War & Peace Quote by Ludwig von Mises

Winning a war, Mises warns, can be the most comforting form of self-deception: it lets victors confuse a battlefield outcome with a political cure. The line is doing two things at once. On the surface it reads like sober postwar realism. Underneath, it’s a libertarian indictment of the story nations tell themselves to keep violence on retainer. If you only “defeat the aggressors,” you’ve treated the symptom (the current regime, the current army) while leaving the cause intact: the ideas that make conquest, planning, and national mobilization feel not just permissible but virtuous.

Mises’s target is ideology as an engine of legitimacy. Aggression rarely sells itself as naked theft; it arrives dressed as historical destiny, economic necessity, ethnic grievance, or “security.” By shifting the emphasis from enemies to ideas, he’s arguing that durable peace is a cultural and institutional project, not a punitive one. The subtext is pointed: postwar settlements that humiliate a defeated nation may actually fertilize the next conflict if the underlying doctrines of collectivism and militarized nationalism remain credible to ordinary people.

Context matters. Mises lived through the collapse of empires, the rise of fascism and communism, and two world wars; he watched modern states turn economic management into total social management, with war as the ultimate policy instrument. His economist’s move is to treat war not as an aberration but as an output of incentives and beliefs. Peace, then, isn’t secured by stronger borders alone, but by discrediting the moral vocabulary that makes aggression sound like order.