Like most Mises.org readers, I’ve enjoyed continuing enlightenment from the changing quotations by Mises on the homepage and blog. I was struck by this one that just popped up among the 1,400: “Louis XIV was very frank and sincere when he said: I am the State. The modern etatist is modest. He says: I am the servant of the State; but, he implies, the State is God. You could revolt against a Bourbon king, and the French did it. This was, of course, a struggle of man against man. But you cannot revolt against the god State and against his humble handy man, the bureaucrat.” – Bureaucracy
This is a short form of Hoppe’s argument concerning the decline from monarchy to democracy, from the private state that you can overthrow and thus intimidate to the public state that is everywhere, entrenched, carries the illusion of self-government. Of course Mises himself remained a democrat because he so closely identified with the old liberal cause and knew the agenda of the monarchists concerning state control. Even so, Hoppe’s contribution represents a full elaboration on the point Mises makes above.
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This is indeed one of the most disturbing things about democracies. They don’t get overthrown by their own people because people tend to associate themselves with the state. The illusion of self-rule is a powerful idea that keeps the people in line under even the worst conditions. Rather than rising up and overthrowing the state like often happens under monarchy or dictatorship, people seek to change things they don’t like from within the system. The system is seldom questioned. It is instead assumed that all that is needed are different people to run it. At least under monarchy the people know who to blame when things go wrong. “Off with his head” is a much more effective solution to tyranny than the ballot box.
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Hoppe’s thesis on absolute monarchy is a complete contradiction to everything that Mises wrote about the state, and it is also an obvious absurdity. See
http://henrysturman.com/english/articles/hoppe.html
for a very intelligent critique.
That Henry Sturman essay is interesting but it largely agrees with Hoppe, clarifying that a parlimentary monarchy is better than an absolute monarchy, but still agrees that democracy is pretty bad. In general, he is arguing too abstractly. If you have a look at Hoppe’s original article, he begins with a detailed history of the pre-20th century monarchical age and contrasts it with the 20th century as the age of democracy–and then finds features of both arrangements, broadly considered, that lend themselves to restrictive government versus expansive government. (Truly I do wonder whether Hoppe’s critics are really reading him or just riffing on blogged summaries of his theories.)
Mr. Aaron Singleton:
I agreed with your post above. If i had a nickel for every time someone said “we” did this or that when the term they should have used is their “government” and rulers, i think i could retire.
I just skimmed the conclusion of Hoppe’s original article that Jeffrey cited above and i know will now have to read the entire thing. Here’s a great little excerpt from it:
“First, the idea of democracy and majority rule must be delegitimized. Ultimately, the course of history is determined by ideas, be they true or false. Just as kings could not exercise their rule unless a majority of public opinion accepted such rule as legitimate, so will democratic rulers not last without ideological support in public opinion.44 Likewise, the transition from monarchical to democratic rule must be explained as fundamentally nothing but a change in public opinion. In fact, until the end of WW I, the overwhelming majority of the public in Europe accepted monarchical rule as legitimate.45 Today, hardly anyone would do so. On the contrary, the idea of monarchical government is considered laughable. Consequently, a return to the ‘ancien regime’ must be regarded as impossible. The legitimacy of monarchical rule appears to have been irretrievably lost. Nor would such a return be a genuine solution. For monarchies, whatever their relative merits, do exploit and do contribute to present-orientedness as well. Rather, the idea of democratic republican rule must be rendered equally if not more laughable, not in the least by identifying it as the source of the ongoing process of de-civilization.”
I have read Hoppe’s article but there is a major problem. He implicitly assumes that a monarch will behave rationally. History proves him wrong: several monarchs were idiots who behaved in the opposite way to the one he suggests, often causing national disasters, such as the first world war itself (Wilhelm II of Germany, Nikolai II of Russia, or Franz Josef I of Austria-Hungary spring to mind).
A look at the historical records shows that in all European countries the sovereign’s domains followed the opposite trend to that outlined by Hoppe. For instance in the late 15th century Sir John Fortescue estimated that Edward IV received a fifth of his revenue from his own property. After a brief increase in 16th century thanks to Henry VIII’s plundering of the monasteries most royal properties were sold off to finance England’s war against France and Scotland. By the end of the reign of Edward VI, seven eighths were gone. Ditto for Sweden, Denmark, France, Prussia, etc (see Niall Ferguson’s “The Cash Nexus” and sources therein, p. 56-59).
By the eighteenth century most European monarchs were highly dependent on taxation. By the 1780′s the French crown was so dependent on its ‘anticipations’ of future tax revenues that when these stopped coming in 1788 the state defaulted again. The British crown was just as dependent on taxes, but unlike France it could rely on a much more efficient tax collecting bureaucracy.
Not surprisingly, this process led to taxpayers demanding participation in the political process. This in turn led to much higher political and economic stability in the century following Napoleon’s downfall. The problem however was that the process overshot and by 1914 there were many more voters than taxpayers.
I am optimistic, however. The present system cannot go on forever. Sooner or later taxpayers will rise against a system in which they have become an oppressed and exploited minority.
Bruno
PS Incidentally in 1914 there were four, not two, republics in Europe: France, Switzerland, Portugal, and San Marino.
Isn’t the chief superiority Monarchy of Democracy is you only need to take off one guy’s head? That seems to trump the parliamentary monarchy critique.
If only it were that simple…
if British and ausie rightists like privatising so much, why don’t they privatise it, by abolishing it
I meant privatise the monarchy
monarchy is a dreadful form of government
charlies:
“[A] dreadful form of government” is redundant.
If we must have government, the, uh, *least bad* is apt to be tiny-State monarchies, a la Monaco or Liechtenstein. By being tiny, the State is held back in its despotism by the knowledge that it’s easy for its populace to flee from it — often with many of their belongings in tow. By being monarchical, there is a sense of proprietorship of the whole country by the ruling class.
Unfortunately, geopolitics tends to work against tiny States. France tried to swallow up Monaco under de Gaulle, and only did so partially because of the rallying of Western popular opinion. (That Monaco’s monarch was married to a much-beloved Hollywood ex-movie star played no small part in this.) Liechtenstein survives because it’s been taken under the foreign policy wing of Switzerland, and because Liechtenstein has surrendered its tax haven policy to threatening Western demands. Small countries tend to grow so they can face off threats from their neighbors, only to become the kinds of large countries where despotism flourishes, whether of the democratic or monarchical variety.
Mr. R.P. McCosker,
I think the form of the governemnt is naught in conversation when the governemnt in question is small. Kings, City Councils, whatnot… all have much more potential to be overthrown or have citizens leave. And indeed I much rather would have to deal with the tyrannies of my town than of the nation as a whole.
I agree that small states have troubles when confronted with larger ones. Which is why I think the founders of America tried an experiment with a decentralization of power through a confederate sort of system. The republic as it was was intended to curb the power of the democratic mind… the success of that experiment…
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