.@Lagarde quotes Montesquieu: Trade is the best cure for prejudice ...— IMFLive (@IMFLive) October 7, 2016
... and for internal and external peace #IMFonTrade
Which means that she's returned, having got away with it before, to a misinterpretation of the context for that quote. Here are the very next sentences of his discussion --
But if the spirit of commerce unites nations, it does not in the same manner unite individuals. We see that in countries where the people move only by the spirit of commerce, they make a traffic of all the humane, all the moral virtues; the most trifling things, those which humanity would demand, are there done, or there given, only for money. The spirit of trade produces in the mind of a man a certain sense of exact justice, opposite, on the one hand, to robbery, and on the other to those moral virtues which forbid our always adhering rigidly to the rules of private interest, and suffer us to neglect this for the advantage of others.
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