This book is one of the most significant ever written by Denson. It contains essays that have been turned into major movies and documentaries, and influenced politics in ways no one could have expected. The thesis in brief: the warfare state is as great or greater threat to liberty than the welfare state. Lovers of freedom need to focus their energies in favor of peace and against war.

Further, there can be no reconciling freedom and empire.

The 2nd edition is expanded to include an additional essay on World War I by Ralph Raico and another by David Gordon on war propaganda. Other contributors include Murray N. Rothbard and Robert Higgs.

"An original and scholarly appraisal of America's wars and their consequences, The Costs of War is easily one of the most important books to emerge from American conservatives in a generation...." Thomas Woods, Modern Age

"John Denson's The Costs of War offers a devastating critique of Washington's interventionist tendencies. The book, a series of conference papers, shows how, for instance, the Civil War sparked the federal government's (still ongoing) centralization of power and how World War I reflected the triumph of collectivism." Doug Bandow, World

"This book is the most convincing attack on the warmongering state to appear since the end of the Second World War." Gerard Radnitsky, Neuezuericher Zeitung.

This essential volume contains:

• War and American Freedom (John V. Denson)
• Classical Republicanism and the Right to Bear Arms (Samuel Francis)
• Defenders of the Republic: The Anti-Interventionist Tradition in American Politics (Justin Raimondo)
• America's Two Just Wars: 1775 and 1861 (Murray N. Rothbard)
• Rethinking Lincoln (Richard Gamble)
• Did the South Have to Fight? (Thomas Fleming)
• War, Reconstruction, and the End of the Old Republic (Clyde Wilson)
• The Spanish-American War as Trial Run, or Empire as Its Own Justification (Joseph R. Stromberg)
• World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals (Murray N. Rothbard)
• Rethinking Churchill (Ralph Raico)
• The Old Breed and the Costs of War (Eugene B. Sledge)
• War and Leviathan in Twentieth-Century America: Conscription as the Keystone (Robert Higgs)
• The Military as an Engine of Social Change (Allan Carlson)
• His Country's Own Heart's-Blood: American Writers Confront War (Bill Kauffman)
• The Culture of War (Paul Fussell)
• Is Modern Democracy Warlike? (Paul Gottfried)
• War and the Money Machine: Concealing the Costs of War Beneath the Veil of Inflation (Joseph T. Salerno)
• Time Preference, Government, and the Process of De-Civilization: From Monarchy to Democracy (Hans-Hermann Hoppe)