In The Democratic Leviathan Hans-Hermann Hoppe writes:
I have tried to find more information about this but haven’t been successful. Does he mean the ideological root or simply that the government that preluded these forms av socialism was democratic?
The development of modern democracy is much more convoluted than textbooks make it out to be. It seems to have started as a reaction against the “absolute monarchies” that were developing in the late Renaissance and early Enlightenment periods. Such “absolute monarchies” seem to have been marked by the monarchs adopting de facto legal positivism. Obviously the people didn’t like this, as it meant the monarchs were now running roughshod over their traditional rights and liberties. Democracy (i.e. popular election and representation) was thus seen as a way to check the legal positivism of the absolute monarchs. It wasn’t exactly articulated this way at the time, but that’s what it was.
Unfortunately, the supporters of democracy didn’t understand that it was legal positivism itself that was the real problem. Hence the democrats eventually took up the cause of legal positivism themselves. This state of affairs remains to this day.
Yes I know this theory and I agree. But my question was more on how to interpret that specific paragraph or were to find more information.