Category: Essay

There’s a funny story–possibly apocryphal–about how the fuel in nuclear reactors came to be called “piles.” The way I heard it, Enrico Fermi was showing off his new, experimental reactor to some of his benefactors, and they asked him what he called it.

Fermi, lacking a cool or new name to call it, said it was a “pile,” and the name stuck.

I get the feeling that the same thing is happening with people reading Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed.

In the book, Hoppe goes over the incentives that monarchs have, compared to democratically-elected political leaders, and concludes that monarchs have better incentives that are more forward-looking. Fair enough. I think his points are solid.

The problem is that this ignores one of the implications of monarchy, namely that most monarchs in history attained their “ownership” through conquest, which political theorists began to recognize as illegitimate only in the late seventeenth century.

This implication colors people’s perception of what monarchy is, whether we like it or not. Therefore, when we say “Hoppean Monarchy,” the average member of the public thinks of a guy with a crown who claims ownership of some territory by conquest, as well as powers such as taxation, conscription, etc. of people within that territory.

It’s true that in a Hoppean Monarchy, the monarch has gained his territory by purchasing it with wealth he earned by serving consumers. It’s true that he doesn’t have plenary power over the people living on his land. But that detail is easily missed or deliberately obscured by our disingenuous detractors.

So, I’m here advocating for a different term. I like Hoppe’s “private societies” way better than “Hoppean Monarchy,” but I’m open to other ideas.

What do you think? Am I barking up the wrong tree, or am I making sense?