3 - Clausewitz on the Nature of War

Summary

To most of us, I suspect, Clausewitz is a somewhat cloudy, mysterious and faceless figure, composed too much of anomalies for definite realisation or understanding. He was a general and a philosopher, reputedly an admirer of Kant and an objective analyst, if not an apologist, of war. If, as has been said, the idea of a literate general defeats the Anglo-Saxon imagination, what can we hope to make of the Prussian officer who was to become the world's first – and, as it may turn out, also its last – philosopher of war? The easiest solution would be to turn him into something definitely repellant – the logician of force, the justifier of bloodshed, or, in Liddell Hart's phrase, ‘the Mahdi of mass and of mutual massacre’. And indeed, with a slight change in the balance of historical forces and hence in national mythologies since his death, he might well have become a name of terror, like Bonaparte to nineteenth-century English children. But in fact, what kind of man was Carl von Clausewitz?

The face that looks out from his portraits takes us by surprise. It suggests a poet rather than a philosopher and a fortiori than a general. We see a man of medium height and slight build, with red-brown hair, finely formed features and a smile of unusual tenderness. And his letters indicate moral and intellectual attitudes that match his appearance. Apart from his professional and patriotic ardour – he was always an enthusiastic supporter and deviser of military and political reforms – they reveal a man of wide general culture, with a notable capacity for forming deep personal attachments, and a vein of melancholy which turned, in his later years, into almost pathological disappointment with his own achievements.