War & Peace Quote by Ludwig von Mises

Mises is smuggling a moral thesis into what looks like a dry origin story. By tying society to “the works of peace,” he’s not praising niceness; he’s arguing that cooperation is the productive state of humanity, and that conflict is the expensive exception. The line is doing rhetorical jiu-jitsu against the romantic myth that nations are forged primarily by war, conquest, or heroic violence. In his framing, real civilization isn’t built on the battlefield; it’s built in the workshop, the marketplace, the family, the contract.

The subtext is unmistakably liberal in the classical sense: peace isn’t merely the absence of shooting, it’s the enabling condition for division of labor, trade, and the compounding gains of specialization. “Peacemaking” here means building institutions and habits that lower the returns to coercion and raise the returns to exchange. It’s a rebuke to political movements that treat force as a creative instrument, whether militarist nationalism or revolutionary utopianism. If you need violence to reorder society, you’re admitting you can’t persuade, bargain, or coordinate; you’re substituting domination for consent.

Context matters: Mises wrote through the collapse of empires, the rise of totalitarian regimes, and world war. For him, “peace” isn’t sentimental; it’s policy. It’s the hard prerequisite for prosperity and pluralism, a claim aimed as much at economists as at statesmen: you can’t model “society” as a neutral machine while ignoring the fragile, continuous work of keeping people from settling disputes with force.