Clausewitz, Carl von. On War.

• Author: Blaser, Kent
• Position: Book review

Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. (Translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret; 2007 abridged version edited by Beatrice Hauser). New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. xli + 284 pages. Paper, $12.95.

Carl von Clausewitz's On War is arguably the most famous and important book about war ever written. Indeed, it is unusual for any work dealing with a major field of human endeavor to attain such rarified status. In the Western canon, it has no real competition; Homer's Iliad and Thucydides' Peloponnesian Wars, for all their wisdom pertaining to warfare, are very different kinds of books with a much more specific focus. Only the relatively brief and aphoristic 2500-year-old Art of War by the (possibly mythic) Chinese sage Sun Tzu has a reputation approaching Clausewitz's masterpiece.

On the surface, Clausewitz's achievement seems highly against the odds. On War is a long work, eight "books" published originally in three volumes. It was written over a period of fifteen years, during which time Clausewitz's thinking changed and matured considerably, and is thus unusually burdened with contradictions and inconsistencies. Even more problematically, On War was very much a work in progress when Clausewitz was called into military service and died unexpectedly of cholera at the age of fifty-one in 1831. Shortly before he died, he made a number of comments about the unfinished and disorganized state of the manuscripts that would become On War, referring to them as a "formless mass" that was intended only as the raw material for the final product and declaring that only the first chapter of the first book was in reasonably finished form (pp. 7-9). And to top it all off, Clausewitz was a contemporary of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and was shaped by the same traditions of German Idealism and dialectical method, and a German writing style, that made Hegel, and a little later Karl Marx, notoriously opaque and difficult reading. (Parallels between On War and Das Kapital are numerous and intriguing.)

Despite these obstacles, Clausewitz's star has continued to shine for more than a century and a half after his death. On War, shaped by his experience as a Prussian officer in the Napoleonic Wars and especially by his service in the Russian military during Napoleon's epic invasion, has seemed increasingly relevant and useful in more recent times. Whether the issue concerns global and "total" world wars or limited, asyrmnetrical, guerrilla "insurgencies" like...