Excerpted from my 2016 essay, “These Two Scholars Discovered the Primal Source of War.”
[Ludwig von] Mises managed to survive the Russian shells and frigid cold of the eastern front [of World War I]. Immediately after the war, he set to work on a book explaining the Great War’s origins, his 1919 Nation, State, and Economy. Among other factors, he noted that the nationalists who drove their countries into war held a conviction that “between peoples irreconcilable oppositions” existed. He noted that socialists held a similar faith, but concerning classes instead of nations. Mises wrote that, “Marxism and Social Democracy see an irreconcilable opposition of conflicting class interests everywhere…” In his 1922 treatise Socialism, Mises incisively wrote that “Nationalist ideology divides society vertically; the socialist ideology divides society horizontally.”
Mises developed this theme further in his 1929 work A Critique of Interventionism, in which he wrote that Karl Marx,
“…denies that a solidarity of interest exists or has ever existed in society. A solidarity of interest, according to Marx, can exist only within each class. But a conflict of interest exists between the classes, which explains why the history of all societies has been a history of class wars.
Conflict is the moving force of social development to yet another group of social doctrines. For those doctrines the war of races and nations constitute the basic law of society.”
He then characterized both doctrines as variants of “warfare sociology.”
Mises had long struggled to intellectually combat the Marxist class warriors who sought to introduce Bolshevism to Austria. For example, his 1920 article on the socialist calculation problem demonstrated the fatal flaw in Soviet-style planning. Soon Mises found himself also hounded by race warriors. As a Jewish liberal, he was compelled to flee the rise of the Nazis: first to Switzerland, and then to America.
The events of World War II proved to Mises that warfare sociology had won the hearts and minds of the west. In his 1945 paper “The Clash of Group Interests,” he wrote:
“It is a fact that the living philosophy of our age is a philosophy of irreconcilable conflict and dissociation. People value their party, class, linguistic group, or nation as supreme, believe that their own group cannot thrive but at the expense of other groups, and are not prepared to tolerate any measures which in their opinion would have to be considered as an abandonment of vital group interests. Thus a peaceful arrangement with other groups is out of the question.”
Mises added that this worldview was not limited to the extremism of the vanquished Nazis and victorious Soviets. It also drove the special interest “producers’ policies” then being embraced throughout the developed world.
In his 1949 magnum opus Human Action, Mises traced warfare sociology to the belief that, “the gain of one man is the damage of another; no man profits but by the loss of others.” This ancient fallacy was first restated in modern times by the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, and so Mises dubbed it the “Montaigne dogma,” which:
“…is at the bottom of all modern doctrines teaching that there prevails, within the frame of the market economy, an irreconcilable conflict among the interests of various social classes within a nation and furthermore between the interests of any nation and those of all other nations.”
Mises warned that:
“As long as the peoples cling to the Montaigne dogma and think that they cannot prosper economically except at the expense of other nations, peace will never be anything other than a period of preparation for the next war.”
In his 1957 book Theory and History, Mises developed this analysis further, coining a term for adherents of warfare sociology: “the antiharmonists.”
“As the antiharmonists see it, community of interests exists only within the group among its members. The interests of each group and of each of its members are implacably opposed to those of all other groups and of each of their members. So it is “natural” there should be perpetual war among various groups. This natural state of war of each group against every other group may sometimes be interrupted by periods of armistice, falsely labeled periods of peace. It may also happen that sometimes in warfare a group cooperates in alliances with other groups. Such alliances are temporary makeshifts of politics. They do not in the long run affect the inexorable natural conflict of interests. Having, in cooperation with some allied groups, defeated several of the hostile groups, the leading group in the coalition turns against its previous allies in order to annihilate them too and to establish its own world supremacy.”