quite possible that the democratic principle must turn back to an earlier system of legitimacy, to the rejected children of politics of another time. In Europe the operation of democracy has been best served with a monarchical system as a symbol of the whole society. For many Europeans an elective legitimacy may be associated with the hereditary and aristocratic principles of monarchy and aristocracy. It is here, it would seem, that the balance of social forces can be praised and in measure preserved. With the monarchy of moderation, the king as a symbol stands above politics and is thus related to the standards of society.
Many Europeans say they are on the way to the creation of the social monarchy, the popular monarchy, or the monarchy of democratic regeneration. In the spirit of moderation there can be both opposition and criticism, and the political party ceases to be simply conspiracy and narrowed interest group politics. Moderation itself is based on a stringent criticism of the people as participants in politics. It recognizes that in elections there is a fictional, purely symbolic character, to the expression of the will of the people; that in the political activity of citizens there is much ignorance behind majority action; and there is political cronyism, caciquismo, and corruption. But with the moderation of imperfection, the wilder claims of the Don Quijotes of politics are held in abeyance. The hope flowers that social foundations for honest elections, intelligent criticism, and responsible opposition can create the democratic legitimacy of tomorrow. Even the most democratic may well say that the proper system of order in society cannot put its trust in the “heroic quality” of political factions.
If order seems to survive in the more “advanced societies,” the practice of extending the democratic procedures to underdeveloped peoples led to confusion. It has led to the dictatorial perversion of emerging institutions of parliamentary government and public administration. In many of the African countries, we have put responsibilities on a limited and partially trained ruling elite which it can hardly accept. Those who once were doctrinaire democrats in their advocacy of parliamentarism are slowly but inevitably formulating principles which will limit democracy without returning to the antidemocratic criticism which followed World War I. Some, like Seymour M. Lipset[37] believe that the conditions for the existence of democracy are remarkably limited, but still it is assumed that the world is moving toward the maturity we have in our society. It is like the proposition of Immanuel Kant that we must act, quite regardless of fact or experience, as if the world is attaining the rationality of perpetual peace. Or, quite recently, Gabriel Almond has proposed that we use the Whig solutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the underdeveloped peoples: We will assume they are moving toward democracy, but we will also restrict their political freedoms until they are ready to exercise them fruitfully. We are here in the presence of the modern myth, of republican legitimacy, much, indeed, as Sir Henry S. Maine in Ancient Law spoke of the fictions of the law which are leading toward the more progressive societies. The will of the people must be expressed for a legitimate society, but will it not be in the Whig theory a little like the popular legitimacy of the lex regia of Imperial Roman days?
Let us admit then that the most notable crisis today in democratic legitimacy is the underdeveloped country, where one may use the sophisticated fictions of Western Europe in the atmosphere of tribal disorder. With the failure or decline of parliamentarism in Europe, except in Great Britain (and Ireland), West Germany, Switzerland, the Commonwealth countries, the Scandinavian monarchies, and in the United States, the legitimacy which blossomed from the French Revolution has fallen on barren soil. Rather, legitimacy as it may be embodied in a totalitarian party, that is, a system which transvalues the will of the people, or in an army which stands for the formalities of a constitutional order, is frequent in our World.
There is, however, another set of fictions that may be used. New and sophisticated systems of social classification may be invented and applied to the new tribal states of the World. It is not necessary to use the ideological or traditional vocabulary of Western Europe, where democracy, fascist, racist, and totalitarianism have had more or less identifiable meanings. In the jargons of social science, as the late Richard Weaver in his The Ethics of Rhetoric spoke of them, we have a double standard. One standard, the new one, which attempts to describe the underdeveloped states, covers up the barbarism of the new systems, while the old one still denounces much milder behavior in Western Europe and North and South America. We have thus in our social sciences a double standard of legitimacy which correlates with a double standard of political morality.
We seem to be playing in our public utterances a kind of universal game of political pretendence. It is a political or Kantian symbol, and perhaps it is neither the truth of philosophy nor of experience. Or, one might say that, indeed, the meaning of democratic legitimacy is changing rapidly in the light of nationalistic insurgency which has accompanied the end of the colonialism of the recent past. It is our mythology against other formulae of alternative systems of legitimacy. These are systems which are being created as alternatives to the liberalism of the nineteenth century.
VI
Much of the crisis of regimes which followed World War I was set in the mold alternative to the parliamentary, capitalistic and democratic systems. The revolutions and near revolutions of defeated and victor led the way. First, there was the rise of the Marxian-Communist system, in which a totalitarian and ruthless regime managed to survive in Russia. With the apparent failure of the Communist drive in Europe, the new mass movements got under way as a propaganda remedy for the problems that the democratic state did not succeed in solving. Fascism and Communism have stood unalterably opposed to the parliamentary spirit of national life. The Revolt of the Masses has taken the form of international socialism, and nationalistic revolts against the liberal system. One wonders what might have happened if the Second Republic in Spain had proved moderate in its leadership and respectful of the national religious and educational tradition. A liberal polity in Spain could have combined all moderate elements in order to create a regime of freedom. However, as Gregorio Marañón argued, the liberals always support those farther to the left, and thus they are destroyed by their own revolutionary children. They scorned the right in Spain and did nothing to resist the advance of the Communists. Any leftist seemed always preferable to any rightist.[38]
The profound study of the revolution is always in order in a troubled age. If we turn from the principle of hereditary monarchy, ancient estates of the kingdom, modern parliaments, or the system of democratic legitimacy which must include the rightful opposition and free and uncorrupted elections, where shall we go for legitimacy? The majority must be real, said Ferrero, and there must be fair play for the minority.[39]
Numberless intellectuals have followed the course of Marañón. It has meant turning away from the old movement to hope for something in the leadership of the mass governments under a new governing minority or elite. As the liberal program (which seems to have very little exclusively its own) is consumed by the extreme left, nothing remains save disillusionment. The turn away from the revolution has occurred because it was perceived that the modern revolution destroys both local autonomy and the traditional social hierarchies of groups, functions, and regions. The intellectual who became a Communist, and then a fascist of some sort in one of the many nationalist movements, is incomprehensible to American intellectuals who have suffered only the minor disorders of the prevailing democracies. But such incomprehension is clearly mutual.
The alternative systems were defeated in World War II, except for Communism which gained enormously throughout the world, including Asia and Africa. Still, the ideology of the alternative, or antidemocratic, systems has not been forgotten. Should the failure or disintegration of European parliamentary life continue, or should further victories be gained by the Communists, the appositeness of the alternative forms might again be more clear. What seems common in all the proposals for a legitimate society from Socialism-Communism through a multitude of new forms, is the criticism of parliaments and political parties. According to Donoso Cortés, the parliamentarism of the 19th century had its origin in the spirit of the revolution, and the continental system arose neither from the medieval system, nor from the model in Great Britain. The parliamentarism which the liberals and socialists wanted demanded unlimited power and it has often had little love for the liberty of those who might be part of the opposition.[40] People like Donoso turned to the Church and to the military for the effective and valid expression of authority, obedience, and charity as the basis of civil society.
Critics of liberalism began in the nineteenth century to return to the older theory of natural groupings or corporations in society. The modern revolution sought to destroy the ancient hierarchies of group life, which began with the family as the primary groundwork of legitimate government. When the family was undercut, some have said flatly that legitimacy was lost.[41] Against the theory of natural groupings in society, one may consider the radical and revolutionary individualism that extends from Jean Jacques Rousseau to the Supreme Court’s decision in Baker v. Carr and subsequent decisions. The critic of liberal, socialist, or parliamentary, individualistic legitimacy will turn to the orthodoxy of the natural group, the natural corporation and the region, asserting the rights of groups and regions to be recognized in the structure of society. But, in nineteenth-century thought of a traditionalist nature, there is also the defense of the monarchy as the symbol of unity in society, as a governing or moderating force amid social pressures. For republicans, as Americans are, the devotion to monarchy in Western Europe today is beyond our understanding, except for the monarchy in Britain. Moderate liberals in Europe have tended to be monarchists–at times–but they have also desired to reject a group, estates, and corporative foundation of society, which is predicated on the religious and economic protection of the family. One must say, indeed, that Americans have almost no understanding at all of the theory of monarchical and familial society. The group and interest structure of society has been recognized in Catholic thought as in the Quadragesimo Anno encyclical of 1931, though in Europe the same idea was expressed in the medieval notion of the corporation, or universitas. [42] One of the deeper forces for the traditionalist rejection of the parliament and the parties has been clearly the violence of the programs of “democratic” and “liberal” parties.[43] The defenders of the natural hierarchies to be found in any traditional and orderly society stand opposed to the liberal demands which would seek to absorb all such groups into the structure of the state or the government.
VII
Every political society seems to have moments when the legitimacy of its political order becomes doubtful. There seems to be a number of such periods in the history of the United States, when owing to public disorder there has been clearly an approach of semi-legitimacy. And semi-legitimacy suggests the emergence of constitutional crisis. Ferrero has argued that much of government in Europe in the 19th century after the revolutions was government by quasi-legitimacy, especially in Italy under its faltering parliamentary order. Crisis was often the agenda of the day. In America with the increasing conflict between races and numerous other social conflicts, it might seem that a constitutional crisis is possible. If disorder and violence become more prominent there is no possibility of the rational discussion of political issues and there is also an increasing resort to force, ultimately to the army as the carrier of a wavering principle of legitimate order. It was Edmund Burke who said to the French: “Everything depends upon the army in such a government as yours; for you have industriously destroyed all the opinions, and prejudices, and, as far as in you lay, all the instincts which support government.”[44]
Oakeshott has seen the crisis in the personality manqué of the mass-man of contemporary days, the man who is incapable of doing what is necessary for the maintenance of representative government, as John Stuart Mill once suggested as a necessity of orderly government.[45] It means the breakdown of the three elements of order mentioned by Barth–consensus, sanction, and authority. There is conflict between law-enforcing agencies; conflict between races, cultural, and religious groups; respect for the Constitution seems to disappear and it becomes but a weakened symbol of evolution and growth; corruption in politics is accepted in stride, and then it is covered up to protect those in high places; power is gained by lies and the defrauding of voters; and there is attack on moral tradition by the emancipated. Though the symbol of elections remains, the exercise of sovereignty tends more and more to be simply recognized or accepted rather than created by election. In many historic situations, thus, sovereignty has tended to become fixed or immovable, and elections become simply extraordinary and subsidiary devices.
In America we have insisted that consensus is the pre-condition of democratic action. Before the Civil War the breakdown of consensus was a mark of approaching political storm. Legitimacy was descending into semi-legitimacy, and finally into what we might call prelegitimacy. Alternative creeds are offered for consensus–race, nationalism, tradition in culture or religion–but there is seldom any good substitute for historical experience.
The profound hope for legitimacy in America has been universal suffrage and honesty in the political process. We have assumed consensus is compatible with opposition and political discussion. We have believed the suppression of opposition as an organ of popular sovereignty would suppress the sovereignty of the people. There must be political fair play, and then the majority will be real, instead of a parliament pretending that it is not composed of irreconcilable minorities. It has been argued that the people do not really want to be sovereign, and when possible they have, like Caesar, refused the crown. In effect, one might argue that there was more desire for universal suffrage in America than in most other countries, but still, it was the leaders, the “political aristocrats,” who taught the people this; and thus they thrust universal suffrage on the masses.
In the traditional representative orders of the continent, the estates were composed of cities (the bourgeoisie), the clergy, and the nobility. In the shambles of the French Revolution, traditional representative government was destroyed violently and with brutality, though in England the old and the revolutionary were blended together. In America, we had the representation of regions in both Congress and the state legislatures, and group interests brought the functional forces of society into the representative order. The doctrinaire position of Baker v. Carr and other cases suggests the final culmination of the individualism of the French Revolution, more, indeed, than existed in the individualism of rights characteristic of American political life in the eighteenth century. A student of the history of legitimacy might suggest that this was one of the more profound reasons for the debacles of parliamentarism on the continent. England preserved a traditional order and stood at bay the friends of the French Revolution. Even the extension of the suffrage in the nineteenth century was carried on with the traditional formalities of British parliamentary order. Baker v. Carr overthrew a legislative tradition that began with the representation of the New England town in the seventeenth century. It may be long before our legislatures have arrived at the radical, Rousseauistic individualism that is implicit in such a decision. We must now ignore the natural groupings of society in so far as possible–though gerrymandering seems not to be inconsistent with the decision– and such social hierarchy as we were developing in relation to politics must now struggle on without the support of the state. Social forces will either not let such a legislative or parliamentary order work, or the new order will itself become some kind of a formality. There may be the emergence of tension in society in which Giant Ideology will more and more lash the ship of state. And this is nothing in the end but the revolutionary diet of the unwelcome public orthodoxy.[46] For some, we approach the tragic alternative which has occurred so often: legitimacy or revolution.
Notes
[1] Authority has been defined as an accepted capacity for reasoned elaboration of judgment in a specific situation. It must be distinguished from coercive power because it is consensual power. Authority in effect tends to equal legitimacy. See Carl J. Friedrich and Morton Horowitz, “Some Thoughts on the Relation of Political Theory to Anthropology,” American Political Science Review, LXII (January, 1968), pp. 536-545.
[2] The Ruin of the Ancient Civilization and the Triumph of Christianity, trans. Hon. Lady Whitehead (1921), pp. 6, passim. Whether one agrees with the historian or not, this volume is one of the best on the issue of legitimacy.
[3] See a notable article by Nathaniel Weyl, “Aristocide as a Force in History,” The Intercollegiate Review, III (May-June 1967), pp. 237-245, in which the author argues that one cause of the decay of the Roman aristocracy was the dysgenic use of lead vessels, especially used to heat wine in the colder weather. Lead poisoning is a cause of sterility. There was a decay of every aspect of Roman civilization except technology, and technology was the prerogative of the slave and artisan classes. Weyl also urged that as creative minds gathered in the cities the destruction of the cities, as by the Mongols, was a profound force for social decay.[4] Jaspers, Philosophy and the World, Selected Essays, trans. E. B. Ashton (1963), pp. 72; and Ferrero, op. cit., p. 187.
[5] Lorenz von Stein, The History of the Social Movement in France, 1789-1850, intro., edit., and trans. Kaethe Mengelberg (1965), pp. 324, passim.[6] Obras completas (1946), II, p. 210.
[7] Cf. Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (1964). In this sense, any of the standard principles of legitimacy may be a symbol of the acceptance of order.
[8] Guglielmo Ferrero, The Principles of Power; The Great Political Crises of History, trans. T. R. Jaeckel (1942), pp. 21, 277, 138; The Two French Revolutions, trans. S. J. Hurwitz (1968). See also David Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (1965), pp. 278-310, for an analysis based on current ideas in political science method.
[9] See Angel López-Amo, El poder político y la libertad (La monarqúia de la reforma social) (Segunda edición, 1957), pp. 104.
[10] Hans Barth, The Idea of Order (1960), pp. 190-191.
[11] See Carl Schmitt, Politiche Romantik (Zweite Auflage, 1925), p. 38; Eugenio Vegas Latapié, Romanticismo y democracia (1938), p. 41.
[12] Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (1953), p. 119; “What is Political Philosophy,” Journal of Politics, 19 (August, 1957), pp. 343 ff. On Hippodamus “who was the first person who made inquiries about the best form of government,” see Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1932), II.v.1; 1267b (p. 121).
[13] Xenophon, Memorabilia, trans. E. C. Marchant (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1923), III.v.14 (p. 197).
[14] Ibid., III.ix.10 (p. 229) .
[15] Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Vol. III: and Plato and Aristotle (1954), pp. 300 and 303.
[16] For a different perspective, see Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (rev. ed., 1950), passim.
[17] See Glenn Morrow, ed. and trans., Plato’s Epistles (1962), pp. 49, and 163-164.
[18] Laws, 690 A-D. (Editors’ Note: Wilson is referring to the Loeb edition of the Laws translated by R. G. Bury [Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library 1923], pp. 210-215).
[19] See Léo Moulin “Les Origines religieuses des techniques électorales et déliberationes modernes,” Revue Internationale d’Histoire Politique et Constitutionnelle, (N.S. No. 10, Avril-Juin 1953), pp. 106-148; “Une forme originale des gouvernement des hommes: Le gouvernement des communautés religieuses,” Revue Internationale de Droit Comparé (Anée 7, No. 4, Octobre-Décembre 1955), pp. 473-771. [20] Ferrero, op. cit., p. 221.[21] Jaime Balmes, Obras completas, Vol. IV: El protestantismo Comparado con el catolicismo (Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1949), passim.
[22] Balmes, op. cit., pp. 718-20, cites St. Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio, Bk. I, Ch. VI. This is a frequently cited passage from St. Augustine.[23] When James II in England tried to effect toleration, it produced disorder, and finally revolution. The Whigs did a smear job on James which has lasted into the present age. See Richard E. Boyer “English Declaration of Indulgence of 1687 and 1688,” Catholic Historical Review, L (October, 1964), pp. 332-371.
[24] See Francois Masai, Pléthon et le Platonisme de Mistra (1956), pp. 80, in which Georgius Germistus proposed in one of his fifteenth-century memoirs that there should be a virtuous prince who is effective. Masai notes that this is the modern state.
The “divine monarchies” of the past might be cited for their claims to legitimacy. In China, Japan, and in Islam, the divine law was asserted to be the basis of the state. Today, the kings of Ethiopia claim to be in the Solomonic-Judean succession. There has been a transfer of religious mission from Rome to Ethiopia because of the corruption of Rome. The Ethiopian Emperor is regarded as a successor of Constantine, as well as the anointed king in the Jewish tradition.
[25] See Modern Age, 9 (Fall 1964-65), for Klaus Epstein’s review of recent literature dealing with Pius XII and the Church in Germany under the Nazis.[26] See Friedrich Gentz, The French and American Revolutions Compared, trans. John Quincy Adams (1955). Adams and Gentz held that the two revolutions were radically different.
[27] See, for example, Enrique Gil Robles, Tratado de derecho político Según los principios de la filosofía y el derecho cristianos (Third ed., 1961-1963), Vol. II, Ch.VI, pp.336-355. It is characteristic of our day, however, to seek the reconciliation of the Christian principles of legitimacy and legality of the French and continental liberals. Such a view is characteristic of the Popular Republican Movement, antecedent to the election of Charles de Gaulle.
[28] See Ernest Barker’s introduction to his translation of Otto Von Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society 1500-1800 (1934, 1957), pp. xxi.
[29] See Introduction to The Theodosian Code and Novels and the Sirmondian Constitution, trans. Clyde Pharr (1952).
[30] See Charles N. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Civilization (1925), p. 493. He cites Georges Sorel, the revolutionary syndicalist, Réflexions sur la violence: The army is the clearest manifestation of the foundation of the state.
[31]See Manuel García Morente, Ideas para una filosofía de la historia de España (1957), passim; and Jorge Vigón, Hay un estilo militar de vida (1953).
[32] Some have gone so far as to say that all of the governments of Hispanic America are so closely related to the military that the military is actually the foundation of the governments, no matter what the trappings and the formalities may be. At times such a situation is praised and defended as a civic virtue, as in Morocco in 1964 on the eighth anniversary of the creation of the armed forces. It was stressed for publicity that the army had an unbreakable loyalty to Hassan II. Contemporary ideologists have criticized the West German army because it has failed to be a democratic organization and a democratic social force. The Bundeswehr had not progressed ideologically toward democracy, it is said; but one might ask when, if ever, has such been the case. The army may be a school for virtue, but it is hardly a preparation for the traditional contests between parliamentary factions.
[33] Some Latin Americans have asked American leaders (especially after our armed intervention in the Dominican Republic) why Americans are so unwilling to accept military governments? If the United States intervenes, is it not a military government? Is one army different from another?
[34] See Philippe Sénart, “Royer-Collard,” La Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 Juin 1963, p. 568.
[35] See Meinecke, The German Catastrophe, trans. Sidney B. Fay (1950), pp. 92, passim.
[36] See Willmoore Kendall, “Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side, A Review,” Stanford Law Review, 16 (May, 1964), pp. 755-767. Kendall is reviewing a book by Leonard Levy by the same title, published in 1963. Jefferson’s tactics against the Federalist illustrates the use of the traditional common law to suppress the criticism of his political party. The history of modern parliaments has shown that they may often by used to foster the revolution. The revolutionary conspiracy may work within parliament as well as without. Parliament may be caught in a whiplash of pressures which will amplify the general political distrust of the parliamentary leader. While the revolutionary party has obviously sought to use parliament to enact laws of various sorts, including reforms, which would aid in destroying the bourgeoisie, the contemporary Communist conspiracy has followed the tactics of its ancestors, the earlier socialist movements. One of the most notable of documents explaining such tactics is Jan Kozak, And Not A Shot Is Fired; The Communist Strategy for Subverting a Representative Government (The Long House, New Canaan, Conn., 1962). This document was originally written in Czech, and it was called “How Parliament Can Play a Revolutionary Part in the Transition to Socialism, and the Role of the Popular Masses.” It was apparently presented to the Communist Party’s political University in Prague in 1957, and it was smuggled out and published in English in London in 1961. Kozak made it clear that his purpose was to show how parliament may be changed from an organ of bourgeois democracy into “an organ of power for the democracy of the working people, into a direct instrument of power for the peaceful development of the socialist revolution.” Parliament may thus become an instrument of the revolutionary democratic will of the people and an instrument for the development of the socialist revolution.
[37] Seymour M. Lipset, Political Man (1960); see also his “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy,” American Political Science Review, LIII (March 1959), pp. 69-105.
[38] Marañón’s essay Liberalism and Communism in Spain was first published in the Revue de Paris, December 15, 1937. It was republished in Argentina, and has been republished in Spain in Punta Europa. It was published in book form in Paris and Madrid, in 1961, and the first American edition appeared in 1964. It is one of the most notable of the classics of the Spanish Civil War. See The Liberal in the Looking-Glass (The Long House, Inc., 1964), with an essay on “Background” by Edwin F. Klotz.
[40] Donoso Cortés, Obras completas, (1946), II, pp. 644, and pp. 313-314.
[41] Alvaro d’Ors, Forma de gobierno y legitimidad familiar (1960), pp. 39-41.
[42] In a later papal statement the suggestion of a corporate order in the reconstruction of the social order was dropped. See Garry Wills, Politics and Catholic Freedom (1964), pp. 174; see also n.17, p.216.
[43] Left-liberal parties in the nineteenth century tended to demand the destruction of the Church and religious education, but they also wanted to destroy the ancient corporations which controlled unreasonably at times the movement of economic goods. The free flow of food into cities was one of the liberal demands, and it is here, indeed, that we get one of the sources of the liberal principle of laissez-faire. In Spain, many of General Franco’s actual supporters do not think he has a moral right to rule. Franco has tried to combine democratic legitimacy (the plebiscites in 1947 and 1966) with monarchic and aristocratic principles from the past. The problem of the “restoration” in Spain would be comparatively simple if there had been no Carlist issue, and if there were no strength in Carlist feeling today in Spain. Supporters of “the Movement,” for example, the present formalistic Falangist Movement, have often urged that out of the Civil War a constitutional consensus has emerged, which is now embodied in the statements of principle re-adopted periodically by “the Movement.”
[44] Reflections on the Revolution in France (Everyman Edition), p. 217.
[45] See Michael Oakeshott, “The Masses in Representative Government,” in Albert Hunold, ed., Freedom and Serfdom (1961), pp. 151ff.
[46] See Willmoore Kendall and F. D. Wilhelmsen “Cicerón et la Politique d’Orthodoxie publique,” La Table Ronde, No. 159 (Mars 1961), pp.70-100.
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