The comparison between elective monarchy and libertarianism looks artificial until you notice that Hans-Hermann Hoppe spent the central pages of Democracy: The God That Failed (2001) arguing exactly this comparison from the libertarian-anarchist side. Hoppe's argument is that hereditary monarchs have longer time horizons than democratic politicians, that monarchical authority therefore produces better long-run governance, and that elective monarchy (the Holy Roman Empire, Poland-Lithuania, the Papacy) is the historically interesting middle case worth taking seriously. Hoppe is heterodox even inside libertarianism. He is also the bridging figure between the contemporary libertarian tradition and the smaller online neoreactionary ecosystem around Curtis Yarvin's writing. The mainstream libertarian tradition rejects Hoppe's argument, but the conversation it opens is more serious than the standard libertarian dismissal allows.
TL;DR
- Elective Monarchy is the political form, older than hereditary monarchy, in which a designated electoral body (princes, nobility, cardinals, sultans) chooses a monarch under procedural rules that vary by jurisdiction but share the basic structure.
- Libertarianism is the Rothbard-Nozick-Friedman tradition that defends individual liberty as the foundational political value across all policy domains, with positions ranging from minarchist (Nozick's minimal state) to anarcho-capitalist (Rothbard).
- They share almost nothing analytically. They share even less in their constituency. The Hoppe-Yarvin online ecosystem is the unexpected contemporary bridge, treating elective monarchy as the historically interesting middle case between democracy and hereditary monarchy.
Side-by-side
| Dimension | Elective Monarchy | Libertarianism |
|---|---|---|
| Founding moment | Pre-Roman tribal kingship; canonical forms from the Golden Bull of 1356 forward | Rothbard's For a New Liberty (1973); Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) |
| Living examples | Papacy (since 1274), Malaysia, UAE, Cambodia, Andorra co-princes | Cato Institute, Mercatus Center, Reason magazine, Libertarian Party |
| Source of authority | Election by designated electoral body | Individual consent and voluntary exchange |
| Stance on hereditary inheritance | Rejected in principle (elective by definition) | Rejected in principle (no individual consent possible) |
| Stance on scope of state | Variable; the elected monarch can have wide or ceremonial authority depending on jurisdiction | Minimal (police, courts, defense) to nonexistent |
| Contemporary defenders | Hoppe, the smaller online neoreactionary ecosystem | Cato, Mercatus, Reason, the Libertarian Party |
Where they agree
The interesting overlap runs through the rejection of inherited hereditary authority specifically. Elective monarchy is, by definition, not hereditary. The whole point of the form is that the monarch is selected by a designated electoral body rather than inheriting position by birth. Libertarianism rejects hereditary monarchical authority on the principled ground that no individual can consent to be ruled by another by birth. The two traditions converge on the rejection of hereditary inheritance, though they diverge sharply on whether the alternative is elective monarchy (the historical tradition) or no monarchy at all (the orthodox libertarian position).
Both traditions also share a positive defense of constraint on rulers. The elective monarchical tradition has consistently used the election process to extract concessions from monarchs before they take office: the electoral capitulations (Wahlkapitulation) the Holy Roman prince-electors negotiated before each imperial election, the pacta conventa the Polish-Lithuanian szlachta required from each elected king, the conclave-imposed constraints on incoming popes. Libertarianism's whole framework is about constraining political authority. The historical elective-monarchical tradition produced institutional mechanisms for this constraint that the libertarian tradition has been less attentive to than it could be.
Skepticism of contemporary democratic mass politics is a third overlap, though one that mostly runs through the heterodox Hoppe-Yarvin wing rather than through mainstream libertarianism. Hoppe's argument is that democracy produces shorter time horizons, higher public-goods provision under shared ownership (and therefore higher resource depletion), and weaker constraint on ruler behaviour than elective monarchy under tight electoral bodies. The argument has been taken seriously inside the smaller paleo-libertarian and anarcho-feudalist online ecosystem but is rejected by mainstream libertarian writers.
Where they diverge
The first divergence is the basic question of authority. Elective monarchy treats unitary executive authority as a legitimate and useful political feature, with the elective procedure functioning to ensure that the office is filled by someone the electoral body considers competent. Libertarianism rejects unitary executive authority on principle. Even the minarchist wing limits the state to police, courts, and defense; the anarcho-capitalist wing rejects state authority entirely. The two traditions disagree at the foundation: elective monarchy says authority can be legitimate if properly selected and constrained; libertarianism says authority requires individual consent that hereditary or narrow-electoral selection cannot supply.
The second divergence is the scope of the electorate. The elective monarchical tradition operates with narrow electorates by design: the seven Holy Roman prince-electors, the Polish-Lithuanian szlachta (8-12% of the population), the College of Cardinals (currently around 135 voting members worldwide), the Conference of Rulers in Malaysia (nine hereditary sultans). The narrowness is treated as a feature: tight electoral bodies have closer information about the candidates and can constrain the elected monarch more effectively than mass democratic electorates can. Libertarianism is broadly skeptical of all narrow-electorate systems, treating the narrowness as evidence that the broader population's consent is being bypassed.
The third divergence runs through religious anchoring. The Papacy is the most institutionally significant continuing elective monarchy, and the Vatican City State is the surviving theocratic-political infrastructure of Western Christendom. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth operated under Catholic-cultural assumptions that gave the szlachta electoral body its coherent identity. The Holy Roman Empire was institutionally tied to the Papacy through the imperial coronation. Libertarianism is mostly indifferent to religious anchoring of political institutions, defending free exercise on libertarian grounds without the positive cultural commitment.
The fourth divergence is contemporary applicability. The elective monarchical tradition survives in working form in roughly four contemporary jurisdictions (the Vatican, Malaysia, the UAE, Cambodia) plus the Andorran co-princes by hereditary office and various smaller ceremonial cases. The contemporary applicability is therefore limited to specific institutional contexts where the tradition is already operating. Libertarianism is a broader policy program with applicability across all constitutional democratic states; it does not require pre-existing institutional infrastructure to be implementable.
Who tends to hold each view
Elective monarchy as a contemporary political identity is held primarily by populations of states currently operating under elective-monarchical political form (Vatican City State, Malaysia, UAE, Cambodia, Andorra), with some additional academic interest from constitutional historians and from the small online neoreactionary ecosystem. The voter base is therefore institutionally specific and demographically narrow. The contemporary defenders of the form as a political theory (Hoppe, Vernon Bogdanor in his work on the British monarchy, Norman Davies in his history of Poland-Lithuania, the smaller neoreactionary online ecosystem) work primarily in academic or marginal-online contexts rather than through partisan vehicles.
Libertarianism's institutional home is the network of think tanks founded in the post-war revival period: the Cato Institute, the Mercatus Center, Reason magazine, the Atlas Network, the Libertarian Party. The voter base is small but visible. Ron Paul's presidential campaigns (2008, 2012) and Gary Johnson's Libertarian Party runs (2012, 2016) gave the movement electoral expression. The contemporary tradition is politically homeless and intellectually fragmented after the 2022 LP internal split, with active electoral influence now mostly at the state-and-local level.
What the Votely quiz would say
If your answers favor unitary executive authority selected by a designated electoral body with tight constraint mechanisms (electoral capitulations, pacta conventa, conclave procedure), and if you accept that authority can be legitimate when properly selected and constrained, the quiz will tend toward Elective Monarchy or one of its adjacent traditions like Constitutional Monarchy or Autocratic Theocracy. If your answers favor individual liberty across all policy domains, minimal state scope, and rejection of inherited or narrow-electorate authority on principle, the quiz will tend toward Libertarianism, with neighbours in Classical Liberalism, Anarcho-Capitalism, and Conservative Libertarianism. The single answer that most distinguishes the two clusters is your reaction to the Hoppe argument that hereditary or narrow-electorate monarchical authority produces better long-run governance than mass democratic alternatives: a heterodox but defensible contemporary defense of monarchical institutions, or a libertarian-flavored revival of pre-modern political forms that the mainstream libertarian tradition rightly rejects.