Von Mises was able to place his technical ability to make innovative contributions to monetary and banking theory (for example, his Theory of Money and Credit, published in 1912) within a broader social philosophy that idealized classical (19th-century) liberalism (see Chapter 2 in this volume). Von Mises believed that socialist ideology was a threat to Western civilization and that classical liberalism alone could uphold freedom (von Mises 1912: 204). As with Hobbes and Hume, society, for von Mises, originated not in some social contract but in the inherent character of the individual: “Egoism is the basic law of society” (von Mises 1922: 402). All social phenomena are spontaneous, unplanned outcomes of choices made by rational individuals. However, in making choices, the individual encounters social necessities, as when the division of labor increases productivity and makes social cooperation more profitable than self-sufficiency. Humans obey the fundamental laws of social cooperation because they are in the person’s rightly understood self-interest—obedience to law allows maximum individual freedom, and the pursuit of rightly understood self-interest also assures the highest attainable degree of general welfare. “The point of departure of all liberalism lies in the thesis of the harmony of the rightly understood interests of individuals” (von Mises 1912: 182). For von Mises, the consumer interest counts above all other interests, and all interests are harmonized by market forces, establishing what von Mises called “consumer sovereignty” (this is merely an extension of the marginalist school discussed in the preceding chapter.) A state may be necessary, but liberalism teaches that its power must be minimized and, especially, laissez faire should be left unhampered to work its miracles of development. This sociology is the foundation for von Mises’s economic theory of laissez faire, or the free market economy, which basically argues that harmony, not conflict, exists between consumers and entrepreneurs, between entrepreneurs, managers, and employees, and so on. This philosophy of laissez faire, together with theories about the market process, money, interest rates, and cycles, justifies von Mises’s conception of freedom. Laissez faire prevails because it is scientifically demonstrated to be the best policy (Gonce 2003).