Carl von Clausewitz

Polish military theoretician

• Born: June 1, 1780
• Birthplace: Burg, near Magdeburg, Prussia (now in Germany)
• Died: November 16, 1831
• Place of death: Breslau, Silesia (now Wrocław, Poland)

Clausewitz played an important role in Prussian military and political history during the Napoleonic Wars but is best known as a leading modern philosopher of war. His most famous work, On War, has been characterized as “not simply the greatest, but the only great book about war.”

Early Life

Carl von Clausewitz (KLOHZ-vihtz) was born into a Prussian family that, despite its pretensions to nobility, was in fact of middle-class origins. The elder Clausewitz had obtained a commission in the army of Frederick the Great but was forcibly retired during Frederick’s purge of nonnoble officers after the Seven Years’ War. Clausewitz seems, however, to have believed in the family’s claim to noble status; on the basis of his own achievements, Clausewitz had his claim confirmed by the king of Prussia in 1827.

The ambiguity of Clausewitz’s social position may be a key to understanding his life and personality, although it does not appear to have blocked his advancement. He tended, as his correspondence and comments by contemporaries reveal, to feel and to be treated like an outsider. Sensitive, shy, and bookish by nature, he could also be passionate in his politics, his love for his wife, and his longing for military glory. Slim and rather handsome, he frequently displayed coolness and physical courage in battle. His keen analytical intelligence was accompanied by a certain intellectual arrogance. These qualities may account for the fact that, although he rose to high rank in the Prussian service, he served always as a staff officer rather than as a commander.

Clausewitz entered the Prussian army as a cadet at the age of twelve; he first saw combat, against revolutionary France, at thirteen. After 1795, he spent five years in the rather dreary garrison town of Neuruppin. There, he applied himself energetically to his own education, a project in which he was so successful that he was able to gain admission to the new War College in Berlin in 1801. With this appointment, his rise to prominence had begun.

Life’s Work

The director of the War College was Gerhard Johann von Scharnhorst, who was to become Clausewitz’s mentor and a key figure in the Prussian state during the upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars. Many of Clausewitz’s basic historical, political, and military views derived from the influence of Scharnhorst and other Prussian military reformers.

Clausewitz was graduated first in his class in 1803 and was rewarded with the position of military adjutant to the young Prince August. The same year, he met and fell in love with his future wife, the Countess Marie von Brühl. However, the ambiguity of his social background and his poverty posed problems. Marie’s family would resist this poor match for seven years, until Clausewitz’s rapid promotion undermined their objections to a marriage.

Prussia had remained at peace with France since 1795 but, alarmed at the devastating French victories over Austria and Russia in 1805, mobilized for war in 1806. Clausewitz and most other Prussian officers anticipated the struggle with confidence, but the timing was poor and the nation was ill-prepared. The Prussian forces were shattered in humiliating defeats at Jena and Auerstedt. Both Clausewitz and Prince August were captured. The experience was both shocking and enlightening for Clausewitz.

When Clausewitz returned from internment in 1808, he joined Scharnhorst and the other members of the reform movement in helping to restructure both Prussian society and the army, in preparation for what Clausewitz believed to be an inevitable new struggle with the hated French. His enthusiasm was not, however, shared by the king, who was more concerned with maintaining his position in the much-reduced Prussian state. Clausewitz’s disillusionment reached a peak when Prussia, allied with France, provided an army corps to Napoleon I to assist during the 1812 invasion of Russia. Along with about thirty other officers, Clausewitz resigned from Prussian service and accepted a commission in the Russian army. He fought at the bloody Battle of Borodino and witnessed the disastrous French retreat from Moscow. He then played a role, the importance of which is disputed, in negotiating the defection of the Prussian corps from the French army.

None of this won for Clausewitz any affection in the court at Berlin, where he was referred to on at least one occasion as “Louse-witz.” The eventual entry of Prussia into the anti-Napoleon coalition nevertheless led, after some delay, to his reinstatement in the Prussian army. Clausewitz participated in many key events of the “War of Liberation,” but bad luck and the lingering resentment of the king prevented him from obtaining any significant command.

In 1818, Clausewitz was promoted to general and became administrative head of the War College. This position offered him little scope to test his educational theories or to influence national policy. Perhaps because of the conservative reaction in Prussia after 1819, as a result of which many of the liberal reforms of the war years were weakened or rescinded, Clausewitz spent his abundant leisure time quietly, writing studies of Napoleonic campaigns and preparing the theoretical work that eventually became his magnum opus, Vom Kriege (1832-1834; On War , 1873).

Clausewitz saw war as essentially a creative activity: Victory goes not to the general who has learned the rules but to the general who makes them. Therefore, military theory must not attempt to prescribe a general’s actions but should aim instead at educating his judgment so that, on the battlefield, he will be able to weigh all the factors that apply in his own unique situation. Clausewitz was scornful of military dilettantes such as Adam Heinrich Dietrich von Bülow, who tried to reduce the art of war to a mathematical equation. The strategist, like the artist, will make use of science, but the end result in both cases will be something quite different from the predictable, repeatable results of an experiment in physics. This outlook surely stemmed from Clausewitz’s own experience of the overthrow of traditional armies by the radically new forces of the French Revolution.

Clausewitz’s approach contrasts with that of his initially more influential contemporary, the Swiss theorist Antoine-Henri de Jomini. Where Jomini saw fixed values, Clausewitz looked for variable quantities. Where Jomini worried about physical forces, Clausewitz discussed the effects of morale and psychological factors. Where Jomini prescribed unilateral action, Clausewitz showed that war is the continuous interaction of opposites. Where Jomini sought to achieve certainty on the battlefield, Clausewitz stressed uncertainty, chance, suffering, confusion, exhaustion, and fear, factors that added to what he called the “friction” of war.

The most famous and often-quoted line from On War, possibly the only line ever read by most quoters of Clausewitz, is that “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” His point was that war is not in any way a sphere separate from politics and that military operations must always serve a rational political end. The crux of the problem is that neither soldiers nor statesmen are infallible, even within their own areas of competence, and Clausewitz’s dictum will work only if the generals and the politicians understand one another’s limitations.

Clausewitz returned to active field duty in 1830, when revolutions in Paris and Poland seemed to presage a new general European war. Before leaving, he sealed his manuscripts with the warning, “Should the work be interrupted by my death, then what is found can only be called a mass of conceptions not brought into form… open to endless misconceptions.” Although war was averted, Clausewitz remained in the east, organizing a sanitary cordon to stop the spread of a cholera epidemic from Poland. He returned home to Breslau in 1831, seemingly healthy, but contracted the deadly disease and died the same day. He was fifty-one years old. Despite his note of warning, his fiercely loyal wife continued his work. It was she who edited and published On War, the first volumes of which appeared in 1832.

Significance

Although Carl von Clausewitz wrote a considerable amount of history, particularly campaign studies, he is read almost exclusively for the military philosophy contained in On War. This book was received with the respect its famous author deserved but remained in obscurity until cited by Helmuth Karl Bernhard von Moltke as the key to his victories over Austria in 1866 and France in 1870-1871. It then became a virtual military cult object. On War has gradually assumed a status as the preeminent philosophical examination of war and military theory.

Unfortunately, many later interpreters have twisted Clausewitz’s argument—and even altered the text—concerning the relationship of war and political policy, with the intent of winning greater independence for military leaders. Colmar von der Goltz, writing in 1883, reconciled these two seemingly irreconcilable ideas by saying that “war serves the ends of politics best by a complete defeat of the enemy,” even though this formulation directly contradicted the lessons of Prussia’s greatest military-political successes, that is, the victorious wars against Austria and France.

Although Clausewitz is often supposed to have been the “apostle of total war,” in fact, this is merely the unfortunate by-product of his quasi-Hegelian analytical method, which led him to begin with a discussion of war as an “absolute,” an ideal. Clausewitz was writing in the years before nuclear weapons, but his abstract discussion of absolute war seems now to be prophetic of today’s balance of terror. There is even a group of modern strategic theorists who have been called the “neo-Clausewitzians,” including such prominent nuclear strategists as Henry Kissinger and Herman Kahn. Clausewitz, however, recognized that war could be either total or limited and that in reality no war would be a perfect example of either.

That On War or its misinterpretation actually led to the debacle of World War I, as some have charged, is dubious. Few generals of this war ever read this notoriously difficult book. Furthermore, as Clausewitz himself recognized, war changes over time; societies fight the wars for which they are physically, socially, and psychologically equipped. The nature of war in any given environment is determined by Clausewitz’s trinity of government policy, the capabilities of the army, and the attitudes of the population.

If Clausewitz’s work is understood as descriptive in nature, it can be a useful tool for military analysis. If, instead, the reader tries to use it prescriptively, as Clausewitz feared might happen, he will constantly be misled by his own cultural preconceptions and by the tendency to see war in its ideal, absolute form, rather than in the disorderly form in which it actually exists. To see in Clausewitz’s rather matter-of-fact description of war as “a continuation of policy” a justification for resorting to arms is to miss the point of his argument; no leader who truly grasps Clausewitz’s description of the role of chance in war is likely to take the gamble lightly.

Bibliography

Aron, Raymond. Clausewitz: Philosopher of War. Translated by Christine Booker and Norman Stone. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1985. Although not a good translation from the French, this book contains a useful biography of Clausewitz, a subtle analysis of his ideas, and an account of the scholarly controversies that they have spawned.

Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. Edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976. The best of three English translations of Clausewitz’s major theoretical work. The volume also contains essays on Clausewitz by each of the editors as well as a guide to reading by Bernard Brodie, a prominent American strategic analyst.

Gallie, W. B. Philosophers of Peace and War: Kant, Clausewitz, Marx, Engels, and Tolstoy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Treats Clausewitz’s theories in their philosophical and military contexts.

Handel, Michael I., ed. Clausewitz and Modern Strategy. London: Frank Cass, 1986. A collection of essays discussing Clausewitz, his theories, and his influence on the military strategies followed by various nations, including Germany, France, and Italy.

Howard, Michael. Clausewitz: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. A brief (84-page) explanation of Clausewitz’s theories of warfare described within the context of his experience in the Napoleonic Wars and the intellectual background of his time.

Paret, Peter. “Clausewitz.” In Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, edited by Peter Paret and Gordon A. Craig. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986. A short essay on Clausewitz in an excellent anthology of essays on other strategic thinkers.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Clausewitz and the State: The Man, His Theories, and His Times. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976. The most sophisticated biography of Clausewitz.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Understanding War: Essays on Clausewitz and the History of Military Power. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992. A collection of Paret’s essays about Clausewitz, examining his theories of warfare and how they relate to war as a general historical phenomenon.