"Modern society, based as it is on the division of labor, can be preserved only under conditions of lasting peace"
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A society that slices work into ever finer specialties is also a society that makes itself fragile. Mises is staking out a hard-edged claim: modern prosperity isn’t just helped by peace; it is structurally dependent on it. The division of labor only pays off when exchange is reliable, contracts are credible, and people can plan beyond the next emergency. War doesn’t merely destroy bridges and factories; it forces economies to revert to cruder, more self-sufficient modes of survival where specialization becomes a liability.
The line carries a quiet polemic aimed at the romance of conflict and the nationalist fantasy of autarky. If your standard of living comes from countless strangers coordinating through markets, then treating foreign trade as a moral weakness or a strategic indulgence is suicidal. Peace isn’t a sentimental wish. It’s infrastructure. In Mises’s worldview, the market is an information system and a trust system; war is the great trust-breaker, the event that makes tomorrow unreadable and turns cooperation into suspicion.
Context matters: Mises lived through the collapse of empires, hyperinflation, fascism, and total war in Europe. He watched “emergency” politics expand state power, distort prices, and reallocate labor by decree. So the sentence is also a warning about what war invites domestically: rationing, controls, propaganda, and the normalization of coercion.
The brilliance of the phrasing is its inversion of the usual story. Peace isn’t the reward of modernity; modernity is the reward of peace.
The line carries a quiet polemic aimed at the romance of conflict and the nationalist fantasy of autarky. If your standard of living comes from countless strangers coordinating through markets, then treating foreign trade as a moral weakness or a strategic indulgence is suicidal. Peace isn’t a sentimental wish. It’s infrastructure. In Mises’s worldview, the market is an information system and a trust system; war is the great trust-breaker, the event that makes tomorrow unreadable and turns cooperation into suspicion.
Context matters: Mises lived through the collapse of empires, hyperinflation, fascism, and total war in Europe. He watched “emergency” politics expand state power, distort prices, and reallocate labor by decree. So the sentence is also a warning about what war invites domestically: rationing, controls, propaganda, and the normalization of coercion.
The brilliance of the phrasing is its inversion of the usual story. Peace isn’t the reward of modernity; modernity is the reward of peace.
Quote Details
| Topic | Peace |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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