Every now and again — I think this happens to everyone, or I hope it does — you read something that really makes you think. In one of my recent jurisprudence seminars, the work of Hans-Hermann Hoppe came up; he even visited Oxford and gave a lecture on his ideas. The most controversial of those is his view that democracy does not protect liberty. Ho-hum, you may be thinking — John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill spotted that one ages ago. The ‘tyranny of the temporary majority’ is a phrase for the ages.
Hoppe goes further, though. He thinks that democracy is likely antithetical to liberty, in part because the majority in a democracy is in the position to vote itself largesse from the treasury until the treasury is exhausted. Monarchs, he argues, treat nations as their property, to be handed on to heirs. Presidents and Prime Ministers, by contrast, are like renters… and prone to trash the place unless closely supervised. It’s an intriguing premise.
That’s not what struck me when first reading his work, though. This did:
If the United States had followed a strict non-interventionist foreign policy, it is likely that the intra-European conflict would have ended in late 1916 or early 1917 as the result of several peace initiatives, most notably by the Austrian Emperor Charles I. Moreover, the war would have been concluded with a mutually acceptable and face-saving compromise peace rather than the actual dictate. Consequently, Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia would have remained traditional monarchies instead of being turned into short-lived democratic republics. With a Russian Czar and a German and Austrian Kaiser in place, it would have been almost impossible for the Bolsheviks to seize power in Russia, and in reaction to a growing communist threat in Western Europe, for the Fascists and National Socialists to do the same in Italy and Germany.
Millions of victims of communism, national socialism, and World War II would have been saved. The extent of government interference with and control of the private economy in the United States and in Western Europe would never have reached the heights seen today. And rather than Central and Eastern Europe (and consequently half of the globe) falling into communist hands and for more than forty years being plundered, devastated, and forcibly insulated from Western markets, all of Europe (and the entire globe) would have remained integrated economically (as in the nineteenth century) in a world-wide system of division of labor and cooperation. World living standards would have grown immensely higher than they actually have.
As counterfactuals go, it’s a pretty neat one. Lovers of alternative history and science fiction — what say you?
More here.
24 Comments
I love it.
Serious counter-factuals about how the world would look without America in WW2 are also interesting. Though of course we’ll never know.
Kim Jong-Il’s father handed the country to him, and it’s just as likely as not that he will hand it to one of his sons. Saddam was supposedly grooming his psychotic children to take the reigns. Castro treats Cuba as his own property and it seems likely to remain in family hands. What exactly is the difference between a nominally communist* autocrat and monarchical autocrat?
*obviously first generation communist revolutionaries are slightly different with their quests to create utopia and all the purging that entails.
If the United States had followed a strict non-interventionist foreign policy, it is likely that the intra-European conflict would have ended in late 1916 or early 1917
I have my most severe doubts that this can be sustained.
The US intervened because Wall St had lent a lot of money to the Brits and Frogs to buy arms from US arms makers. If they’d lost the war the bankers would’ve lost their chump change. End of story.
I’m not sure what that has to do with democracy being antithetical to liberty, a proposition resoundingly disproved by historical evidence, these sort of realpolitik causes of war are pretty much standard for monarchies and oligarchies as well.
Monarchs, he argues, treat nations as their property, to be handed on to heirs.
Indeed and monarchs never abuse the treasury. They never spend ‘their’ money unwisely. They never act irresponsibly.
In those rare cases of a wise mnarch you get the best of all possible worlds. Trouble is monarchs are usually pretty average, ‘cept of course their egos and sense of entitlement.
A cursory look at the France of the High Middle Ages disproves any notion of sensible monarchical management. Or liberty. Except of course if you’re talking about aristos taking liberties with other people’s money, property, bodies and lives.
Anyone who wants a winge about taxes today should look into those levied during the 14th century. And the reasons why.
This has always struck me as excessively conspiratorial and not sustainable by recourse to the evidence. I think a certain Wilson as Prez had a great deal more to do with it.
Hoppe thinks monarchs are pretty average, too, but also that they have a vested interest in not wrecking the place completely over time. I don’t know that I agree with that, although it was an element in the ACM arguments against Australia becoming a Republic. Republics being so damn successful and all.
I guess if we’re to continue Hoppe’s analysis of democracies as renters and monarchs as owners, one could say that renters do not exercise as much care as some owners, but they tend to be regulated by the owners (the voters). Whereas outright owners of property answer to no one, and attitudes vary vastly – from the careful and proud owner who takes care of his or her property, to the owner who destroys his property. The same goes for monarchs.
I can think of plenty of monarchs who have had no problem with trashing their kingdom and depleting the treasury totally. Ultimately, the monarch isn’t the one who suffers if he or she does this – it’s the people underneath who pay the taxes and starve. So there’s no incentive to be wise with money. Unless, of course, there’s a civil war or a revolution (in which case, monarchs tend to end up a head shorter).
I’m thinking of a Monty Python sketch concerning Charles I here…
Tee hee, that’s exactly what was in my head when I wrote the comment…
That’s kind of my argument in favour of keeping an appointed House of Lords as the UK upper house rather than an elected body like the Australian Senate. I don’t see it as a particular threat as ‘lords’ (new and old) tend to be more conservative in their political thinking than the politicians of the lower house because their jobs aren’t on the line so they have more freedom to do what is right than what is electable. For those having the ‘inheritable’ privilege, many also can see the “good” as a multi-generational concept.
The benefit comes from having the balance I think. One house elected vs. one that’s not. In Australia, two elected houses work because the voter knows to provide this balance him/herself by voting one way in the lower and putting their opponents in the upper house.
In terms of monarchy vs democracy … well I don’t think either is better the the other. Both can go VERY wrong (‘mad’ King Ludwig bankrupting Bavaria comes to mind) what democracy does provide is a spread of risk. It’s also probably why the British style constitutional monarchy (monarch plus democracy) has worked so well. It’s not neat but it does work.
SL,
Personally, I think you need to look beyond the simplistic democratic / despotic question. A good king / dictator / General / whatever can beat a bad democratic government every time in most criteria. To use your Charles I example – the regime that replaced him was no better and turned just as despotic, even though (in some ways) an elected one.
Where the path to development or freedom is an easy one to work out then a despot can do it. Raising most of the world out of the mess left by WWII and the depression was easy – but the results from both democratic and despotic regimes was mixed. India (for example) did poorly yet Singapore (again, for example) did well.
To me, what it comes down to is the limitation and dispersal of government power – those countries with strong non- or quasi-government institutions tend to do well, those with poorly developed institutions tend to do poorly. Democracy, then, would only be a second order issue if one or the other tended to produce better institutions. Again, IMHO, democracy tends to do better, but this has an equally mixed record.
This has always struck me as excessively conspiratorial and not sustainable by recourse to the evidence. I think a certain Wilson as Prez had a great deal more to do with it.
Neither Wilson nor FDR had the power to get America into a war just because they thought it was a good idea. American military excursions have almost always been in furtherance of commercial interests.
I recommend Andrew Bacevich’s American Empire which mostly examines the immediate post- Cold War period but does so by referencing the Roosevelt I era to Wilson. Wilson was pretty much the first president to articulate notions we might associate with a Pax Americana but as Roosevelt had already said before him: America has always been expansionist.
One of the interesting things about Bacevich’s work is the startling resemblance between the political rhetoric of the late 19th/early 20th centuries and the Bush 1/Clinton era.
Neveretheless the notion that the United States entered the first World War because of economic expediency has been well furbished by serious scholarship. It’s more than a conspiracy theory.
I think you need to look beyond the simplistic democratic / despotic question. A good king / dictator / General / whatever can beat a bad democratic government every
That was Aristotle’s reasoning. A good monarchy is the best form of government. You have a brilliant individual, in power for decades, things can change for the much better.
However a bad monarch is the worst nightmare. You have a complete arsehole in charge for decades. The only way to change that is if said arsehole dies.
Now a great democratic government can’t be as good as a great monarchy because it won;t last that long and its powers are limited. But a bad democratic government is easily gotten rid of.
It’s why democracy is the least worst system.
This kind of debate is moot anyway. Short of a Great Catastrophe people aren’t going to simply give away their franchise. And in any event the notion that monarchy=freedom is absurd.
It’s based on a romanticization of the British monarchy from the point of view of the property owning classes. The liberalism of English monarchs is an anomaly. Everywhere else they were autocratic.
I don’t know that the English monarchs were so liberal anyway (at least, not the ones I knew). Only the decapitation of Charles I led to the abolition of the Star Chamber and any notion of habeas corpus.
Hoppe’s theory is bunk. But it is true that majoritanism gives apparently respectable cover to the erosion of liberty.
He’s obviously not read too much about WW1 if his theory is that the US intervention stopped a negotiated peace. Germany had a whole bunch of French and Belgian territory so any negotiated peace absent the US in fact assumes a French/Brit defeat.
Yes, and Polybius thought he showed how wrong Aristotle was, and that IN FACT, the really best form of government was the Roman Republic of the mid-2nd century BC. But that was before Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus were assassinated and the Pentagon, er generals took over. Sulla and all that….
L’eagle – Chuck 1 may have been a dud but Chuck 2 was a class act. That’s my idea of a King.
It’s good to be King.
Yes, and Polybius thought he showed how wrong Aristotle was, and that IN FACT, the really best form of government was the Roman Republic of the mid-2nd century BC
I haven’t read Polybius but I have read Machiavelli ‘s Discourses. In that work he improves on Aristotle by suggesting that the Roman system worked well because it combined aspects of all three systems of governance. As we do.
Trouble is the Romans got too rich, and their ethical base withered. Armies started directing their loyalty to their commanders and not the state, mercenaries started to do the fighting. The state became a vehicle for elites to enrich themselves, decadence set in, clowns, maniacs, tyrants and morons rose to the top and…
Um.
Mmmph. Sounds familiar. Can’t quite place my finger on it.
I was thinking about this. It seems to me that democracy might not last and that even if it does that some sort of global governance which will nt be democratic might be inevitable. So the question becomes how do you limit the State’s purview in that event?
Can you?
It was said of Charles II: “Give him a side of beef and a whore and he’ll be happy”.
In fact, he excelled at the “divide and conquer” strategy. His father had also tried this strategy, but with disastrous consequences. You can’t promise different things simultaneously to all sides in a civil war. They’ll find out eventually, and someone who has gotten used to bloodshed will decide it’s time for your blood to be shed.
LE,
His father did not have the intelligence (or the advisers) to carry that strategy off. Charles II at least had the wisdom to get good advice.
Charles I’s problem was that he seriously believed in the Divine Right of Kings. Who needs advice when you’ve got God on your side…? His father had had similar beliefs, but was enough of a canny Scotsman not to take himself too seriously.
“Give him a side of beef and a whore and he’ll be happy”.
I’m sorry L’eagle but you’ve provoked me into relaying this bit o’ bawdy dogg’rel, 17th century style:
Hard by Pall Mall
Lives a wench call her Nell
King Charles the 2nd, he kept her
She hath got a trick to handle his prick
But never lays a hand on his sceptre
All matters of State
From her soul she doth hate
And leave to the politic bitches
The whore’s in the right
For ’tis her delight
To be scratchin’ just where it itches
Ah Nell Gwynn the original cockney wit and rival of the pretentious and unpopular (because French and Catholic) Louise de Quérouailles. In Oxford, Gwynn’s coach was haulted by a mb who thought it was de Quérouailles’.
Gwynn leaned out and said “Be civil, good people, be civil! I am not she. I am the Protestant whore”.
She never objected to being called a whore and tried to stop her coachman getting into a fight with someone who’d called her thus. He said: Well you might not object to being called a whore but I object to being called a whore’s coachman.
The 17th century is a fine place to vist. (But you wouldn’t wanna live there).
Crazy times. Sure as hell glad I’m a 21st century gal (thus far, anyway).
Yeah thing is Nell Gwynn only ever had three partners. All called Charles. By the standards of the time (or ours) she was quite chaste.
She is worth reading about. She had one of the quickest minds and sharpest tongues of the court.
“Presidents and Prime Ministers, by contrast, are like renters… and prone to trash the place unless closely supervised”.
As a long time renter this line in the blog post struck me as very discriminatory.
One Trackback
[...] a debate about the economics of Nazi Germany. Speaking of world wars, SkepticLawyer looks at Hoppe’s hypothetical about how the world would have looked without America joining WW1. And more on peace & [...]