Politics & Power Quote by Ludwig Quidde

Quidde’s sentence does something quietly lethal: it reframes militarism as an all-devouring administrative habit, not a heroic posture. The key word is “sufficient.” He’s not trying to win a romantic argument about peace; he’s claiming the evidence is so obvious that he barely needs to argue at all. That rhetorical restraint is strategic, aimed at an audience accustomed to patriotic spectacle. Instead of debating glory or national destiny, he drags the conversation into ledgers, classrooms, and workplaces.

The subtext is a critique of what armies do even when they don’t fight. Armaments don’t just consume money; they commandeer a nation’s “economic, social, and intellectual resources.” That phrasing widens the indictment beyond the treasury. The cost is measured in diverted talent (engineers building weapons instead of bridges), warped priorities (schools and research yoked to strategic aims), and a social contract reshaped around obedience and threat. By placing “intellectual resources” alongside budgets and taxes, Quidde signals that militarization degrades a country’s capacity to think freely about itself. Weapons are not only material; they are ideological infrastructure.

Context matters: Quidde, a German liberal critic and later Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was writing in an era when European great powers treated armaments as both insurance and status symbol. His argument anticipates the logic of the arms race before World War I: nations can bankrupt their future while insisting they’re protecting it. The line lands because it denies militarism its favorite alibi - necessity - and recasts it as misallocation on a civilizational scale.