A particular paragraph in the introduction to The Myth of National Defense credits the rise of 20th century dictatorship to democratic politics. It claims “monarchies only resemble dictatorships superficially”.
Checking up some meanings of dictatorship, just to be sure, it means a leadership without the basis of any supervening law, constitution, or political system or any other political factors acting in the state. It’s not the system which put the man there, but the man who puts the system there.
So if a man manages to become or remain a leader through an existing political system - he is technically not a dictator. We call Hitler a dictator, because he worked against the system to come and be in power, by combing executive and legislative powers, and having the parties in Germany dissolve. We call Mussolini a dictator because he dissolved constitutional restrictions.
I am arguing semantics here, but even though democratic nations represent a force of coercion in themselves, there is a genuine reason why traditional thinking hesitates to see them as comparable to dictatorships. Democratic nations force out of power anybody who does not tow the party line, and constantly keep restrictions and watch on the one in incumbent leadership, although it still implies concentration of power among a few people. The dictator, on the other hand, enjoys the leisure of not having restrictions of an existing system on him.
Hans Hoppe is an exceedingly smart and interesting man, but this sort of thing to criticize democracy by lumping it in with dictatorships, rather than addressing its problems in its own right, seems like the wrong way to approach the issue.
It seems to me that when Hoppe says “monarchy” he really imagines a “settled monarchy”.
Otherwise a monarchy can be an outgrowth of mass democracy just as dictatorship can. People power turned Rome from a republic into a monarchy, the same happened with the French Republic with Napoleon and Napoleon III. But those probably would not count with Hoppe.
I would say a monarchy is just a tyranny (in the Greek sense) which had succeeded in cementing itself. A tyrant has to be democratic to come to power, but once he has cemented his rule he can cease to be democratic and therefore morphs into a monarch.
You can observe the process even today in the case of the so called family dictatorships. (Albeit today it is much harder to pull this of because modern dictatorships are fiercely ideological, while old tyrannies were much more ad-hoc affairs.)
There is a major distinction. A monarchy is established out of an existing system of property owners, and the monarch is typically the biggest of them all. That means that for all purposes the monarch naturally owns the state, and has been given the privilege of being the monopoly judge. The fact that a royal family must first be extremely wealthy before being considered for the crown testifies to their moral and intellectual qualities.
A dictator, on the other hand, seized the state. He has no legal or natural ownership of the state. The fact that he can control it simply testifies to his ruthlessness. Democracy is much closer to dictatorship as the ruling politicians are usually the most ruthless and compromising. “The worst get on top” as Hayek said.
The mayor of New York City, Mike Bloomberg, is an interesting exception. He was selected by the outgoing mayor as his heir because of his personal achievements amongst the city’s property owners (there is no doubt that a man such as him would never have become mayor through the regular electoral process), and has kept himself in power against regular politicians only at enormous personal expense.
Even Napoleon, to be considered a full monarch, had to divorce his first wife and marry the daughter of the Habsburg Emperor of Austria. Napoleon III was kept in suspicion by the monarchists, and was elected on the Republican ticket for president before seizing power in a coup. His dictatorship always rested on brutality alone.
The currency of monarchies are titles, the currency of dictatorships ideologies. A monarchy serves for personal aggrandizment of a named induvidual, a dictatorship in theory serves for an advancement of an ideological cause. At the end of the day this is the only meaningful distinction. A dictatorship has a much better PR department. Good PR is generally a good thing, but not when married to the state. You do not want a state with a good PR department.
Despite that you can for every monarchy where the monarch`s power was not unlimited find in history two monarchies of the oriental type where the power was total, with the ruler not just the owner of the lands, but of its peoples, with his subjects his personal property and his word the highest law. And occassionaly with the monarch as god on earth and a deity to be worshipped.