But even in the years of greatest challenge Clausewitz recognized that the demand of absolute or utmost violence, though logically valid, was rarely satisfied in reality. Absolute war was a fiction, an abstraction that served to unify all military phenomena and helped make their theoretical treatment possible. In practice the use of force tended to be limited. The power of friction reduced the abstract absolute to the modifications it assumed in reality. The major, unrevised part of On War is dominated by the mutually clarifying dialectical relationship between absolute and real war.
