Legitimacy and Legality Part I: The Introduction | The War for Christendom
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. Especially in the Pragmatic Sanction, that Indivisible and Inseparable interdependency on each other which the Countries acknowledged and committed to, distinctly manifests itself, since the Countries were united amongst themselves through the indivisible, identical hereditary succession into a common dynasty and multi-national monarchy. Thus they proceeded through that line of equal inheritance for the head of the family and for the Crown of each country, from a mere personal union to the Real Union of the later empire of the House of Austria. A number of sovereignties so flowed together into a common power. Without violation of the sovereignty of each of the Countries and its historic crown, that Arch-House, i.e. the family, in the sovereignty of its own House, could in 1804 raise the entirety of the Hereditary Lands to the Imperial Rank.
This popped up on my twitter feed. I had no idea they even existed. But here they are! Makes me think of Filmer whom John Locke argued against in his First Treatise which hardly anybody ever reads anymore. Someday I would like to dig into that argument a little bit.