As most of the world’s “liberal” democracies continue to embrace more ruinous censorship, war, crippling inflation, crushing debt, and rising crime, many who pine for a different type of political order understandably look to regime types other than the modern democratic state. In some cases, monarchy is offered as an alternative.
The idea has been embraced by a variety of groups including Catholic integralists, moral traditionalists, and classical conservatives of the variety of Burke and de Maistre. Each group has its own reasons for supporting monarchy as a regime type.
Some libertarians can be found among monarchists, as well. In these cases, those who support monarchy say that state power is likely to be more restrained under monarchy than it is under other regime types.
Is this true? The answer is: it depends. It depends on the type of monarchy we are talking about, since some monarchical regimes are notable for centralized and unrestrained state power, while other types of monarchy are characterized by extremely weak states and decentralized power.
For example, the absolutist monarchs—most famously the French King Louis XIV—were enthusiastic about consolidating state power, and protecting the monarch’s claim to total sovereignty. The European monarchies after the fifteenth century were largely notable for rapid growth in centralization and overall state power.
There is little to admire about these later European monarchs and their states from a libertarian perspective. The best that can be said about them is that they compare favorably to many modern states in terms of the amount of income and wealth they extracted from the taxpayers. That however, is often just due to the fact that the monarchies of that era lacked the “efficiency” of modern technological state administration fueled by a highly liquid cash economy. Those monarchs would have taxed more and regulated more if they had had the practical ability to do so. After all, many absolutists explicitly stated that they considered the king’s power to be unlimited.
Moreover, given that the monarchs of Europe failed utterly to prevent the rise of twentieth-century socialist regimes, it can hardly be said that absolutist monarchies provide a reliable backstop for the preservation of freedom. Indeed, monarchies after the sixteenth century generally paved the way for the strong states that eventually formed the administrative core of the socialist and kleptocratic states that came after.
But there were also forms of monarchy that were characterized by a very weak state—if a state can even be said to exist at all in those times and places. These were the monarchies of the Middle Ages in which the monarch was greatly restrained in his exercise of power by a highly decentralized political model and by numerous competing powers who prevented the king from exercising full sovereignty.
If libertarians are going to make pronouncements about the desirability of monarchy, it is important to make distinctions among different types of monarchy. .
Europe’s Medieval Monarchs and the Polycentric Political Order
If weak state institutions are desirable, then the medieval type of monarch is preferable. Medieval institutions, however, have suffered centuries of bad press, so to speak, because they are association with feudalism, and we all “know” that feudalism was a system of political repression. What most people think of when they hear “feudalism,” however, better describes the later system of absolutism. For example, students of history have all seen the “pyramid” of political power that supposedly represents feudalism. There is the king at the top, and then there is everyone below him who supposedly takes orders from the king. That, however, is not how feudalism worked, and medieval kings did not sit atop a regime and issue orders to meek and obedient underlings
So, how did medieval monarchies work and why do some libertarians say they were in many ways preferable to modern centralized states?
For one, European monarchs in the Middle Ages usually lacked anything we might call a bureaucratic state. There was no permanent government of civil servants or royal officials to carry out the edicts of the monarch in any consistent manner. Rather, “the state” as an identifiable organizational entity did not exist. As a result, the monarch’s ability to govern relied on his personal network of extended family and close allies to carry out his policies.
Contrary to modern misconceptions of feudalism as a static hierarchy, feudalism was, in fact, a system of extreme political decentralization and fluid power structures. The king was not “sovereign” in the sense that he enjoyed a monopoly on violence within his realm, nor was he necessarily the final arbiter of disputes and political contests among his subjects. Rather, the feudal monarch tended to be a primus inter pares in relation to other lords—or a “prince among equals,” to use Hendrik Spruyt’s phrase.1
Or, as described by historians Vladimir Shlapentokh and Joshua Woods, “In many cases ... the power of kings was only marginally greater than that of lower lords, the church, and various tribes and warrior clans.”
They continue:
“central authority in society is relatively weak and unable to fully regulate other power centers; a sort of pluralism of “the few,” to use Aristotle’s terminology. The model anticipates frequent conflicts and a low level of state-provided security for individuals and groups, though it does not suppose a complete absence of social order or stateless anarchy.2
This was, as Salter and Young describe it, a form of “hierarchical polycentricity” in which no monarch (i.e., a prince or lord or king) could rule by edict or expect automatic compliance from assumed subordinates.3 The feudal king could exercise sovereign and autocratic rule only within his own privately owned estates, and not within the lands of his vassals. Far from being powerless subjects, members of the nobility often exercised sovereign authority of their own, complete with the means to defend that sovereignty.
Rather, monarchs had to gain a sort of voluntary compliance from other elites within this polycentric order. Where compliance did not exist, it could not be easily forced. To coerce compliance required the use of military resources that were, from the king’s perspective very expensive. So, compliance was often bought instead:
With few resources at their disposal, kings of the early Middle Ages were forced to yield part of their power to local emissaries, and ultimately to make them landowners with the right to bequest their property to their descendants. This was the price they paid to establish a modicum of order in the kingdom’s territory. The central authority resorted to decentralizing power as a way to secure order in society and tap local resources.4
But even in cases where the king secured “friendship” from lords by handing out lands and titles, these friendships could evaporate if the nobles believed the king was not respecting the legal rights of his own noble vassals.5 Moreover, since much of this nobility were able to assert their own sovereignty through the use of the nobles’ own military resources, kings could not simply have their way with their subjects. On top of this, the monarch faced substantial institutional resistance from the Church which jealously guarded its own autonomy and control over its own properties. Monarchs often faced opposition from ecclesiastical authorities as much as the secular nobility.
Consequently, except for those lands where the king was the immediate landlord and owner, there was no clear or reliable direct transmission of the monarch’s will from the top down to lesser underlings within the kingdom:
“Although laws did exist and were, to some extent, respected by the people, many areas of life were unregulated or beyond the reach of the central authority.” Although a hierarchical relationship existed between lords and vassals, “power was not a pyramid; it was scattered” ... Societies of the Middle Ages were marked by “a dispersal of political authority amongst a hierarchy of persons who exercise in their own interest powers normally attributed to the state”...6
Within a kingdom the monarch therefore exercised two types of power. There were the monarch’s personal estates on which the monarch exercised autocratic power, limited only by Church law or the danger of uprisings by laborers. It was only in these places that a monarch exercised true centralized legal control. But outside the king’s personal domains, power was fragmented and limited.
In France during the Middle Ages, for example, these lands were the crown lands or the “royal domain,” and did not include all of the lands within the kingdom. During this period, vast areas of France were held as the personal possessions of other lords, many of whom might be rivals of the king. Indeed, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the ruling monarchs of France were not even the largest landowners in the kingdom, meaning the French kings were forced to deal with many other French nobles as functional near-equals in many cases.
In those areas where the king was the owner of the private property that was his estate, the king exercised personal rule over his lands and was personally responsible for the defense and maintenance of these lands. The king as owner had to maintain roads and other infrastructure such as mills. The king had to provide military defense for himself and his servants. The king was expected to act as judge and arbiter for legal cases that occurred within his personal domains. The right to feudal rule was, at least in theory, to be premised on the lord’s faithful execution of these contractual duties of customary law, owed to his own vassals and laborers.7
The fact that this sort of monarchy is sustained largely by personal ownership of private property is key. Since the monarch was personally responsible for his own privately owned lands, he was motivated to ensure that his lands were well maintained and defended. To engage in unnecessary war or immoderate exploitation of the population was to risk the impoverishment of his domains, which would endanger the owner’s position within the feudal order. Put another way, where a monarch exercised personal rule, he had “skin in the game” over the long term.
Within this system, monarchs could also expect fierce resistance from other private property owners who were themselves concerned about the viability and prosperity of their own private lands. In the feudal model of the Middle Ages, monarchs were expected to pay for their own acts of governance out of their own revenues from fees, dues, and other sources of income from the king’s private property. Taxation was considered a last resort, and other major landowners were not easy targets for taxation. Thus, a king who must largely self-finance his political agenda was less likely to throw away his own money on unnecessary wars or other boondoggles. Consequently, those over whom the king claimed lordship were quick to assert their own independence from royal demands in a variety of way. In this we find early notions of political freedom as we understand it today. Moreover, the idea was widespread among the nobility, the Church, and other “subjects” who were powerful enough to resist. This is why historian Alan Harding notes that “the word ‘liberty’ is everywhere in medieval charters and legal records ... in the great majority of cases it does refer to an essentially political freedom.”8
So, a monarch within a system of personal rule and polycentric political power will be constrained in his exercise of power, and the financial cost of the king’s missteps and abuses will be largely internalized within the king’s own personal estates. In this political milieu, it remains difficult for the monarch to simply impose new taxes and externalize the cost of bad governance.
Limited Monarchy Contrasted with Absolute Monarchy
Clearly, this type of monarchical governance stands in stark contrast to later absolutist models. By the late sixteenth century in France, for example, the king—in that case, Henry IV—finally managed to bring virtually all the land in France under the legal control of the royal domains. Yet, civil government by then no longer resembled the weak personal rule of the Middle Ages, and it could not be said that the royal domain was any longer the private property of the the king. By then, the monarchy had become an institutional corporation of a type we might call “public.” Under the monarchs of the early modern period, the monarch had become protectors and agents of something much larger we now call the state.
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were therefore a time of growing bureaucracy, standing armies, and taxation. Moreover, because the king now finally had a veritable army of civil servants at his disposal, enforcement of state regulations became far more consistent and widespread and punitive.
The ideology of absolutism also spread, and its in this later age in which the idea of the “divine right of kings” came to be used to defend ever greater autonomy and power for the monarch. As Murray Rothbard notes, the French Theorist Jean Bodin in the sixteenth century created a new idea of the state as something quite different from the polycentric medieval “state.” For Bodin, all political power within the kingdom—including the Church which was finally forced to become a junior partner to the secular monarch—was to “be subordinated to the power of the king.” Bodin’s thinking persisted well beyond his death. Rothbard continues:
Among the absolutist writers following Bodin, the 17th-century servitors of the absolute state, all hesitance or piety to the medieval legacy of strictly limited taxation was destined to disappear. State power, unlimited, was to be glorified.
So, if we are to consider the desirability of monarchy through a libertarian lens, it is important to make distinctions between greatly differing types of monarchy. Some monarchical systems have existed alongside weak states, decentralized power, and significant limitations on the ability to tax—and, accordingly—wage war. Other types of monarchy are founded upon a strong centralized state, and the promotion of the monarch himself as complete sovereign.
Some types of monarchy are better than others.
Image credit: Image of King Louis IX, public domain, via wikimedia.
- 1
Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 40.
- 2
Vladimir Shlapentokh and Joshua Woods, Feudal America: Elements of the Middle Ages in Contemporary Society (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2011), p. 17.
- 3
Alexander Salter and Andrew Young, The Medieval Constitution of Liberty (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2023), p. 115.
- 4
Shlapentokh and Woods, Feudal America, p. 13.
- 5
Matin Wolfe, “French Views on Wealth and Taxes from the Middle Ages to the Old Regime,” The Journal of Economic History 26,No. 4 (Dec. 1966), p. 467-8.
- 6
Vladimir Shlapentokh and Woods, Feudal America, p. 13
- 7
Jacob Viner, Religious Thought and Economic Society (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1978) p. 104-5.
- 8
Alan Harding, “Political Liberty in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 55, No. 3 (July 1980): 423.
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