ABSTRACT
Political history, the history of wars and States, is neither unintelligible nor accidental. It is no more difficult to understand a battle than to understand military institutions or methods of production. The events reveal only an aleatory determinism, connected not so much with the imperfection of our knowledge as with the structure of the human world. The law of the falling rate of profit would not justify the belief that capitalism must inevitably destroy itself. Even on this assumption, economists who do not claim to be prophets do not foresee either the apocalyptic collapse of capitalism or the inevitability of total planning, but simply the necessity of government intervention in the shape of the lowering of the rate of interest or State investments. The 'contradiction' between the capitalist countries and those of Asia and Africa belongs to the realm of history, not economics.
