Legitimacy
Where does the right to rule come from?
The source of political authority: transcendence, tradition, contract, consent or collective will.
Transcendent · Traditional ↔ Rational · ContractualIndividual consent ↔ Collective will
An atlas of political convictions
ORDVS
Beyond the Cartesian plane: six layers, thirteen dimensions, a genealogical tree of sixty lineages and a philosophical reading of what you truly believe.
Proem
The political compass measures where you stand. Not why.
The Political Compass and its derivatives remain the best starting point for comparing political positions. But their axes — economic, authority and sometimes cultural — are shallow and rarely independent. They blend dimensions that ought to be kept apart and leave out the deeper layers: the source of legitimacy, social ontology, epistemology, the preferred institutional scale.
Questions that force contemporary dichotomies and assume the state as the only arena produce low-resolution classifications. ORDVS was born to distinguish what one desires from the way one means to legitimise it — and to treat hybrid positions, meta-positions and internal tensions as information, not noise.
From plane to atlas
The compass
ORDVS
Two or three axes
Six layers, thirteen dimensions
Correlated axes
Dimensions treated as independent
Content and method fused
Content separated from method
The state as implicit arena
Scale, jurisdiction and exit in question
A fixed questionnaire
An adaptive tree with 60 outcomes
A point on a plane
Profile, tensions, meta-positions and scenarios
Architecture
Six layers, from premises to institutions
Each layer interrogates a distinct foundation of political conviction. Together they form a map no Cartesian plane can hold.
Social ontology
Who is the subject of politics?
The primary political subject — individual, family, community, nation, class — and the human nature it assumes.
Individual ↔ Organic communityConstrained ↔ Perfectible
Property & economy
What is desired, and how do we get there?
Separates the substantive preference (the desired arrangement) from its character (voluntary or imposed).
Private ↔ CommonSpontaneous order ↔ PlanningVoluntary ↔ Imposed
Culture & society
What morality sustains our common life?
The relation to tradition and progress, and the degree of moral pluralism the public order admits.
Tradition ↔ ProgressMoral plurality ↔ Moral unity
Institutions & scale
At what size, with how much power?
The preferred institutional scale — from local to universal — and the reach of coercive power.
Local ↔ CentralMinimal ↔ Broad
Political epistemology
How do we know what is just?
Where relevant knowledge resides and which criteria justify a political choice.
Dispersed · Tacit ↔ Technical · CentralisablePrinciples ↔ Consequences
Procedure
A questionnaire that listens
It begins with premises, branches wherever there is ambiguity and ends in a reading in plain language.
I
Premises
Thirty-one high-level questions — scales and choices of up to six options — on the foundations of authority, the subject and knowledge.
II
Genealogical tree
Your premises open the three nearest houses. Once you choose a door, each fork separates neighbouring traditions until one of sixty lineages.
III
Reading
A multidimensional profile with an interpretation of each layer, coherences, inconsistencies, kindred families, meta-positions and alternative scenarios.
The result
A portrait, not a point
At the end you receive your profile in thirteen rays, a coat of arms drawn from your convictions and a reading of each layer.
Coat of arms of a sample profile
Kindred families
Fusionism74%
Agrarianism74%
Burkean conservatism74%
Liberal conservatism72%
“Subsidiarist traditionalist of voluntary method” — a sample synthetic reading.
Gallery of flags
Sixty ideological families
From legitimism to anarcho-communism, from theocracy to panarchism: every tradition is placed on the same thirteen dimensions — and compared with you.
Legitimist monarchismOne king, one law, one faith.Social democracyA tamed market, full citizenship.Anarcho-capitalismProperty, contract, nothing more.TraditionalismOrder comes before us.Anarcho-syndicalismThe union is the seed of the future society.DistributismThree acres and a cow.Green politicsThink globally, act locally.Constitutional monarchismThe king reigns but does not rule.
Know thyself — in politics too.
About fifteen minutes. No sign-up. Your result stays with you.
Take the assessment