What the State Can't Do: Mises on Legitimate Force

Tom Woods' foreword to Ludwig von Mises' "Liberalism" frames the whole book around a single question: when the state is allowed to use force. The classical liberal answer, Woods writes, sets the bar very high. The state may initiate force only to defend persons and property against those who would do the same.

Mises wrote the book in 1927, at a moment when fascism and communism were both ascendant. He argued that liberalism–the old, 19th-century kind–was the only doctrine that could defend peace and prosperity. The state, in his view, was a necessary evil, not a tool for social engineering. Its job was to protect individual rights, nothing more.