>>7582
Democracy may not be the easiest way to achieve a libertarian government (and by that I mean minarchist, night watchman state stuff) but it is the best way, maybe the only way to safeguard it.
While England may have been a monarchy, local-level decision making was carried out by representatives, and the law interpreted and enforced on the same level. As opposed to top-down law coming from the government, it came up from the people. The monarch was not above the law, and it went poorly for them whenever they ignored that, but that required armed resistance and the ability to oust an unpopular king. In most states that failed, and the king became the law - absolute monarchy became all the rage. England's one of the few countries where the opposite was true, and the king got his ass beaten every time he tried a power grab.
That is what makes democracy so necessary. Democracy is a market-like system for political leaders; while liberty may exist under a somewhat autocratic government, it is not well safeguarded and subject to the whims of the ruler/s. Democracy is a system that replaces the need for violence to remove a ruler from power (although it's pretty obvious that force will be used against those who violate the system, ensuring its survival), and necessarily checks their power as they must worry about election and re-election. The interests of their constituents are the only things that will get them elected, making them the best people to represent their locality because they will be required to be responsive to the electorate.
I'd like to add that, in my opinion, most European style parliamentary democracies are hardly healthy democracies, as parties are national in scope and party leadership decides the party's makeup and not the constituents. And of course, a democracy must also be bound by laws - the will of the majority is not above the law, just as the monarch's is not.
tl;dr: representative democracy is the best safeguard in a state for liberty because it transforms the political landscape into a stable (not prone to sudden outbreaks of violence or corruption) market-lite that its voters know will function as intended, and that if it doesn't it will be rectified the next round in the local primaries. Representative democracy or bust.