Organization Versus Freedom

These causes appear to me to have been of three kinds: Economic technique, political theory, and important individuals. I do not believe that anyone of these three can be ignored or wholly explained away as an effect of causes of other kinds.

Economic technique must be regarded as the most important cause of change in the Nineteenth Century, it cannot be regarded as the sole cause; in particular, it does not account for the division of mankind into nations. I do not believe that, if Bismark had died in infancy, the history of Europe in the past seventy years would have been at all closely similar to what it has been.

--Jesse Halsey