The Immoral Equivalent of War

“European intellectuals from Voltaire to Lenin have had only three really big political ideas. One of them, the liberalism conceived in the 18th century by Voltaire and Adam Smith, and carried on by people like Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill and Claude-Frédéric Bastiat, has made the modern world. The other two, nationalism and socialism, conceived in the 19th century by Hegel and Marx, and carried into the 20th century by Lenin and Mussolini, have nearly unmade it. The modern plague is a threat to sweet liberalism, because it is an encouragement to nationalism and socialism, and, God help us, national socialism.”