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Clausewitz and the State: The Man, His Theories, and His Times
Originally published in 1976, Clausewitz and the State presents a comprehensive analysis of one of the significant thinkers of modern Europe. Peter Paret combines social and military history and psychological interpretation with a study of Clausewitz's military theories and of his unduly neglected historical and political writing.
This timely new edition includes a preface which allows Paret to recount the past thirty years of discussion on Clausewitz and respond to critics. A companion volume to Clausewitz's On War, this book is indispensable to anyone interested in Clausewitz and his theories, and their proper historical context.
This timely new edition includes a preface which allows Paret to recount the past thirty years of discussion on Clausewitz and respond to critics. A companion volume to Clausewitz's On War, this book is indispensable to anyone interested in Clausewitz and his theories, and their proper historical context.
468 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1976
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About the author
Peter Paret
55 books22 followersAmerican historian who has specialised in German military history in the Napoleonic era and German artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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May 9, 2015Truth is relative, and time is nothing but the condition in which truth exists, develops, functions, survives. Every organism known to us is confined within this context: each man in his times. Our age is the age of self-consciousness, of self-reflection pushed to imbalance and infinity...the strongest potential for heroism, the most capable and effective personality, will dry up, shrivel, evaporate in smoke and flame if he should happen to be doubly gifted, if he should be truly rich in human qualities - that is, if his strength should be joined by a speculative, reflective spirit, by sharp and intelligent comprehension, a mobile poetic imagination, by a powerful but tender heart. In the fragmented modern world...only one option is left to the enlightened individual: the heroism of scholarship
Rahel Levin, letter to Alexander von der Marwitz, 17th May 1811
I
"The reader will agree with us when we say that once barriers - which in a sense consist only in man's ignorance of what is possible - are torn down, they are not so easily set up again" this quote from Clausewitz's writings lies at the heart of my experience of reading Peter Paret's biography of the Prussian soldier and military theorist Clausewitz.
The challenge of the French Revolution, in combination with the Enlightenment, lies behind Paret's interpretation of Clausewitz. He is determined to avoid looking back on Clausewitz and interpreting him in the light of later events, the attempt is not to view him as in the Anselm Kiefer painting, looking from the present backwards, but rather to see him develop in pace with and in reaction to French victories, the educational theories of Pestalozzi, the collapse of the Frederickian Prussian state, and the ultra-conservative reactionary politics of post-1815 Europe.
We are with a young man from the wrong kind of family (too bourgeois, with too little influence who was inducted into the army at the age of twelve and who had been under fire in combat situations perhaps already by the age of thirteen .
Clausewitz through good fortune ends up with Scharnhorst, a man from a lower social background than Clausewitz who had a successful military career in the artillery before being poached by the Prussian government for whom he ran the first educational programme for officers, really with the aim of developing a general staff function .
Traditional tactical doctrine in the Prussian army stressed strict discipline and the virtue of taking the offensive. Providing education for officers, let alone for soldiers, was felt to potentially weaken combat effectiveness. As it happened a battlefield test at Jena and Auerstadt in 1806 resulted in Prussian forces being completely trounced by a far more flexible and better organised French army.
II
War is more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to the given case. As a total phenomenon its dominent tendencies always make war a remarkable trinity-composed of primordial violence, hatred, & enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance & probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; & of its element of subordination as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone.
The first of these three aspects mainly concerns the people, the second the commander and his army; the third the government pp394-5
Some years ago I came across Clausewitz for a second time not on account of war but because of business. There's been a bit of a fashion for things along the lines of Genghis Khan's tips on mergers and management, which while hopefully making money for needy publishers and insufficiently inebriated writers, may not offer the most helpful perspectives on contemporary economic activity. Clausewitz though might have something more interesting or at least something complementary to offer.
The first part of his above trinity is emotion. One the one hand there are beliefs that stress that the human experience is essentially rational, but an alternative tendency is to accept the centrality of feeling .
After the defeat of Prussia in 1806 both Clausewitz and Scharnhorst were involved in the Prussian Reform movement which aimed to create a resurgent Prussia that could take on the French through a top down reform process . One of the aims of the reforms was to produce intrinsic motivation among Prussians. This was a rerun on a larger scale of the debate over the role of education and broadly falls into McGregor's theory X and theory Y approaches. Traditionalists stressed dynastic loyalty: the serf served as a soldier in the regiment of his landowner who in turn served the dynasty. The reformers wanted to unleash intrinsic motivation, which they believed was something that had given the French an advantage since 1789 - people seeing themselves as citizens wanted to serve a cause they believed in. Paret points out that the recruitment statistics show that the reformers did not succeed over the years 1812-1814 in unleashing popular enthusiasm but suspects that their attempt played an important part in creating the idea of a popular nationalism that was to surface in 1848.
The second part of his trinity deal with his treatment of friction and genius. Friction in the sense of Murphy's Law - what ever can go wrong will go wrong with Genius as something like the ability to combine fancy book learnin' with experience and with a feel for geography. This is not about command and control but about flexibility. At the same time the word genius is a reminder that we are in an intellectual culture that is shifting from the Enlightenment to Romanticism via German Idealism, with a nod to Napoleon and the Eroica symphony in our ears. For me a strength of the book is how Paret seeks to put Clausewitz in a context of Kleist and Humboldt as much as Blücher.
Finally, and perhaps curiously, Clausewitz expects the role of Government to be rational or at least subject to reason: "war is not a mere act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political activity by other means" (p393)
This is very much a trinity of its time, a discussion of human activity that accepts and assumes the roundness of human nature. The role of emotion, intuition, genius and rationality all have to be acknowledged as they unfold in a dialectic between at least two parties in a reality which is not smooth but subject to friction.
III
But for Clausewitz's wife, Marie von Brühl, his major work "On War" would probably have remained unpublished. The two had a close intellectual relationship and it was Marie who prepared the manuscripts for publication after her husband's death from cholera in 1831. Had Clausewitz himself lived longer it seems unlikely that the manuscripts would have reached a more complete state as he seems to have been a chronic rewriter.
Paret's portrait is of a man who at once spent his lifetime fighting against and fearing a France resurgent after the French Revolution and whose thinking had been liberated by the same event, which did so much to crack apart the constrictions of Ancien Regime assumptions and patterns of thought. It is picture of a person in an organisation who supports change and yet lives to see the imposition of the ultra-conservativism of post-1815 Europe when the crowned heads of Europe did their best to pretend that they could reign as before without having to pay attention to the intrinsic motivation of their subjects or engage with them through constitutions and representation assemblies.
It is a rich portrayal of a slice of European intellectual history that comes to involve almost everybody from Fichte to Theodor Körner with the notable exception for Goethe. And to think that one of the reasons I picked this up was only because of the brief discussion of the Prussian Reform movement in Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions. What reading there is to discover when you let one book lead you to another.
Rahel Levin, letter to Alexander von der Marwitz, 17th May 1811
I
"The reader will agree with us when we say that once barriers - which in a sense consist only in man's ignorance of what is possible - are torn down, they are not so easily set up again" this quote from Clausewitz's writings lies at the heart of my experience of reading Peter Paret's biography of the Prussian soldier and military theorist Clausewitz.
The challenge of the French Revolution, in combination with the Enlightenment, lies behind Paret's interpretation of Clausewitz. He is determined to avoid looking back on Clausewitz and interpreting him in the light of later events, the attempt is not to view him as in the Anselm Kiefer painting, looking from the present backwards, but rather to see him develop in pace with and in reaction to French victories, the educational theories of Pestalozzi, the collapse of the Frederickian Prussian state, and the ultra-conservative reactionary politics of post-1815 Europe.
We are with a young man from the wrong kind of family (too bourgeois, with too little influence who was inducted into the army at the age of twelve and who had been under fire in combat situations perhaps already by the age of thirteen .
Clausewitz through good fortune ends up with Scharnhorst, a man from a lower social background than Clausewitz who had a successful military career in the artillery before being poached by the Prussian government for whom he ran the first educational programme for officers, really with the aim of developing a general staff function .
Traditional tactical doctrine in the Prussian army stressed strict discipline and the virtue of taking the offensive. Providing education for officers, let alone for soldiers, was felt to potentially weaken combat effectiveness. As it happened a battlefield test at Jena and Auerstadt in 1806 resulted in Prussian forces being completely trounced by a far more flexible and better organised French army.
II
War is more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to the given case. As a total phenomenon its dominent tendencies always make war a remarkable trinity-composed of primordial violence, hatred, & enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance & probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; & of its element of subordination as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone.
The first of these three aspects mainly concerns the people, the second the commander and his army; the third the government pp394-5
Some years ago I came across Clausewitz for a second time not on account of war but because of business. There's been a bit of a fashion for things along the lines of Genghis Khan's tips on mergers and management, which while hopefully making money for needy publishers and insufficiently inebriated writers, may not offer the most helpful perspectives on contemporary economic activity. Clausewitz though might have something more interesting or at least something complementary to offer.
The first part of his above trinity is emotion. One the one hand there are beliefs that stress that the human experience is essentially rational, but an alternative tendency is to accept the centrality of feeling .
After the defeat of Prussia in 1806 both Clausewitz and Scharnhorst were involved in the Prussian Reform movement which aimed to create a resurgent Prussia that could take on the French through a top down reform process . One of the aims of the reforms was to produce intrinsic motivation among Prussians. This was a rerun on a larger scale of the debate over the role of education and broadly falls into McGregor's theory X and theory Y approaches. Traditionalists stressed dynastic loyalty: the serf served as a soldier in the regiment of his landowner who in turn served the dynasty. The reformers wanted to unleash intrinsic motivation, which they believed was something that had given the French an advantage since 1789 - people seeing themselves as citizens wanted to serve a cause they believed in. Paret points out that the recruitment statistics show that the reformers did not succeed over the years 1812-1814 in unleashing popular enthusiasm but suspects that their attempt played an important part in creating the idea of a popular nationalism that was to surface in 1848.
The second part of his trinity deal with his treatment of friction and genius. Friction in the sense of Murphy's Law - what ever can go wrong will go wrong with Genius as something like the ability to combine fancy book learnin' with experience and with a feel for geography. This is not about command and control but about flexibility. At the same time the word genius is a reminder that we are in an intellectual culture that is shifting from the Enlightenment to Romanticism via German Idealism, with a nod to Napoleon and the Eroica symphony in our ears. For me a strength of the book is how Paret seeks to put Clausewitz in a context of Kleist and Humboldt as much as Blücher.
Finally, and perhaps curiously, Clausewitz expects the role of Government to be rational or at least subject to reason: "war is not a mere act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political activity by other means" (p393)
This is very much a trinity of its time, a discussion of human activity that accepts and assumes the roundness of human nature. The role of emotion, intuition, genius and rationality all have to be acknowledged as they unfold in a dialectic between at least two parties in a reality which is not smooth but subject to friction.
III
But for Clausewitz's wife, Marie von Brühl, his major work "On War" would probably have remained unpublished. The two had a close intellectual relationship and it was Marie who prepared the manuscripts for publication after her husband's death from cholera in 1831. Had Clausewitz himself lived longer it seems unlikely that the manuscripts would have reached a more complete state as he seems to have been a chronic rewriter.
Paret's portrait is of a man who at once spent his lifetime fighting against and fearing a France resurgent after the French Revolution and whose thinking had been liberated by the same event, which did so much to crack apart the constrictions of Ancien Regime assumptions and patterns of thought. It is picture of a person in an organisation who supports change and yet lives to see the imposition of the ultra-conservativism of post-1815 Europe when the crowned heads of Europe did their best to pretend that they could reign as before without having to pay attention to the intrinsic motivation of their subjects or engage with them through constitutions and representation assemblies.
It is a rich portrayal of a slice of European intellectual history that comes to involve almost everybody from Fichte to Theodor Körner with the notable exception for Goethe. And to think that one of the reasons I picked this up was only because of the brief discussion of the Prussian Reform movement in Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions. What reading there is to discover when you let one book lead you to another.
February 24, 2011
If I could, I'd give this work 4.5 stars. Peter Paret does a superb job tracing how Cluasewitz's life and experiences influenced his seminal work, On War. This work adds to understanding this important philosophical work, and is very readable. Paret gives important background on the life of Clausewitz and how his experiences with Gneisenau, his time as a staff officer with the Russian army, and his contacts with the reformers of the Prussian army influenced his thoughts on the philosophy of war and the writing oif his treatise.
June 11, 2013
Excellent. The best biography of Clausewitz available in English (not to mention the best English reference for a great deal of untranslated German work), and it's not even close.
June 18, 2017
An excellent and thorough historical companion to Clausewitz's War.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews