These three “modern” tendencies—distrust of individual initiative, exacerbated nationalism (called chauvinism after the ultranationalist French Bonapartist Chauvin), and socialism—were, for all practical purposes, combined, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, in neomercantilism.

This began in the Germany of Bismarck and in the United States, spread by reaction to England, France, and other countries, produced the two world wars, and destroyed the international division of labor.

Christened in Germany in 1920 the “planned economy” (Planwirtschaft) and later everywhere called the “controlled economy,” under the pretext of defending national interests against foreign competition and the humbler classes against domestic oppression, it has enthroned the omnipotent state wherever it has gained a foothold and has forced democracy and liberty, whose universal victory was once thought to have been finally assured, into retreat.