Clausewitz

Philosopher of War

Raymond Aron

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000549348
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In this edition, originally published in 1983, the late Professor Raymond Aron, one of France's most distinguished social scientists, presented a major re-evaluation of Carl von Clausewitz, 'the genius of war'. He sees in Clausewitz a political philosopher of major importance, whose impact and significance permeate many facets of modern society. Yet Clausewitz's reputation was entirely posthumous, for his great work, On War, was published after his death, and in his lifetime he achieved only a limited reputation as a military thinker and planner. Even today he is more often quoted than closely read.

Aron begins by elucidating the complexity of Clausewitz's thought and by describing his main ideas. He gives an account of the successive phases in the development of On War, and traces the different interpretations of Clausewitz's doctrine in Germany, in France and in Soviet Russia. Finally, Aron analyses many aspects of the present world using the concepts of Clausewitz, and is therefore able to examine such modern phenomena as the theory of the nuclear deterrent and 'total war' in Clausewitzian terms.

This is a book of piercing insights by a writer of world-wide reputation, who used the Clausewitz world-view as a means of political analysis. It is thus still of great importance and interest to contemporary historians and to all who are concerned with military and political affairs.

Part I From Writer to Writings

The Treatise comprises three of the ten volumes of the Hinterlassene Werke. If the seven other volumes of correspondence, political articles and the course on guerilla warfare are added to it, the major work only forms a fragment of the writings of Clausewitz. Yet, for reasons which will immediately become apparent, I intend particularly to clarify and elucidate the Treatise.

I have chosen a seemingly circuitous route. Some will say that the third part, The Theoretical Scheme’, would have been better placed at the beginning. In fact, it is the very logic of my undertaking that has led me to the structure which I have ultimately adopted.

Clausewitz only published unsigned articles in his lifetime, he never perfected the Treatise and he wrote, before sealing the manuscript, that the latter in its existing form lent itself to all sorts of misunderstandings. Consequently, I believe it suitable in the first instance to follow the stages of his thought, not only before 1815, but also during the years 1816 to 1830. The method adopted is not a simple one for the reader who suddenly, without preparation, is asked to penetrate Clausewitz’s universe. In particular, the first paragraphs of Chapter 3 require, in their expounding of the final thesis, close attention. The significance of these paragraphs will become clearer to the reader who is willing to return to them having read to the end of Part III of this work.

The order which I have followed in the account, or commentary, does have one limitation. Since, as I believe, Clausewitz only fully mastered his own system at the time when he wrote the first chapter of Book I, it is advisable to read and interpret the whole in the light of what I sometimes call the final synthesis or intellectual testament. In the final note, drawn up before resigning his appointment as director of the military academy, he himself expressly indicated that he only felt satisfied with the first chapter of Book I. I therefore had to retrace fully the broad lines of the evolution of Clausewitz’s thought before analysing the ‘dialectic’ of ‘The Theoretical Scheme’.

On the whole, I kept strictly to the texts themselves and to the military writers known by Clausewitz, and I willingly disregarded the commentators except to set their interpretations against mine. I made only one exception which seemed to me indispensable, even though I appreciate the drawbacks, notably the ‘strategic debate’ which was started by Hans Delbrück. He inextricably threw into confusion a discussion on the thought of Clausewitz with a debate on the two kinds of war or strategy. Without referring to it I could not discuss the Foreword of 1827. Nor could I report the analysis of the strategic debate without coming back to Clausewitz himself. Any other solution would only have led to more complications than the one I finally chose.

In Parts II and III, I did not intend to reproduce in detail Clausewitz’s strategic or tactical ideas. In particular, I have hardly used the ‘Outline of a Theory of Combat or Tactics’. This text, entirely neglected by French readers before 1914, would have prevented them from making errors. As my main purpose is to draw out the way of thinking and, so to speak, the mental structure of Clausewitz, this text supplies almost nothing which cannot be found in the Treatise itself. The method is at once conceptual and empirical.

The following account – analysis and commentary – does not aim to replace the actual reading of the Treatise but to make it easier. Its aim is to guide the reader in his exploration of a text notoriously irksome for all but military readers. I trust it will not provoke in its turn as many misunderstandings! Anyway, that danger is now more remote than in the past as Clausewitz has found his natural home: the universities.

Chapter 1The Life of Clausewitz

Carl von Clausewitz, the fourth son of Friedrich Gabriel Clausewitz, entered the Prussian army at the age of 12, in 1792, as a Fahnenjunker (ensign). He died in 1831, after reaching the rank of general at the end of a brilliant career. He knew of no existence other than that of the soldier, he received no teaching other than that of the military academy, where, admitted in the autumn of 1801, he met Scharnhorst, his spiritual father. He owed his education to extensive reading and reflection.

Between 1792 and 1831, Carl von Clausewitz passed, with his generation, through two epochs of history. First, the Europe of the wars of the Revolution and Empire – from 1793-4 as a 13-year-old soldier, until the campaign of 1815 when as colonel he served as chief of staff to General von Thielmann who was commandant of the Prussian corps positioned opposite Grouchy after the battle of Ligny. Then, the Europe of the peace of the Holy Alliance which, while offering officers in search of exploits few opportunities, encouraged reflection on the lessons for the future, to be drawn from recent events.

Inseparable from mainstream history, Clausewitz’s life also divides into two periods: one devoted above all to action and the other to writing. Indeed, the young officer measured himself against theoreticians while he attended the military academy and while he had served as aide-de-camp to Prince August. The ‘Strategy’ of 1804 bears witness to an astonishing maturity of mind, and many of the themes or methods characteristic of the Treatise appear in it. In 1810-11, he taught for two years in Berlin, at the establishment where he had met his master during a course on guerilla warfare. He was made responsible for the military education of the crown prince (1810-12). This led him to write a memoir, dated 1811, before leaving the service of the king to fight Napoleon in Russia. This memoir helps us to follow the development of his thought between the first notes of 1804 and the Treatise. However, after 1815, Clausewitz probably did not consider that circumstances excluded him from action for good. In the wake of the French Revolution of 1830 and the Polish Revolt, having resigned the directorate of the military academy, Clausewitz was not only appointed inspector general of artillery, he was also appointed chief of staff to Field Marshal von Gneisenau, then in command of the Prussian army on the eastern front. He had lost none of the passions against the French which had animated him since his childhood, nor had he lost his taste for the plans of campaign which were buried in the drawers in his bureau.

I accept the reservations which the biographers of Clausewitz express about the distinction between the two periods: Geist und Tat (to adopt the title of a small volume of miscellany published by W.M. Schering). The soldier never separated thought and action and, similarly, he did not separate war from politics nor understanding from sensibility. If, despite this, I maintain the distinction in a limited sense, it is because circumstances have so dictated, creating a situation comparable to that in which Thucydides or Machiavelli wrote their works or, at any rate, their principal works. It seems that we owe the great books on action to men of action whom fate deprived of their crowning achievement, men who arrived at a subtle blend of engagement and detachment which left them capable of recognizing the constraints and shackles of the soldier or the politician and also capable of looking from outside, not indifferently but calmly, at the irony of fate and the unforeseeable play of forces that no will can control. Philosophy presents an image of pessimism. For what, may one ask, makes victories precarious and the state unstable? Whoever devotes himself to the state chooses to build sandcastles. There remains for him only the hope of Thucydides or that of Clausewitz: ‘My ambition was to write a book which could not be forgotten after two or three years but which could be taken up several times when required by those who take an interest in this subject.’

Can one compare Vom Kriege with the Peloponnesian War? Indeed one can, but only to contrast them. Thucydides related the great war and inserted, even in the narrative, the lessons which he drew from it. The interpretation of men and events constitutes the articulation of the narrative itself. Clausewitz related several of Napoleon’s campaigns: the Treatise uses the narratives to raise a conceptual edifice, a theory of strategy. To the extent that this theory is based on historic experience and tends to pass beyond it in order to formulate eternally true or valid propositions, it persuades the interpreter to bring to mind the personal experience of the theoretician and the material data which the latter did not recall on each occasion because he assumed they were known.

It seems to me both impossible and fruitless to write a political and military account of the wars of the Revolution and Empire. It seems equally futile to narrate once more the Prussian collapse after Jena, the work of the Reformers, the alliance with Napoleon in 1812, the War of Liberation after the disaster of the Grande Armée and the participation of the revived Prussian troops in the battles of 1814 and 1815. Nor do I intend to offer in a single chapter a summary biography of Clausewitz. By letting him speak, by using and abusing fragments of his correspondence and occasional writings, I hope to help the reader to understand the man, his twofold passion, the stages of his career, his tribulations, his farsightedness. Followers of pure theory will judge this biographical sketch unproductive. Perhaps they are right; let them – if they find the concept of abstract or absolute war fascinating, or if Marie von Brühl bores them – jump to the following chapter.

1 Origins and personality. Clausewitz and Marie von Brühl

The father of Clausewitz, Friedrich Gabriel Clausewitz – no ‘von’ – was born on 13 February 1740 in Halle, the only son of the Professor Benedictus Gottlieb Clausewitz’s second marriage. At the age of 9, following the death of his father, he was brought up by the second husband of his mother, Major von der Hundt. The latter made him recognize a nobility which his parents and grandparents, professors of theology and philosophy or pastors, had renounced. This claim to nobility was based on connections with a Freiherr von Clausewitz of Silesia whose origins could be traced back to the end of the seventeenth century. Recent research, particularly that of E. Kessel, shows that the family had no right to nobility at all. Friedrich Gabriel Clausewitz served in the army of Frederick II when the latter, during the Seven Years’ War, must have relaxed the rule by which only ‘blue blood’ authorized entry to the officer corps. Once peace had returned, according to the version given by Carl, an injury to his hand forced him to leave the service. Deprived of his uniform, he occupied a mediocre position in fiscal administration, tied body and soul to the institution which had dismissed him. If Carl is to be believed, his father’s comrades continued to frequent the house of the old officer who reacted to personal frustration with an exaggerated patriotism and spirit of militarism. He brought up his four sons in veneration of Frederick II of Prussia and of the army. Three of them chose a career in arms, surviving the wars to end up as generals. Carl himself, despite the moroseness which darkened his last years, had a fast-moving career; major at 30, colonel at 34, general at 38.

German authors have led erudite researches into the origins of the family; some have also raised the question which arises from the psychology of inscrutabilities: was the personality of Carl marked by an uncertain ancestry? Let us read the letter written to his fiancee on 13 December 1806, after the disastrous defeat at Jena in October:

After careful thought, dear Marie, it seems to me that it would be better to bring to an end now, in this letter, the subject of conversation that we have recently broached. This subject is only painful in that circumstances prevent me from saying everything, which cannot be done in a letter. I was going to wait until later before speaking to you about it. There was no reason for it, it was a feeling I had: there are so many things that have to be left to uncertain intuitive perception. Now, the way you spoke to me about it and the trustful intimacy of our souls, growing stronger day by day, makes me happy to tell you everything now.

Clausewitz then wrote that his father descended from a noble family from Upper Silesia whose last representative lived at Jagerndorf at the end of the seventeenth century. The latter’s children ‘seem to have adopted the status of commoner, since my grandfather was a professor at the university of Halle’. The family no longer dreamt of nobility,

only my father, the youngest of the family, was of a different opinion. Anxious not to lose the definitive right to our privileges, he wrote to Frederick the Great and, declaring his noble status, he applied for a military post which suited his many qualities. The king, giving effect to his request, drafted him to the Nassau regiment.

Now we come to the official version: the father takes part in the Seven Years’ War; injured in the right hand, he is forced to leave the army. The elder son is studying theology and experiences such aversion for his situation that, too old to become a soldier, he enters the civil service. The fate of the three other sons is decided by the father himself. Writing to the king he ensures that, in Carl’s words,

it is thus that the three younger sons, as we were, owe our enlistment to our status as gentlemen; my third brother and myself found ourselves in a regiment (bearing the name Prince Ferdinand) where only members of the nobility were admitted. Now since we had a parentage which did not seem to be of noble origin, we quite naturally came to fear that, if discovered, we should be taken for usurpers. I cannot say how repugnant this idea was to us, for we well knew that there was not a single drop of mendacious blood in us. In fact, we did not have the least apprehension: to whoever was ill-advised enough to challenge our title to nobility, we would have replied with the sword which sheltered us from complete humiliation; but in relations which needed more tact, every allusion to a usurpation was unbearable for us while a detailed exposition of circumstances could not brush it aside (as at this moment) and show us as free from all suspicion as we felt from the bottom of our heart.

Carl finally explains that his father had wanted to ask the king for confirmation of his nobility, that his friends, Rüchel in particular, had dissuaded him, arguing that nobody doubted it. The events of the war diverted them further from this step. Carl finally ends with this confession:

From the moment that our relations made me envisage the possibility that you would one day be mine, this matter began to weigh on my heart; but, knowing that the strength of the bond that unites us would not fail to give me an opportunity to explain myself in detail, I was not too worried with regard to you even though it was always painful to raise the subject only to gloss over it.

I swear that the idea of passing as a usurper or an adventurer and the idea that I could be suspected of being ashamed of my parentage, all people of extreme probity, hurt me to the depths of my heart, like pointed arrows, rousing in me the most unspeakable of feelings. You could hardly have had the first of these ideas; but it is possible that you might have been unable to defend yourself against the other at some stage. I hope, Marie, that you are also now freed from this idea and that you again belong to me with all your soul and with a relieved soul. I am too moved now to add anything else, let me leave it there. Tomorrow, I hope that I shall see you again, that I shall see your exquisite face, your heavenly face.

The letter bears witness to an ill-restrained emotion, to insoluble contradictions, to a wounded pride. To be sure, Carl does not want to doubt that his father is connected with the family from Upper Silesia whose nobility has, so to speak, fallen into desuetude by the conversions of two generations of professors to the bourgeois state. The letter, vibrant with love and suffering, betrays doubt in the denial of doubt. Doubt and denial were equally distressing for Clausewitz who, according to his own scale of values, should have brushed aside this obsession with ‘blue blood’ that did not run in the veins of Scharnhorst. Yet, in the Prussian army of the nineteenth century, which remained largely unchanged until the beginning of the next century, Clausewitz could not show indifference to his ancestry without passing as a cavalier of fortune, or without escaping from the morality of the Prussian universe, in whose light his father had raised his three younger sons. To doubt his nobility would mean accusing his father, doubting his word. Marie von Brühl herself belonged to a great Saxon family of imperial nobility. How could Marie’s mother easily consent to marriage with this poor officer if he did not even possess a legitimate nobility and at the same time was guilty of usurping an officer’s rank.

I have lingered for a few moments on this letter, a witness to a worried soul, deprived of inner peace to his last day. This uncertain nobility – bastardy in the words of Sartre – left its mark on the personality where the taste for concepts and abstract constructions, proper for theologians, is found in the theoretician. After all, in addition to a philosopher of war, Clausewitz could be called a theologian of war. He questions the existence of war no more than the theologian questions the existence of God. He puts in a rigorous form the ideas which involve the nature of the reality or of the idea to a greater or lesser extent confused.

In spite of his obscure origins, a peculiar destiny compelled Carl to spend the greater part of his life, from 1803, in the company of the illustrious. Following his return from the French campaign (1793-4), he was garrisoned for eight years in the small town of Neu-Ruppin – eight years in which the young lieutenant schooled himself to pass the entrance examination of the military academy. The two years in Berlin, at the academy, mark a turning point. Emerging as top of his year, he became, on the recommendation of Scharnhorst, aide-de-camp to Prince A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction to Parts I, II and III
• Part I. From Writer to Writings
• Part II. The Dialectic
• Part III. The Theoretical Scheme
• Part IV. Defender or Prosecutor?
• Part V. The Nuclear Age: The Gamble of Reason
• Epilogue: Goodbye to Arms, or the Great Illusion
• Index