Features February 2023
The continuing legacy of Otto von Habsburg
On the values & beliefs of the last archduke of Austro-Hungary.
Editors’ note: The following is an edited version of remarks delivered for a gala dinner of the Otto von Habsburg Foundation in Budapest, Hungary, on November 19, 2022.
There have been few conservative minds—or souls, for that matter—like that of Otto von Habsburg (1912–2011).
I first met Otto von Habsburg in 1965, on account of that least conservative of all human impulses: the arrogance of youth.
I was a twenty-three-year-old graduate student in Salzburg and the part-time deputy editor of a small journal nurturing conservative thought on American college campuses. I was too young and foolish to know how presumptuous it was for me to ask an archduke, one of the great men of the age, to write for my little magazine.
Being a great man, though, Dr. Habsburg forgave my...
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