Mises’s Im Namen des Staates oder Die Gefahr des Kollektivismus, written in Geneva in 1938/39 and published only in 1978, diagnoses the doctrines that made modern war likely. Its central problem is peace, not party blame: why economic, cultural, and national rivalries are transformed into armed conflict.
Die dringendste Aufgabe, die die Welt heute zu lösen hat, ist die Schaffung dauernden Friedens.
English translation: The most urgent task the world has to solve today is the establishment of lasting peace.
The book’s chief enemy is collectivism in its many rival forms. Fascism, National Socialism, Bolshevism, socialism, interventionism, and militant nationalism differ in rhetoric, but all enlarge the state into an agency for directing social life in the name of a collective whole. Mises therefore rejects ordinary political cartography:
Nichts ist so irreführend wie die übliche Unterscheidung von „rechts“ und „links“.
English translation: Nothing is so misleading as the customary distinction between "right" and "left."
His historical argument traces the defeat of German liberalism. German nationalism, he insists, was not simply the continuation of Prussian militarism; it first developed through Western ideas of rights, constitutional government, and self-rule.
Die Untertanen der deutschen Fürsten wurden zur deutschen Nation, indem sie sich die Ideen Westeuropas aneigneten.
English translation: The subjects of the German princes became the German nation by appropriating the ideas of Western Europe.
Yet this liberal inheritance remained fragile. Prussian military prestige, imperial bureaucracy, constitutional compromise, social policy, protectionism, and anti-liberal economics displaced the older program. National Socialism is thus not treated as a primitive relapse, but as the mass-democratic culmination of doctrines prepared by statism, militarism, and hostility to the market order.
The conceptual center is Etatismus. Mises strips the state of metaphysical aura: it is organized coercion.
Staat ist Gewaltanwendung und Bereitschaft, Gewalt anzuwenden.
English translation: The state is the application of force and the readiness to apply force.
Liberalism accepts coercion only to protect life, liberty, property, and peace. Socialism and interventionism politicize production and livelihood. If the state controls production, it controls the conditions of speech, work, movement, and publication; if it intervenes piecemeal, each control distorts prices and production, creating pressure either to repeal the intervention or to extend it. Hence Mises’s stark alternative:
Entweder Kapitalismus (Marktwirtschaft) oder Sozialismus (Kommunismus); ein Mittelding, eine dritte Organisationsform, gibt es nicht.
English translation: Either capitalism (the market economy) or socialism (communism); there is no middle way, no third form of organization.
This economic argument grounds his theory of nationalism. In a liberal order of free trade, migration, private property, and equal law, borders lose much of their destructive significance. Under interventionism, however, tariffs, school policy, labor privilege, subsidies, licenses, and administrative decisions become prizes to be captured by one national group against another. Mixed-language regions become battlegrounds not because peoples naturally hate one another, but because state power makes national control materially decisive. Modern nationalism is therefore the imperialist consequence of statist economics.
Mises applies this to Germany’s claim that conquest could solve its “space problem.” Germany’s disaster was not insufficient power but a false theory of national interest. Expansion, autarky, and militarization promised security while producing encirclement, impoverishment, and war. The same doctrinal error shaped readings of Versailles, inflation, depression, and defeat: events do not teach by themselves, because experience is interpreted through ideas. Nationalist and collectivist doctrines can turn catastrophe into further radicalization.
The critique also targets Marxist and racial “polylogism,” the denial of common human reason. Once truth is treated as bourgeois, proletarian, German, Jewish, or racial, argument yields to force. Weimar democracy lacked a liberal foundation because Marxist dictatorship and nationalist paramilitarism alike rejected the market order and the rule of law; even socialist internationalism remained attached to state protection, union privilege, social insurance, and intervention.
The closing argument denies that Bolshevism spreads chiefly as an external infection. Socialist doctrines are Western in origin, and Russia realized ideas long cultivated by European intellectuals, socialists, and syndicalists. The danger to liberal societies is internal: their own abandonment of liberal principles. Treaties, federations, boundary revisions, and punishments cannot secure peace while states are authorized to direct production, trade, migration, and national destiny. The book’s force lies in joining history, economics, and ideology: totalitarianism appears not as an accident at modernity’s margins, but as the danger inherent in granting the collective, through the state, command over social life.
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