Another important development in international politics was the negotiation of an alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1879. Apparently Bismarck’s decision not to impose an excessively harsh peace on Austria in 1866 was paying off. This alliance, like the Russian-French alliance and others, set the stage for a chain reaction whereby the countries not directly involved in the original dispute between Austria and Serbia in 1914 got drawn into World War I.
The Wilhelministic Era, which Mises refers to, was the reign of William II as German Emperor, particularly from the dismissal of Bismarck as chancellor in 1890 until World War I.
The defeat of the Central Powers in that war split Austria-Hungary up into several states. Currency inflations gained momentum. In Germany the Spartacists, whom Mises mentions and who reorganized themselves into the German Communist Party in December 1918, seemed for a time to have prospects of gaining power in at least the major cities.
We now turn to a few explanations and identifications that did not fit into the preceding chronological survey. Cabinet ministers in both Germany and Austria were responsible to the Emperor rather than to parliament. Although a government could not be thrown out of office by a vote of no confidence, parliamentary majorities were necessary to enact specific pieces of legislation; and the government occasionally resorted to political maneuvers and tricks to achieve the necessary majorities. Mises refers scornfully to these circumstances. In Austria, in particular, the parliamentary situation and the alignment of parties was complicated by the mixture of nationalities and by such issues as what languages should be used in particular schools. Mises refers, for example, to Badeni’s electoral reform of 1896. (Count Kazimierz Felix Badeni, a Polish aristocrat, became prime minister in 1895. The finance minister and foreign minister in his cabinet also came from the Polish part of the Empire. Badeni was dismissed in 1897 through the pressure of German-speaking factions, who considered his policies on use of language in the civil service too favorable to the Czechs.) Mises also notes allusions made at the time to the government’s courting of the ironically nicknamed “Imperial and Royal Social Democrats” (the term “Imperial and Royal,” commonly abbreviated in German as “K.k.,” referred to the Austrian Empire and Kingdom of Hungary and meant something like “governmental” or “official”).
The nationality situation is also in the background of Mises’s reference to the Linz Program of 1882. The extreme German nationalists proposed the restoration of German dominance in Austrian affairs by detaching Galicia, Bukovina, and Dalmatia from the Monarchy, weakening the ties with Hungary to a purely personal union under the same monarch, and establishing a customs union and other close ties with the German Reich. They apparently did not realize that Bismarck had little reason to provide help, since the existing domestic situation in Austria-Hungary was consonant with his approach to international affairs. The leader of the extreme German-Austrian nationalists was Georg Ritter von Schönerer, who later made anti-Semitism a part of his program.
Employing synecdoche, Mises sometimes opposes Potsdam to Weimar. Potsdam was the home of the Prussian Monarchy, and the word symbolizes the authoritarian state and militarism. Weimar, the literary and cultural center, stands for the aspect of Germany evoked by calling it the “nation of poets and thinkers.” (The “classical period” of German literature, to which Mises also refers, corresponds roughly to the time of Goethe.)
The Gracchi, referred to in a Latin saying that Mises quotes, were the brothers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, agrarian, social, and political reformers of the second century B.C. Both perished in separate public disturbances, one of them after having sought an unconstitutional reelection as tribune of the people.
It is quite unnecessary to identify every event, person, or school of thought that Mises refers to—Alexander the Great and so on. Still, there is no harm in adding that the Manchester School was a group of English economists of the first half of the nineteenth century, led by Richard Cobden and John Bright, who campaigned for a market economy and a free-trade policy. François Quesnay, 1694–1774, was a French physician and economist who stressed the central role of agriculture and who prepared the Tableau Economique, a kind of rudimentary input-output table.
Benedikt Franz Leo Waldeck, 1802–1870, was Mises’s example of the possibility of being both a Prussian nationalist and a sincere liberal democrat. Waldeck, a member of the highest Prussian court, had been a radical deputy in the Prussian constituent assembly in 1848 and leader of a committee that drafted a constitution. Later, as an opposition member of the Prussian chamber of deputies, he continued resisting authoritarian trends in government.
This introduction might fittingly end by especially recommending the discussion with which Mises ends his book—his discussion of the respective roles of value judgments and positive analysis in the choice between socialism and liberal capitalism. Mises proceeds not only from a liberal democratic outlook but also, and especially, from a rationalist and utilitarian philosophy.
Thanks are due to the Thomas Jefferson Center Foundation and the James Madison Center of the American Enterprise Institute for contributing much of the secretarial help required in preparing the translation. Thanks for their good work also go to Mrs. Anne Hobbs, Mrs. Carolyn Southall, and Miss Linda Wilson.
Only from lack of historical sense could one raise the question whether and how the World War could have been avoided. The very fact that the war took place shows that the forces working to cause it were stronger than those working to prevent it. It is easy to show, after the fact, how affairs could or should have been better managed. It is clear that the German people underwent experiences during the war that would have restrained them from war if they had already undergone those experiences. But nations, like individuals, become wise only through experience, and only through experience of their own. Now, to be sure, it is easy to see that the German people would be in a quite different position today if they had shaken off the yoke of princely rule in that fateful year 1848, if Weimar had triumphed over Potsdam and not Potsdam over Weimar. But every person must take his life and every nation must take its history as it comes; nothing is more useless than complaining over errors that can no longer be rectified, nothing more vain than regret. Neither as judges allotting praise and blame nor as avengers seeking out the guilty should we face the past. We seek truth, not guilt; we want to know how things came about to understand them, not to issue condemnations. Whoever approaches history the way a prosecutor approaches the documents of a criminal case—to find material for indictments—had better stay away from it. It is not the task of history to gratify the need of the masses for heroes and scapegoats.
That is the position a nation should take toward its history. It is not the task of history to project the hatred and disagreements of the present back into the past and to draw from battles fought long ago weapons for the disputes of one’s own time. History should teach us to recognize causes and to understand driving forces; and when we understand everything, we will forgive everything. That is how the English and French approach their history. The Englishman, regardless of his political affiliation, can consider the history of the religious and constitutional struggles of the seventeenth century, the history of the loss of the New England states in the eighteenth century, objectively; there is no Englishman who could see in Cromwell or Washington only the embodiment of national misfortune. And no Frenchman would want to strike Louis XIV, Robespierre, or Napoleon out of the history of his people, be he Bonapartist, royalist, or republican. And for the Catholic Czech, also, it is not hard to understand Hussites and Moravian Brethren in terms of their own time. Such a conception of history leads without difficulty to understanding and appreciation of what is foreign.
Only the German is still far