First, until recent decades there has been an historic erosion of the tenets of classical liberalism and its faith in democracy and the free market. The pacific nature of democracy is a matter of insight and knowledge gained and lost among liberals. So long ago as 1795, in his virtually now forgotten Perpetual Peace, Immanuel Kant systematically articulated the positive role of republicanism in eliminating war. He proposed that constitutional republics should be established to assure universal peace. The essential idea was this: the more freedom people have to govern their own lives, the more government power is limited constitutionally, the more leaders are responsible through free elections to their people, then the more restrained the leaders will be in making war.

Through the writings of Kant, de Montesquieu, Thomas Paine, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill, among others, it became an article of classical liberal faith in the 18th and 19th centuries that “Government on the old system,” as Paine wrote, “is an assumption of power, for the aggrandizement of itself; on the new [republican form of government as just established in the United States], a delegation of power for the common benefit of society. The former supports itself by keeping up a system of war; the latter promotes a system of peace, as the true means of enriching a nation.”

These liberals believed that there was a natural harmony of interests among nations, and that free trade would facilitate this harmony and promote peace. Most important, they were convinced that monarchical aristocracies had a stake in war. In contemporary terms, it was a game they played with the lives of the common folk. Empower the common people to make such decisions through their representatives, and they would generally oppose war.

In the 18th Century, classical liberals wrote about democracy and peace in the abstract, by hypothesis. Reason, the instrument for uncovering natural law, was their guide. Now we have the longer historical record, empirical research, and social theory to show that indeed, their reason and intuition were not misplaced.

Nonetheless, by the middle of the 20th century, this insight became almost completely ignored or forgotten. There are several reasons for this. First and foremost, the classical liberal view itself fell into disrepute among intellectuals and scholars. Essentially, classical liberals believed that the government that governs least governs best. Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was their economic bible. And in current terms, they preached democratic capitalism. But beginning in the 19th century capitalism came under increasing attack by socialists.

First, the socialist agreed with the classical liberal that the people had to be empowered, and that this would bring peace. But what the socialist saw when the liberal creed was enacted into law, especially in Britain, was that the bellicose aristocracies were replaced by bellicose capitalists. Democracies and their attendant free market appeared to foster exploitation, inequality, poverty, and to enable a very few to rule over the many. Most important here, capitalism was seen not just to promote, but to require colonialism and imperialism, and thereby war.

But what was to be done? Here the socialists divided essentially into the democratic socialists, state socialists, and Marxists. The democratic socialists argued that true democracy means that both the political and economic aspects of their lives must be under the people’s control, and this is done through a representative government and government ownership, control, and management of the economy. Elected representatives, who would oversee economic planners and managers, and above all be responsive to popular majorities, would thus replace the capitalist. With the aristocratic and capitalist interests in war thus eliminated, with the peace oriented worker and peasant democratically empowered, peace would be assured.

The state socialists, however, would simply replace representative institutions with some form of socialist dictatorship. This would assure the best implementation and progress of socialist egalitarianism, without interference by the bourgeoisie and other self-serving interests. Moreover, the people cannot be trusted to know their own interests, for they are easily blinded by pro-capitalist propaganda and manipulation. Burma today is an example of state socialism in practice.

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