Clausewitz learned the the fundamentals of grammar,
arithmetic and Latin in a provincial municipal school and was later exposed to
a more sophisticated curriculum during his three years as a student at the Allgemeine Kriegsschule. In France and
Berlin, he read a diverse selection of authors, including Ancillon, Fichte,
Gentz, Herder, Kant, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Johannes von Muller and
Rousseau. But above all, Clausewitz read history to augment his personal
experience and to discover the underlying dynamics of war.
Clausewitz lived through a particularly turbulent era of German and European
history that encompassed the French Revolution, the French and Napoleonic Wars,
the industrial revolution, the rise of nationalism and the counter-Enlightenment.
The latter is a catchall term for a variety of movements and tendencies,
including conservatism, critical philosophy, historicism, idealism,
nationalism, revivalism and holism, that
developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in large part
in reaction to the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment put faith in the power of reason to unlock the secrets of the
universe and to deduce from first principles laws and institutions that would
allow human beings to achieve their potential in just, ordered and secure
societies. Counter-Enlightenment thinkers considered these expectations naïve and
dangerous; they saw the world as complex, contradictory, composed of unique
social entities and in a state of constant flux. They rejected the
Enlightenment conception of a human being as a tabula rasa, and the mere sum of internal and external forces, as
well as its emphasis on body over soul, reason over imagination and thought
over the senses. They insisted on a holistic understanding that built on these
dichotomies, and one, moreover, that recognized individuals and social groups
as the source of action motivated by their search for expression and
authenticity.
The counter-Enlightenment began in France and gained a wide audience through
the writings of Rousseau. It found German spokesman in the 1770s, among them
Hamann, Herder, the young Goethe, and Lavater and Moser, the dramatists of Sturm and Drang, and the Schiller of his
early plays. The French Revolution of 1789, and Napoleon’s subsequent
occupation of many German territories, provoked a widespread reaction to French
cultural and political imperialism and to the Enlightenment more generally. In
literature this found expression in the early Romanticism ( Fruhromantik) of Novalis ( Friedrich Hardenberg),
the Schlegel brothers and Christian Friedrich Tieck, in religion with Friedrich
Schliermacher, and in the philosophy of Johann Gottleib Fichte and, later,
Georg F. W. Hegel. Clausewitz knew their writings intimately, wrote a letter to
Fichte and was personally acquainted with Schlegel, Tieck and Novalis. On more
than one occasion he played cards with Hegel at the home of August Heinrich von
Fallersleben.
Clausewitz is often described as someone who wholeheartedly embraced the counter-Enlightenment.
There are indeed many aspects of his thought that reflect and build upon
counter-Enlightenment assumptions, but he owes and equal debt to the
Enlightenment. Like Kant, from whom he borrowed heavily, Clausewitz straddled
the Enlightenment and the German reaction to it. His life-long ambition to
develop a theory of war through the application of reason to history and
psychology was a quintessential Enlightenment project. His recognition that
such a theory could never reduce war to a science nor guide a commander in an
inherently complex and unpredictable world reflected counter-Enlightenment
views, as did his emphasis on emotive forces and personality and the ability of
genius to make its own rules. But, in a deeper sense, Clausewitz remained faithful
to the Enlightenment. He appropriated many concepts from philosophers of the
“German Movement,’ but stripped tem of their metaphysical content. He borrowed
their tools of inquiry to subject was to a logical analysis, and looked beyond
pure reason to a psychology of human beings to find underlying causes for their
behavior.
The same duality marked Clausewitz’s political thinking; his un-reflexive
nationalism and visceral hatred of France coexisted with his belief that
education, economic development and good government could bring about a better
world. Clausewitz’s political beliefs evolved more rapidly than his
philosophical ones, and he made little effort to reconcile their
contradictions. His thoughts about war were more extensive and productive. One
of the remarkable features of On War
is its largely successful synthesis of assumptions and methods from opposing
schools of thought. In this sense too, Clausewitz follows in the footsteps of
Thucydides.
Scharnhorst exercised the most direct and decisive influence of Clausewitz’s
thinking and writing. He was among the leading Aufklarers [ proponents of the Enlightenment] in the Prussian
service. He was born in 1765 to a retired Hanoverian non-commissioned officer
and the heiress of a wealthy farmer. He entered the Hanoverian army in 1779,
and later taught in a regimental school that he established. In 1782, he
founded and edited the first of a series of military periodicals and wrote two
widely read ‘how to’ books for officers before leaving his desk job to fight
against revolutionary France. In 1801, he entered the Prussian service, and in
1806, he penned a long essay that summarized and extended his thoughts on the
study of war.
Scharnhorst’s writings excelled in its detailed reconstruction of historical
engagement. He believed that combat experience aside, case studies were the
next best way to capture the reality of war. Scharnhorst used his cases to
infer ‘correct concepts’ that could order warfare and identify its principle
components in a useful way for practitioners. His two books drew extensively on
his wartime experience and historical research, but he never succeeded in
developing a general theory of war. His
case studies provided good evidence for his critique of mathematical systems to
guide the conduct of war developed by Bulow, Dumas, Muller and Jomini.
Peter Paret observes that no military theorist of his time was as conscious as
Scharnhorst of the distinction between theory and reality. His lectures at the Allgemaine Kriegsschule paid lip service
to the conventional wisdom that good theory and good preparation could
eliminate uncertainty and chance, but he did not for a moment believe it. In
good sophistic tradition, the examples he used to pepper his lectures
encouraged perceptive students to conclude that theory might be more
effectively used to recognize and exploit departures from the expected.
Clausewitz would develop this concept further, making surprise and chance central,
positive features of his theory of war, in contrast to many earlier writers on
the subject, who treated the unforeseen as an inconvenience, if the addressed
it at all. Scharnhorst taught his students that geometry and trigonometry were
useful for sharpening the mind, but that any theoretical understanding of warfare
had to be based on history. Good history required access to reliable primary
sources. This was another lesson the young Clausewitz assimilated, and many of
his early writings were historical case studies. Scharnhorst also open his students’
eyes to the broader political, social and intellectual forces that influenced
warfare we and determined its nature in any historical epoch. He taught
Clausewitz that the distinguishing feature of the French revolutionary and
Napoleonic Wars was the ability, first of France, and then the other European
states, to extract greater resources and demand greater sacrifices from their
populations. Survival in the modern age demands efficiency in exploiting the
physical and social resources at the disposal of the state, and this requires a
governing elite open to talent and merit independent of class or religious
background.
Clausewitz’s early writings reveal the influence of Scharnorst, but also his
ability to transcend the conceptual limitations of his mentor. These works span
the years 1803-06, and consist of notes and essays on politics and strategic
principles, treatments of the Thirty Years War, the Russo-Turkish War of
1736-39, a longer study of Gustavus Adolphus and a review article of one of
Heinrich von Bulow’s many books on the theory of war. Clausewitz reveals an
early fascination with power, and qualified acceptance of the rights of states
to extend their sway as far as they can. He also emphasizes the interest,
indeed the responsibility, of other states to oppose such aggrandizement –
especially in the case of France – when it threatens their interest or
existence. This principle was so obvious to him that he found it strange that
not all statesmen conceived of foreign relations in terms of power. He
nevertheless recognized real world constraints on the exercise of power, some
of them impose by domestic considerations, and others the result of deliberate
and wise moderation by many leaders.
Clausewitz ‘s fascination with power may have come from his reading of
Machiavelli or Fredrick the Great, but it was positively Newtonian in
conception. He conceived of power in terms of the latter’s Third Law: a body in
motion would stay in motion until acted upon by an equal and opposite force.
States could be expected to expand their power until checked by an equal and
opposite political-military force. This was a law of politics, but, unlike the
law of physics, it was tempered in reality by other influences that kept states
from expanding as far as their power might allow, and others from checking them
as their interests dictated. Paret speculates that it was a short step from
Clausewitz’s formulation of power to the conception of war he developed in his
mature years: that war in theory led to the extreme through a process of interactive
escalation, but was constrained in practice by numerous sources of ‘friction.’
This concept too was borrowed from Newtonian physics.
Clausewitz’s early writings alternated between case
studies and more theoretical writings, and the two were related. His case
studies were theoretically informed, more so than those of his mentor,
Scharnhorst. He wrote military history to explore the possibilities and limits
of theory, and then refined his nascent concepts in follow-up case studies. It
is apparent in retrospect that Clausewitz was trying to discover which aspects
of warfare were amenable to theoretical description and which were not, and
what else he would need to know to construct a universally valid theory. ‘While
history may yield no formulae,’ he concluded, ‘it does provide an exercise for
judgment, here as everywhere else.’ There is no evidence that Clausewitz began
his research program with this insight in his mind; it seems to have developed
in the course of his reading and writing.
It may even represent an unconscious effort to reconcile two distinct
and otherwise antagonistic aspects of his intellect: a pragmatic bent that
focused his attention on concrete issues and problems, and a desire to step
back and understand issues and problems as specific instances of broader classes
of phenomena.
Clausewitz’s case studies addressed campaigns, not engagements, and were more
analytical than descriptive. His study of Gustavus Adolphus’s campaigns of 1630-32
was the most concrete expression of this approach. He sought to analyze the
underlying causes of Swedish strategy during one phase of the Thirty Years War.
He ignored the order of battle (the forces a the disposal of the two sides),
and gave short shrift to individual engagements, including the Swedish victory
at Breitenfeld and the battle of Lutzen in which Gustavus Adolphus lost his life.
Clausewitz made clear at the outset his intention to focus on the more important
‘subjective forces,’ which include the commander’s personality, goals,
abilities and his own comprehension of them. He produced what can only be
escribed as a psychological study of Gustavus Adolphus, and, to a lesser
extent, of his Catholic opponents; he treats the war as a clash of wills, made
notable by the energy and courage of the adversaries. He concluded that the
Thirty Years War lasted so long because the emotions of leaders and peoples had
become so deeply engaged that nobody could accept a peace that was in
everybody’s interest.
Clausewitz described Gustavus Adolphus as a man of ‘genius,’ a concept he
picked up from Kant and would develop further in On War. William Tell, Wallenstein, William of Orange, Fredrick the
Great, and above al, Napoleon, qualified as geniuses because they grasped new
military possibilities and changed the
nature of warfare by successfully implementing them. Geniuses periodically
transformed warfare, and most other social activities, and make a mockery of
attempts to create static theoretical systems. The concept of genius was Clausewitz’s
first step towards a systematic understanding of change. It was based on his
recognition, developed more extensively in On
War, that change could be both dramatic and gradual. Gradual change, in the
form of improvements in armaments, logistics and tactics, was an ongoing
process, the pace of which varied as a function of political organization,
technology and battlefield incentives. Dramatic changes were unpredictable in timing
and nature, and transformed warfare – and how people thought about warfare – in
more fundamental ways. They were somewhat akin to what Thomas Kuhn would later
call paradigm shifts.
Clausewitz used the findings of his psychological case studies of Gustavus
Adolphus and Fredrick the Great to attack existing military theory, especially
the work o Heinrich Dietrich von Bulow.
Bulow maintained that the outcome of military campaigns was determined primarily
by the angle formed by two lines drawn between the perimeters of the base of
operations and the objective. Victory was assured if commanders situated their
base close enough to their objective and
extended their perimeters far enough to that the imaginary lines converged on
the objective at an angle of a least 90 degrees. Clausewitz marshalled examples
of defeat under these conditions, and of victory in cases where the angle had
been less than that prescribed. He attributed both outcomes to the skill of
generals ,the élan of their forces and simple good luck.
Bulow’s system reflected an eighteenth-century preference for wars of maneuver
over combat, and was ridiculed by Clausewitz who insisted that war is about
fighting. Strategy, he wrote, is ‘nothing without battle, for battle is the raw
material with which it works, the means it employs.’ The ultimate goal of war
was political: ‘to destroy one’s opponent, to terminate his political
existence, or to impose conditions on him during peace negotiations.’ Either
way, the immediate purpose of war become the destruction of the adversary’s
military capability ‘which can be achieved by occupying his territory, depriving him of military supplies, or by destroying
his army.’ Clausewitz introduced a further distinction between strategy and
tactics: ‘Tactics constitute the theory of the use of armed forces in battle,
strategy forms the theory of using battles for the purposes of war.” The
distinction between strategy and tactics would become essential components in
his later theory of war.
Bulow and Jomini built their systems around the order of battle and relative
positioning of deployed forces because they were amenable to quantitative
measurement. They considered quantification an essential step in transforming
strategy into military science. Clausewitz insisted that science requires
propositions that can be validated empirically, and was struck by how
uninterested the leading military theorists of his day were in using
historical, or any other kind of, evidence for this purpose. Like Scharnhorst,
Clausewitz thought the study of strategy should begin with history, not with
mathematics. It had to be rooted in psychology because the motives and means of
war were determined by political considerations, and ultimately by
intelligence, imagination And emotions. The study of strategy had ‘to move away
from the tendency to rationalize to
the neglected riches of the emotions and the imagination.’ It had to find a
systematic way of bringing these more tangible but critical considerations into
the picture, while at the same time recognizing that chance, by its very
nature, would always defy conceptualization and confound prediction. .
. .
Clausewitz began from the assumption that social and physical phenomena were
fundamentally different. The theory of physics was possible because objects are
acted upon. Social actors, by contrast, are independent agents with free will,
subjective understandings and independent goals, who act upon each other and
their environment. Their behavior varied within and across cultures and over
time; human nature might be universal but its expression was constantly in
flux, Generalizations about war were also of limited utility because the
outcomes of battles and campaigns were significantly influenced by ‘the courage
of the commander, his self-confidence, and the effect of moral qualities. These
critical but intangible qualities, and the ever-present role of chance, made a
mockery of attempt to treat political or military behavior as a predictable,
mechanistic exercise.
In keeping with the counter-Enlightenment emphasis on holism, Clausewitz
maintained that free will was responsible for a second important distinction
between the study of the physical and social worlds. In physics, he noted, it
is possible to isolate and study part of the system and ignore the rest. But
human action is an expression of the whole person, and is almost certain to be
influenced by aspects of life different from the domain under study. Modern war
is an expression of the entire society, an activity which reflects its values,
and calls for contributions of one kind of another from most of its members.
Unlike mathematics, it cannot be studied
apart from these disparate but critical influences. Even if generalizations
were possible, they would be short-lived because of the constant evolution of
warfare. So-called ‘laws’ that appear to account for eighteenth-century warfare
were inapplicable to the Napoleonic period. It would be just as mistaken,
Clausewitz insisted, to generalize on the basis of the Napoleonic experience
because the future would assuredly different. History was the key to knowledge,
but understanding of the past could not be used to predict the future. Change
would come gradually, or dramatically, when men of genius exploited new
possibilities.
Clausewitz was equally hostile to the opposite view, expressed most forcefully
by Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst, that modern warfare was beyond the realm of rational analysis
because it was a manifestation of unknown and uncontrollable spiritual
qualities that found expression through will and emotion, Clausewitz sought a
middle ground, and gradually came to understand war as something which
straddled science and art.
‘Rather than comparing it to art, we could more accurately compare it to
commerce . . . and it is still closer
to politics, which in turn may be considered as a kind of commerce on a larger
scale. Politics, moreover, is the womb in which war develops – where its
outlines already exist in their hidden rudimentary form, like the
characteristics of living creatures in their embryos.’
Within these limits theory was possible, but not the kind of predictive theory
sought by so many of Clausewitz’s contemporaries. The proper goal of social
theory was to structure reality and make it more comprehensible by describing
the relationship between the parts and the whole. Theory could provide the
starting point for working through a problem and standards for evaluation. Theory
in art, architecture or medicine – the models Clausewitz had in mind- helped to
conceptualize problems, but offered little guidance in practice. An architect
would learn a lot from studying the form and function of existing structure,
but such knowledge would not enable him to design his own buildings. According
to Clausewitz, ‘Theory is meant to educate the mind of the future commander, or,
more accurately, to guide him in his self-education, not to accompany him to the
battlefield, just as a wise teacher guides and stimulates a young man’s intellectual
development but is careful not to lead
him by hand for the rest of his life.
From Galileo, Descartes and Newton, Enlightenment philosophers like Hume
borrowed the concept of general laws that could explain concrete instances. The
cause of an event was neither its purpose nor its original cause, but its
immediate or ‘efficient’ cause- the event prior in time that was responsible
for bringing it about. This conception encouraged quantification and the belief
that everything could be described by general laws and efficient causes. To impose
limits on this process would defy reason. The new physics, accordingly,
encouraged the belief that everything as knowable and could be reduced to a set
of mathematical laws. If al phenomena were material, there was no room for the
independent mind and no foundation for ethics. The mind was either a machine or
a ghost. German idealism was a reaction against both the skepticism and
materialism of the Enlightenment, and an effort to reassert the centrality of
human beings in the overall scheme of things. Kant’s transcendentalism sought
to show that there is more to human beings that can be discovered by
observation and introspection. To understand what we must be like to have the
experiences we have, we must work back from experience to the structure and
overall unity of the subject. The world of the subject is distinct from the
external world, and motivated by will. Human beings are free in the most radical sense; they are
self-determining, not as natural beings, but through their pure, moral wills.
Radical freedom could only be achieved at the expense of man’s unity with
nature. Kant introduced a division between man and nature, different from, but
at least as great, as the dualism brought about by the Enlightenment from which
he thought to escape. His successors, the generation of the 1790s, sought desperately
to overcome this dualism while preserving the radical freedom and the potential
they perceived it had to ring about spiritual transformation. They were reacting,
as writers and philosophers almost always do, to external developments, and
most specifically, the French Revolution. They hoped that Germany could be the
midwife of a spiritual revolution that would succeed where the political
revolution had failed. The revolution would pave the way for the reintegration of
man and nature, and encourage the kind of creative expressiveness that had not
been witnessed since fifth-century Athens. The Greeks, Schiller wrote, ‘are what
we were, they are what we shall become again. Various systems towards this end
were developed by Fichte, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Schelling and Hegel.
Clausewitz was familiar with this literature, and shared the political-ethical
ideals that motivated its authors. He was particularly drawn to Johann Gottlieb
Fichte, because of his belief that citizens had responsibilities to society and
the state which they had to fulfill in accord with their own understanding and
ability. Clausewitz wrote a warm and complimentary letter to Fichte in response
to an essay he published on Machiavelli in 1807. Clausewitz was not a philosopher, and made no systematic effort to address or resolve the dualism introduced
by Kant. On War can nevertheless be read
as an attempt to show how this might be done in a practical, limited way in one
important social domain. Its underlying conception is very close to Fichte’s
‘philosophy of striving, which assumes a self-positing and absolute ego that
creates all nature, but has no physical form. The finite ego strives to attain
an idea or a goal by shaping nature in accord with its rational demands. It
must strive endlessly to control nature, a goal it approximates but never
achieves because of the resistance nature offers. Dualism is nevertheless
partially resolved because the subject gains limited control over nature. For
Clausewitz, the soldier-statesman strives to impose his will on nature by making
war a rational expression of his goals. But nature, in the form of ‘friction,’
resists that control, and does so in proportion to the degree that rational
control is sought. The best a soldier-statesman can do is to approximate
effective control, and, by doing so, create a synthesis in the form of a
self-willed, enlightened but uneasy accommodation with nature.
pages 176-186
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