Carl von Clausewitz

Clausewitz, Carl Philip Gottlieb von (1780-1831), Prussian general and theorist of war. His posthumously published work On War (1832) is the most important general treatment of its subject yet produced. Clausewitz entered the Prussian army as a 12-year-old in the spring of 1792, and was soon drawn into the French Revolutionary wars that began a few weeks before. The following year he fought in the Rhineland and the Vosges, indecisive campaigns of position and manoeuvre typical of what would soon be called ‘the Old Regime’, but sufficient for the moment to bring peace to northern Germany. In 1801 he was admitted to the Institute for Young Officers in Berlin. There he came into contact with the Institute superintendent, Gerhard von Scharnhorst, the seminal intellectual influence of Clausewitz's life. Scharnhorst was among the first to recognize that the French Revolution would transform the conduct of war, and that the social and political institutions it was creating would in turn create new military possibilities which the conservative monarchies of central Europe would be hard-pressed to match. Clausewitz's earliest surviving manuscripts date from his years at the Institute. They reveal a mind already engaged by questions of the broadest military and political significance.

Scharnhorst's insights were vindicated in October 1806, when the forces of Napoleonic France crushed those of Prussia at the twin battles of Jena/Auerstadt. Clausewitz was present as adjunct to the king's nephew. In the retreat that followed he assumed command of part of the rearguard—the only time he commanded troops in combat—and eventually spent seven months interned in France. Upon his return he became involved in the movement to reform the Prussian state and army, in which Scharnhorst, again, was a key figure. In 1812, following Prussia's acceptance of a French alliance, which Clausewitz found politically and emotionally intolerable, he resigned his commission and, along with some 30 other Prussian officers, went to serve in Russia. There he witnessed the epic campaign that would break Napoleon's hold on Europe, a process to which Clausewitz made a modest personal contribution as negotiator, on the Russian side, of the Convention of Tauroggen, by which the Prussian contingent of the Grande Armée withdrew from the war.

As the war moved back into central Europe, Clausewitz worked to raise provincial militia and other irregular forces against the French, activity that was judged treasonous by some since, like the Convention of Tauroggen, it was done without the king's consent. He regained his Prussian commission in April 1814, and was COS to a corps during the Waterloo campaign. In 1818 he became superintendent of the Allgemeine Kriegsschule (War College) in Berlin, a purely administrative post that did not require him to teach, but did afford time for historical and theoretical work. In 1831 he set his studies aside when the outbreak of civil war in Poland caused Prussia to mobilize part of its army. Clausewitz was chosen as COS of the forces deployed to observe the conflict. He died in Breslau of cholera a few months later.

On War was published by Clausewitz's wife the following year. It has always been judged a demanding text, in part because it was never subjected to the comprehensive revision Clausewitz knew it required. The book is thus marred by inconsistencies and omissions that further work would presumably have reduced. On the other hand, anyone familiar with the first chapter of book 1, the only part that Clausewitz declared finished to his satisfaction, may wonder whether, if the entire book had been brought to a comparable state of theoretical density and analytic precision, the results would be any easier to interpret. In the end, whatever difficulty On War poses for the reader does not arise from its accidental shortcomings, but from its author's intellectual ambition.

On War is only secondarily a work of strategic theory, if by that one means a work intended to improve our ability to wage war successfully. Clausewitz had his own ideas about the best way to conduct military operations, and much of On War is devoted to strategic and tactical analyses that were certainly intended to appeal to the practical instincts of other professional soldiers. Yet his study of the history of war had also made him aware that his insights would some day lose whatever practical value they might possess for their own time. His ultimate goal was therefore to reach beyond such instrumental concerns, in order to grasp war as a total phenomenon, and understand its relationship to the social and political world of which it is a part. The result is a work whose most essential propositions are so encompassing that they might be easily mistaken for truisms: that the essence of war is violence, which knows no natural limit; that war ‘does not consist in a single blow’, but involves protracted interaction between opposing wills; that every attack loses impetus as it proceeds, until it reaches a culminating point where it no longer exceeds the strength of the defence that opposes it; that war is dominated by chaos and chance, which Clausewitz characterizes metaphorically as friction; that military genius can be cultivated, but not taught; that the only means in war is combat; that war is merely a continuation of policy; and so on. Theory at this level cannot serve as a guide to action, and is not intended to. On War is not about how to fight. It is about how to think about war.

For Clausewitz, one requirement for clear thinking was an unflinching respect for war's physical, psychological, and historical reality. He disdained bold strategizing that took no account of how difficult the simplest action becomes in the ‘resistant medium’ of war. He recognized the impact of fear, danger, confusion, and fatigue on men in battle, and wrote about them with unusual candour. He also rejected the idea that contemporary military methods represented a normative standard against which past practices could be judged. If wars in the past rarely achieved the scale and violence of Napoleon's greatest campaigns, it did not mean that previous generations had somehow failed to grasp a science whose true principles had now been revealed. For Clausewitz, the goal of theory was not to transpose reality into a system of abstractions, but to illuminate it with as little intellectual distortion as possible. No theory could be adequate that did not account for the full range of military experience captured in the historical record. That record suggested that war at all times possessed what Clausewitz called a ‘dual nature’. Few wars were ever intended to overthrow the enemy completely. Most sought limited goals, and were accordingly fought by limited means.

Clausewitz's recognition of the theoretical significance of limited war was both a consequence and a source of his insight into war's political and instrumental character. Clausewitz was scarcely the first to see that wars arise from political quarrels, or that they answer to purposes beyond themselves—that they are ‘about’ something. But he was the first to recognize the analytic power that these perceptions possessed when rigorously applied to all aspects of war.

For Clausewitz, the ‘subordination’ and ‘permeation’ of war by politics meant that there could be no ‘purely military solution’ to any military problem. It also exemplified a kind of complex tension that always attracted him. War, he famously proposed, was a ‘remarkable trinity’, whose essential elements—primordial violence and passion, the ‘free play’ of chance and creativity on the battlefield, and intelligent political purpose—could never be fixed in any arbitrary relationship. War's subordination to politics was logically necessary, and the norm in practice. Yet it was never perfect or absolute. War always threatened to escape its political restraints, and often did succeed in modifying the course of policy to some extent. The violence of war and the rationality of politics were thus theoretical opposites whose real existence was nevertheless marked not by mutual repulsion or exclusion, but by intense and continuous interaction.

Similarly dynamic conceptual structures—which in Clausewitz's day would have been described as ‘dialectical’—pervade On War at every level. Violence and reason, genius and friction, attack and defence, risk and decisiveness, ends and means, fear and courage, victory and defeat—such dualities weave their way throughout the text like musical figures, echoing and recurring in unexpected registers that may sometimes startle or disconcert us, but which finally provide the work with an intellectual integrity that transcends its superficial incongruities. In a note written towards what proved to be the end of his life, Clausewitz openly feared that his work would be liable to ‘endless misinterpretation’ and ‘much half-baked criticism’, an apprehension that has been borne out more than once. Yet his ultimate ambition—‘to write a book that would not be forgotten after two or three years’—would also be amply fulfilled. Few comparably demanding works in any field have so thoroughly withstood the test of time.

Bibliography

• Carl von Clausewitz: Historical and Political Writings, ed. Peter Paret and Daniel Moran (Princeton, 1992).
• Aron, Raymond, Clausewitz: Philosopher of War (New York, 1983), trans. from German orig. (1980).
• Paret, Peter, Clausewitz and the State (Oxford, 1976)

— Daniel Moran

(1780–1831), Prussian general and theorist of war

Clausewitz's On War (1832) is the most important general study of war. Incomplete and in need of revision at the time of Clausewitz's death, its sometimes disconnected arguments are typically remembered as relatively simple propositions, which do not always reflect the complexity of the reasoning that produced them. Among these are: that war is not an autonomous phenomenon, but a political instrument; that the violence of war knows no theoretical limit, and is prone to escalate; that war's theoretically boundless violence is tempered in practice by the political goals of the belligerents, and by the “friction” to which military operations are subject; that armed forces possess “centers of gravity,” whose successful attack promises the most decisive military results; that all attacks lose impetus as they proceed; and that the defensive is the stronger form of war. These and similar insights, although by no means universally accepted, are well established as foundational elements of serious strategic theory in the United States and throughout the world.

Clausewitz's work first attracted widespread attention among English‐speaking readers in the aftermath of Germany's victory over France in 1871, a success that Prussia's chief of staff, Helmuth von Moltke, attributed in part to the influence of Clausewitz's ideas. The first English translation of On War appeared two years later, and thereafter Clausewitz acquired a growing reputation among military professionals as a proponent of operations that were swift, violent, offensive, and decisive in character to overcome the strength of defense conducted with modern weapons—an interpretation that owed more to the perceived requirements of industrialized warfare than to a close reading of his work. After 1914, Clausewitz's writings were studied for clues to German military conduct, and increasingly misread as harbingers of Prussian militarism. By the outbreak of World War II, it was not unusual for American authors to find significant links between Clausewitz and Hitler.

This baleful trend was checked primarily by the work of German expatriates like Herbert Rosinski and Hans Rothfels, who presented Clausewitz's ideas with greater comprehensiveness, and greater attention to their original context, than most of their Anglo‐American counterparts had done. Of special significance was Rothfels's contribution to the first edition of Makers of Modern Strategy (1943), which demonstrated the analytic power of Clausewitz's identification of war as a political instrument, and also the fundamental significance of what Clausewitz called the “dual nature” of war, by which he had sought to reconcile the historical preponderance of limited war with the theoretically unlimited violence of war as such. Rothfels also portrayed Clausewitz himself as a figure of great intellectual integrity, striving for a disinterested and universally valid understanding of war.

Rothfels's essay set a new intellectual standard and a new direction for Clausewitz scholarship in English, which reached a culminating point in 1976 with the simultaneous appearance of Peter Paret's magisterial Clausewitz and the State, and a new translation of On War by Paret and Michael Howard. Clausewitz's insistence on war's political nature acquired special resonance in the nuclear era, when the means of organized violence so often threatened to dwarf the aims of policy; while his emphasis on the preeminence of limited war throughout history spoke directly to those who had endured the frustrations of Korea and Vietnam. At the end of the twentieth century, Clausewitz's ideas permeated the professional education and outlook of American military officers. When Michael Howard, writing in the wake of the Persian Gulf War (1991), nominated Clausewitz (in the New York Times) as “Man of the Year,” the proposal was rightly seen less as a jest than as tacit acknowledgment that, 160 years after his death, Clausewitz's influence and reputation had never been greater.

[See also War: Nature of War.]

Bibliography

• Raymond Aron, Clausewitz: Philosopher of War, 1976; English ed. 1983.
• Peter Paret and Daniel Moran, eds. and trans., Carl von Clausewitz: Historical and Political Writings, 1992

Clausewitz, Karl Maria von (1780-1831) Prussian general and military theorist.

Clausewitz, who fought in the Napoleonic wars, is most famous for his unfinished treatise On War (Vom Kriege), published posthumously in 1832 (an English translation was published in 1873). His most famous dictum is that war is “merely the continuation of politics by other means.” Clausewitz wrote that a war, though theoretically boundless, is limited by the political objectives of the belligerents and by “friction” (errors, chance, fatigue). He viewed the defensive as the stronger form of war, and advocated that offensive operations be swift, overwhelming, and decisive.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

German military leader and strategist Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) has been called the "father of modern warfare." As a member of the officers' corps of the mighty Prussian army from an early age, Clausewitz witnessed some of the most decisive European battles of his century and culled his observations into a body of theories that were outlined in his 1832 tract, On War. Its most enduring statement, "War is a continuation of policy by other means," has been widely misconstrued.

Clausewitz was born Karl Philipp Gottlieb von Clausewitz on June 1, 1780 in the Prussian city of Burg, near Magdeburg, capital of Saxony-Anhalt. He was one of six children of Friedrich Gabriel von Clause-witz, a retired Prussian army officer. Though Prussia no longer exists as a sovereign nation, during Clausewitz's lifetime it was one of Europe's most formidable powers. It originated as a duchy in the seventeenth century, and eventually acquired enough territory and influence to crown a king. Prussia remained independent from the Holy Roman Empire, but enjoyed close ties to it. The military campaigns led by the armies of Frederick the Great greatly added to its territory.

Clausewitz's formal military training began at the age of twelve, when his father brought him to the headquarters of the 34th Infantry Regiment in Potsdam in 1792. Here he began his training as an officer cadet. Such early martial instruction was not uncommon in the Prussia of the late eighteenth century. His older brother, Wilhelm, was already a second lieutenant with the corps. Not long after his arrival at the barracks, Clausewitz witnessed his first battle, when his regiment was sent to liberate the cathedral city of Mainz from French occupying forces. Clausewitz's duties as a Fahnenjunker, or ensign, apart from carrying the regimental standard in marches, included visiting the wounded in the field hospitals and writing reports on them to his commanding officer.

At the King's Court

When the Prussian army withdrew from participation in the French Revolutionary Wars in 1795, Clausewitz was posted to a remote garrison for several years. He occupied his time by reading a great deal, and studying for the entrance examination to the Institute for Young Officers in Berlin. In 1801, he took the test and was accepted. Its director, Gerhard von Scharnhorst, would become a key figure in the modernization of the Prussian army. He implemented changes that would make it one of the most successful forces of the coming century.

Scharnhorst recognized Clausewitz's abilities and became the young officer's mentor. In 1803, Clausewitz graduated first in his class from the Institute, and was appointed military adjutant to the young Prussian prince, August. With this prime posting, he entered the rarefied world of the Berlin royal court, with its round of balls, banquets, and lavish official ceremonies. It was an enriching, but difficult time for Clausewitz. He was still a low-ranking officer with a correspondingly paltry pay rank. Many of his fellow officers were of noble birth and possessed independent family incomes. Still, Clausewitz became acquainted with many famous European political and cultural luminaries of the day here, and also met his future wife at a Berlin gathering late in 1803. Countess Marie von Bruhl came from an old, esteemed Saxon line of aristocrats. It took several years of engagement before her family would grant approval for her marriage to Clausewitz.

Prisoner of War

In France, Napoleon Bonaparte had exploited the political and economic chaos of the post-revolutionary years and seized power. He proclaimed himself emperor in 1804, and launched a war that added territory to France despite opposition from a coalition of British, Austrian, Russian, and Swedish forces. Prussia joined the fight in 1806, but suffered devastating losses at Jena and Auerstadt. It would mark a turning point for both Clausewitz and Prussia. He and Prince August were captured in the area near Prenslau and taken as prisoners of war.

Clausewitz's captivity was not a punitive one. Officers who were taken into custody by a foreign power were usually allowed to move about freely; they only had to surrender their insignia and weapons, and swear an oath that they would not take up arms against the detaining army. Thus Clausewitz spent part of 1806 in Berlin and Neu-Ruppin, but was then sent with Prince August to Soissons, France, where he spent half of 1807. He began writing articles about the military debacles of the previous year. "Observations on Prussia in its Great Catastrophe" was finished in 1806. Its criticisms of how the Prussian regiments had lost at Jena and Auerstadt were considered so inflammatory that the work would not be published in Germany for another seven decades.

Sided with Russia

A major political capitulation occurred in 1807, when Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm signed an agreement with Napoleon. The treaty handed over nearly half of Prussian land to the French. This was seen as a humiliating defeat and incensed many officers, including Clausewitz. Still, it meant that he and the prince were released from official detention. Clausewitz returned to Berlin to aid Scharnhorst, who had been named head of the newly created Prussian Ministry of War and was working to reorganize and reform the army. In 1810, Clausewitz was promoted to the rank of major and began teaching at Berlin's Kriegsschule, the newly reconstituted school from which he had himself graduated with top honors. His salary and good repute combined to finally win the approval of the von Bruhl family. He and the Countess were married at St. Mary's Church in Berlin on December 17, 1810.

Tension between Prussia and Napoleonic France became strained. In February 1812, King Friedrich Wilhelm approved a request to send a Prussian corps of 20,000 men to join Napoleon's march on Russia. Clausewitz wrote a severe denunciation of this act of treachery that went unpublished for several years. Then he resigned, (as did many other high-ranking officers), and took up arms on the Russian side. Before his departure, he left with Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm - for whom he served as military tutor - a manuscript for safekeeping. This work, containing many of his theories and tactics, was the forerunner of his later treatise, On War.

Victory at a Terrible Price

In Russia, Clausewitz participated in several infamous battles. The French army managed to reach Moscow, but was decimated by its long, harsh winter. In late November 1812, a turning point was reached when the French were routed at the Berezina River. In the last days of the calendar year, Clausewitz was involved in negotiations that came to be known as the Convention of Tauroggen. This changed the course of the war decisively. The entire Prussian army joined with the Russians to defeat the French, and won a great victory at Leipzig in October 1813. Paris was seized five months later, and Napoleon was banished to the Mediterranean island of Elba.

After Tauroggen, Clausewitz was reinstated in the Prussian army as a colonel. However, he still was disliked by King Friedrich Wilhelm, and was not appointed to any command position. In early 1815, Napoleon escaped from Elba and once again gathered a force that retook Paris and did battle with a combined force of Prussian, Austrian, British, and Russian troops. At the battle of Ligny, at which Clause-witz was present, the French inflicted great casualties. Napoleon was defeated that same week by the British at Waterloo, in Belgium.

A Low Profile

In October 1815, Clausewitz was appointed chief of staff for Prussia's Army of the Rhine. He and his wife lived in Koblenz, Germany at this time. In 1818, Clausewitz was promoted to the rank of general and became the administrative director of the Kriegsschule. He had been recommended for the post by another key figure in the Prussian military organization, August von Gneisenau. Clausewitz had come to known Gneisenau through Scharnhorst, and had served under him during the Napoleonic Wars.

The position was a rather dull one, however, and Clausewitz spent much of the 1820s writing his opus. Because of the continued disfavor of the king and a postwar mood of conservatism, he was not able to teach or implement any of his ideas at the officers' college. He kept a low profile, and was even known as somewhat of a recluse. There were rumors that he was a drinker, due to his ruddy complexion. But this was caused by dermatological damage he had suffered during the Russian winter of 1812, when battlefield temperatures sometimes dropped to forty degrees below zero.

In 1830, tensions erupted at Prussia's border with Poland. Clausewitz had harsh words for the Poles, whom he considered unfit for self-government. He was appointed chief of staff to Gneisenau, commander of Prussia's Army of the East, and departed for Breslau, to serve as an inspector near the border. Before he departed, he sealed all his manuscripts, including what would become On War.

War was averted, but a cholera epidemic struck the area in late 1831, and felled Gneisenau in Poznan. Clause-witz was quarantined for a time, but then allowed to return to Breslau. Ten days later, on November 16, 1831, he died of cholera. His wife edited the manuscripts and had them published in 1832.

Theories of Conflict

On War, the work's English title, is difficult reading in any language. Its eight sections bear headings such as "On the Nature of War," "The Engagement," "Defense," and "War Plans." Clausewitz believed that the time-tested mathematical strategies for battle were increasingly useless in his modern age. War, unlike mathematics, was mostly unpredictable. In his writing, Clausewitz draws upon his own battlefield experiences in detailing innovative methods of retreat, flank positions, marches, and subsistence. He also wrote at length on more theoretical topics, such as his notion of what he called "absolute war." This would become On War 's most infamous and misunderstood passage. According to Clausewitz, absolute war was violence unchecked by any controls, whose aim is to utterly annihilate the enemy. "The destruction of the enemy's military force is the leading principle of war; … The results will be greatest when combats unite themselves into one great battle," he wrote. But Clausewitz went on to note that in reality, such abstract "pure" war did not exist, for political strategies and goals served to restrain such massive carnage.

On War belongs to a genre of controversial works that have, at times, been subject to many conflicting interpretations - Machiavelli's The Prince and Das Kapital by Karl Marx have earned a similar place on the bookshelves of history. Indeed, the Marxist-Leninist theory of war is culled significantly from Clausewitz's theories. It remains an important, though controversial text in military academics, and has been an integral part of the United States officers' curriculum since the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

Clausewitz's groundbreaking writings have prompted some to note wryly that as people became more civilized, warfare grows increasingly vicious. Despite the nature of his professional beliefs, Clausewitz was anything but a belligerent man. Extant images and memoirs reveal him as serious, shy, and, in appearance, closer to that of a poet or composer than the stereotypical Prussian general.

Further Reading

Aron, Raymond, Clausewitz: Philosopher of War, Simon and Schuster, 1983.

Parkinson, Roger, Clausewitz: A Biography, Stein and Day, 1971.

For more information on Carl Philipp Gottlieb von Clausewitz, visit Britannica.com.

Clausewitz, Karl von (Burg nr. Magdeburg, 1780-1831, Breslau), Prussian general and military writer, entered the infantry in 1792 and almost immediately saw active service in the French campaigns of 1792-3. He came to the notice of Scharnhorst and after Jena, where he was taken prisoner, was active in the War Department. He emigrated to Russia and served in the War of 1812 and the War of Liberation (see Napoleonic Wars). In 1814 he returned to the Prussian army and was present at Ligny and Wavre. After 1815 he held various high appointments, dying of cholera at Breslau.

Clausewitz wrote a number of military books, including accounts of the campaigns of 1813 and 1815. His most famous work, Vom Kriege, was left unfinished and published in the first three volumes of Hinterlassene Werke (10 vols., 1832-7). It sees war as a continuation of politics, the ultimate arbiter when all else has failed. He supported the conception of national war and insisted that wars must be conducted swiftly and ruthlessly in order to reach a clear decision in the minimum time. Clausewitz was not a warmonger; his doctrine is a logical deduction from existing conditions.

Clausewitz, Karl von (kärl fən klou'zəvĭts) , 1780–1831, Prussian general and military strategist. Clausewitz was an original thinker most influenced by the Napoleonic wars in which he fought. He served in the Rhine campaigns (1793–94), won the regard of Gerhard von Scharnhorst at the Berlin Military Academy, and served in the wars against Napoleon I. In the service of Russia from 1812 until 1814, he helped negotiate the convention of Tauroggen (1812), which prepared the way for the alliance of Prussia, Russia, and Great Britain against Napoleon. Later he reentered the Prussian army, played an important role at Waterloo, and was appointed (1818) director of the Prussian war college. His masterpiece On War was unfinished and was published posthumously. Written in a dialectic style influenced by Hegel and subject to varying interpretations, it remains influential. Clausewitz argued that although most conflicts tend toward total war in the abstract, the “friction” of reality keeps war limited, unpredictable, and dangerous. His most famous dictum, that war “is merely the continuation of policy by other means,” emphasizes his conception of war as one part of normal and pragmatic politics. At the same time, he stressed the need to strive for the most complete military victories possible, using whatever reasonable resources were available. While his work echoes themes from the ancient text The Art of War, attributed to Sun Tzu, and even more from the work of Machiavelli, Clausewitz has influenced many 20th-century strategists and historians, especially Bernard Brodie. See strategy and tactics.

Bibliography

See P. Paret, Clausewitz and the State (1976).

Quotes:

"War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of politics by other means."

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