Category: Thought

“[T]here are men who look upon social revolution as a kind of fairyland.”

‘Nothing can serve as a substitute for an ideology that enhances human life by fostering social cooperation — least of all lies, whether they be called “tactics,” “diplomacy,” or “compromise.” If men will not, from a recognition of social necessity, voluntarily do what must be done if society is to be maintained and general well-being advanced, no one can lead them to the right path by any cunning stratagem or artifice.’

Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism, first published in German as Liberalismus, 1927, and in English as The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth, 1962.

“Political liberty, by submitting to all the citizens, without exception, the care and assessment of their most sacred interests, enlarges their spirit, ennobles their thoughts, and establishes among them a kind of intellectual equality that forms the glory and power of a people.”

Benjamin Constant The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns, 1819

The idea of defending, as integral parts of our Empire, countries 10,000 miles off, like Australia, which neither pay a shilling to our revenue . . . nor afford us any exclusive trade . . . is about as quixotic a specimen of national folly as was ever exhibited.

Richard Cobden, a note to Edward Ellice, 1856.

[C]ommerce inspires in men a vivid love of individual independence. Commerce supplies their needs, satisfies their desires, without the intervention of the authorities. This intervention is almost always — and I do not know why I say almost — this intervention is indeed always a trouble and an embarrassment. Every time collective power wishes to meddle with private speculations, it harasses the speculators. Every time governments pretend to do our own business, they do it more incompetently and expensively than we would.

Benjamin Constant The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns (1819).

“Free Trade! What is it? Why, breaking down the barriers that separate nations; those barriers, behind which nestle the feelings of pride, revenge, hatred, and jealousy, which every now and then burst their bounds, and deluge whole countries with blood; those feelings which nourish the poison of war and conquest, which assert that without conquest we can have no trade, which foster that lust for conquest and dominion which sends forth your warrior chiefs to scatter devastation through other lands, and then calls them back that they may be enthroned securely in your passions, but only to harass and oppress you at home.”

Richard Cobden, Speech at Covent Garden (28 September, 1843).

“Among the ancients, a successful war increased both private and public wealth in slaves, tributes, and lands shared out. For the moderns, even a successful war costs infallibly more than it is worth.”

Benjamin Constant The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns, 1819

“A common mistake is that the conclusions of the plain unlettered man differ from those of economists in being more immediately founded on observed facts and less on deduction. The truth is that the plain unlettered man is more prone to rely on deduction from unproved hypotheses than the economist is. All classes must equally use deduction, because it is only by this logical process that we form any conclusion about the future effect of any present cause. Drawing the conclusion that rain will follow a certain direction of the wind with certain appearances of the clouds is an act of logical deduction. The main point in which men’s logical methods differ lies in the care with which hypotheses are formed by induction from observed facts, and the readiness of men to test them. Now it is the plain man who is most prone to form hasty generalizations from insufficient facts, to consider the conclusions which he thence deduces as final, and to be blind to all facts which do not tally with his theory.”

Simon Newcomb, Principles of Political Economy, 1886, p. 40

“The ancients, as Condorcet says, had no notion of individual rights. Men were, so to speak, merely machines, whose gears and cogwheels were regulated by the law. The same subjection characterized the golden centuries of the Roman Republic; the individual was in some way lost in the nation, the citizen in the city.”

Benjamin Constant The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns, 1819

“War precedes commerce. War and commerce are only two different means of achieving the same end, that of getting what one wants. Commerce is simply a tribute paid to the strength of the possessor by the aspirant to possession. It is an attempt to conquer, by mutual agreement, what one can no longer hope to obtain through violence. A man who was always the stronger would never conceive the idea of commerce. It is experience, by proving to him that war, that is, the use of his strength against the strength of others, exposes him to a variety of obstacles and defeats, that leads him to resort to commerce, that is, to a milder and surer means of engaging the interest of others to agree to what suits his own. War is all impulse, commerce, calculation. Hence it follows that an age must come in which commerce replaces war. We have reached this age.”

Benjamin Constant The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns, 1819