War & Peace Quote by Ludwig Quidde

Security hawks love a conditional, and Quidde pins them to it like an exhibit label: peace, they insist, can only arrive through law; until law arrives, arms must stay; therefore disarmament can never begin. The sentence is built to mimic their logic and reveal its trapdoor. By stacking “so long as,” “until,” and “impossible,” Quidde shows how the argument manufactures permanent emergency. It doesn’t defend militaries so much as it defends the idea that militaries must always be defended.

The parenthetical “so argue the advocates of armaments” is doing quiet, surgical work. Quidde isn’t neutrally summarizing; he’s naming a lobby, a worldview, a reflex. The subtext is that “peace by law” is not being pursued as a project but invoked as an alibi: a lofty standard held up precisely because it won’t be met soon, if ever. When the prerequisite is perfect enforcement, the outcome is guaranteed stasis.

Context sharpens the edge. Quidde, a German liberal pacifist and prominent critic of militarism around the turn of the century and into the interwar years, watched European powers speak the language of order while stockpiling catastrophe. His line anticipates the tragic loop that haunted the period: insecurity fuels armament; armament signals threat; threat validates insecurity. By framing disarmament as “impossible” under prevailing assumptions, Quidde is less lamenting than indicting a political imagination that treats law as a distant utopia and force as the only practical present.