The free market has liberated people in a way that Marxism never could. What is more, as A. O. Hirschman, the Harvard economic historian, showed in his classic study The Passions and the Interests, the market was seen by Enlightenment thinkers Adam Smith, David Hume, and Montesquieu as a powerful solution to one of humanity’s greatest traditional weaknesses: violence. When two nations meet, said Montesquieu, they can do one of two things: they can wage war or they can trade. If they wage war, both are likely to lose in the long run. If they trade, both will gain. That, of course, was the logic behind the establishment of the European Union: to lock together the destinies of its nations, especially France and Germany, in such a way that they would have an overwhelming interest not to wage war again as they had done to such devastating cost in the first half of the twentieth century.
* Marxism: 마르크스주의