"Human civilization is not something achieved against nature; it is rather the outcome of the working of the innate qualities of man"
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Mises flips a familiar story on its head: civilization isn’t a fragile barricade we build to keep “nature” out, it’s nature speaking through us. The line is doing ideological work. It rejects the Rousseau-ish romance of humans as noble until society corrupts them, and it also resists the Hobbesian framing where culture exists mainly to muzzle our animal impulses. For Mises, markets, language, law, and cooperation aren’t artificial add-ons; they’re expressions of what humans are already wired to do when left room to choose.
The subtext is a defense of liberal social order without conceding that it’s merely a moral preference. If civilization is an “outcome” of innate human qualities, then the institutions that channel voluntary exchange and peaceful coordination can be presented as aligned with human nature rather than imposed against it. That’s a pointed move in the 20th-century context: Mises is arguing against socialist planning and romantic anti-capitalism, both of which often treat markets as a dehumanizing deviation from some more “natural” state.
There’s also a strategic humility here. By rooting civilization in dispersed human capacities rather than elite design, Mises implies that no committee can outthink the accumulated intelligence embedded in everyday choices. The rhetoric is calm, almost clinical, but the ambition is sweeping: to make the case that freedom isn’t a utopian gamble. It’s the political posture most consistent with what humans already do when they’re allowed to act on their own knowledge, needs, and ingenuity.
The subtext is a defense of liberal social order without conceding that it’s merely a moral preference. If civilization is an “outcome” of innate human qualities, then the institutions that channel voluntary exchange and peaceful coordination can be presented as aligned with human nature rather than imposed against it. That’s a pointed move in the 20th-century context: Mises is arguing against socialist planning and romantic anti-capitalism, both of which often treat markets as a dehumanizing deviation from some more “natural” state.
There’s also a strategic humility here. By rooting civilization in dispersed human capacities rather than elite design, Mises implies that no committee can outthink the accumulated intelligence embedded in everyday choices. The rhetoric is calm, almost clinical, but the ambition is sweeping: to make the case that freedom isn’t a utopian gamble. It’s the political posture most consistent with what humans already do when they’re allowed to act on their own knowledge, needs, and ingenuity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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