An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation

Written in 1918 as Veblen worked inside Woodrow Wilson's peace commission, this is not abstract philosophy but a man watching the world burn and asking why. Veblen's argument cuts through the comfortable myths: peace doesn't fail because humans are naturally violent. Peace fails because governments need war. Patriotism, he argues, is not a noble instinct but a manufactured belief in national superiority, and it is precisely this belief that governments weaponize. He examines how popular sentiment drives state decisions toward conflict, how the glory of war is engineered, and why perpetual peace remains elusive. Most provocatively, Veblen contends that genuine peace between democratic states and imperial monarchies is impossible without the dissolution of one system - a claim that history bore out with brutal efficiency. The book extends his lifelong critique of how vested interests manipulate the common man, showing that the same forces which drive economic exploitation also fuel imperial aggression. A sharp, unflinching work that reads less like a century-old treatise and more like an angry contemporary analysis of why the machinery of war keeps running.