A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.
—attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler
In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Tytler was far from the only philosopher skeptical of popular rule. Voltaire, Edmund Burke, and John Adams all warned, in their own ways, that handing power to the uninformed masses would replace reason with passion.
How times have changed. When political problems arise in today’s West, voters blame the party in power and demand it be voted out. Everyone agrees that modern democracy is the end‑all, be‑all. Power to the people!
Many are quick to offer strong opinions about how we should live together to maintain our democracy. Few ever step back and dare to question the underlying system.
After all, Western democracies have lasted longer than any attempt at voluntary self-government without a central enforcer. Case closed!
Or so we are told.
Two Hundred and Fifty Years
The longest-standing modern democracy turns 250 this year. On the one hand, that is an impressive achievement.
On the other hand, the chickens that philosophers like Tytler warned about are now coming home to roost:
Entitlements: Privileges such as healthcare, pensions, or transportation are treated as fundamental rights. These unfunded liabilities are a looming economic disaster in most Western nations.
Election promises: Politicians win elections with promises of subsidies, transfer payments, targeted relief, and handouts.
Debt: Government debt around the world is skyrocketing.
Yet we are told that Western democracy is the ultimate evolution in human governance. Monarchy was unfair. Dictatorship is cruel. And every historical example of a system without a strong central government collapsed in short order.
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
—made famous by Winston Churchill
The record of history, however, tells a different story.
The Forgotten River Strip
Perpetua et firma libertas—“eternal and steadfast freedom”—is inscribed above the entrance to the Church of Annunziata. It sums up Cospaia's motto.
This tiny, accidental microstate in Umbria in northern Italy sprang into existence when Pope Eugene IV and the Duke of Florence agreed to a land transfer and forgot to include a 500-meter strip in the border river.
The 250–300 locals seized the opportunity to declare independence. From 1440 on, there were no taxes, no tariffs, no formal laws, no military, no prisons, and no bureaucracy.
A council of elders and family heads made communal decisions and handled disputes. Order rested on social norms, mutual agreements, and family pressure.
Cospaia profited from its ability to grow and sell tobacco, a trade the pope had banned everywhere else. This peaceful, anarchic tobacco capital of Italy lasted until larger powers imposed formal rule with its annexation in 1826.
Bottom-Up Laws
If Cospaia shows how a small strip of land could thrive without a state, historic Ireland shows the same bottom‑up logic at work across an entire island.
It differed from Cospaia in that it had written laws. In the seventh century, the island’s oral traditions were codified in written form. These were customary laws, meaning they grew from tradition rather than being imposed by a legislature.
In contrast to modern legislation, Irish Brehon law was interpreted locally. Trained jurists called Brehons administered the law. Legal knowledge was not passed on through a centralized licensing system but through law schools, scholarly families, and clerical learning networks.
The laws did not depend on state power for enforcement; there were no prisons or police. Instead, restitution penalties—usually in the form of payment of goods or livestock—were enforced through community pressure.
Stigma, ostracism, and expulsion were powerful tools for encouraging good behavior. Being an outsider was simply not an option; it meant you would starve to death.
In the twelfth century, the English began invading Ireland. This marked the beginning of the decline of Brehon law’s influence. By the early seventeenth century, when courts rejected Brehon law, the system had been effectively erased.
After centuries as an oral tradition, the era of the written Brehon system endured for roughly a millennium because it was local and rooted in natural incentives that people accepted.
Eroding Freedom
The endurance of Cospaia and Irish Brehon law dwarfs that of modern democracies. Both flourished without central planners.
Decentralized, voluntary self-government, rooted in human incentives and community enforcement, produces free, thriving societies. Top-down, centrally controlled decision-making leads to present-orientation and entitlement.
Look around! Checks and balances are eroding, and politicians are expanding their power to control what information you may hear and which dangerous thoughts you must be protected from.
Historic free orders were not centrally designed but emerged from the bottom up. They codified ways of life people were already living, rather than schemes drawn up by central planners to engineer particular outcomes. Hence, they lasted for centuries to millennia.
Brehon law, Cospaia, and the Holy Roman Empire show how this decentralized order covered large parts of historic Europe. The Hanseatic League’s voluntary trade network across hundreds of cities and the Icelandic Commonwealth’s stateless era of Viking settlement are additional examples we will cover in a future article.
The End?
Democracy was never built to last. The time horizon of a politician rarely stretches beyond the next election. And why would it? Because politicians are morally superior and only want to achieve what’s best for us all in the long run?
Every election becomes an auction. Tytler saw it coming. Some analysts are starting to suggest the experiment of modern democracy might be coming to an end. Democracy advocates at Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), for example, warn of an “unraveling [of] the democratic era.”
The world has never before seen as many countries autocratizing at the same time as during the last few years of the “third wave of autocratization.”
But autocracy is not the only alternative. History shows that free farmers and merchants outlasted kings and princes.
Empires crash. Elections fail. Builders keep on building. Let us live by the motto perpetua et firma libertas.