Clausewitz is not as some misinterpretations suggest a philosopher of total war. An analysis of his hermeneutical key presented in the first chapter of the first book of 'On War' makes it clear that there is a crucial distinction between his pure abstract concept of war - the notion of absolute war - and his theory of real war, where the irrationality ofviolence and the force of the military will, are subjected to political rationality. According to Clausewitz politicians carry the (...) ultimate responsibility in determining the ends of war, and this can only be done after a thorough appraisal of national and international realities. One of the consequences of his position is that the military and political levels are not, as A. Rapoport suggests, interchangeable but in a subordinate position. Military leaders should always follow the logic of politics, politicians however should not neglect the grammar of war. Despite some texts that might suggest the contrary, Clausewitz held a clear option for a defensive policy. Value judgments are left to philosophers. (shrink)

The work of Carl von Clausewitz Clausewitz, Carl von, [1832] 1976. On War, Michael Howard, and Peter Paret, eds. and trans. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar] continues to provoke heated debate. For some scholars, Clausewitz's On War remains indispensable to serious thought on the resort to war in the modern period. Others, however, see Clausewitz's work as either outdated, or a morally repellent argument for unlimited, unrestrained and brutal warfare. This essay argues not only that Clausewitz's (...) work continues to be relevant to discussions on the use of armed force, but also that On War provides a framework for ethical reflection on war and its conduct. Two main preoccupations of western military academies and staff colleges—Clausewitz on the one hand, and the just war tradition on the other—can complement, rather than rival each other. On War creates a space for reflection on the use of armed force, and for that reason if no other, should still be considered an important resource for contemporary students and practitioners of strategy. (shrink)

Intellectual eminence apart, what did Kant, Clausewitz, Marx and Engels, and Tolstoy have in common? Professor Gallic argues that they made contributions to 'international theory' - to the understanding of the character and causes of war and of the possibility of peace between nations - which were of unrivalled originality in their own times and remain of undiminished importance in ours. But these contributions have been either ignored or much misunderstood ; chiefly because, as with all intellectual efforts in unexplored (...) fields, they were often imperfectly expressed, and were also overshadowed by their author's more striking achievements. Professor Gallic has sorted out, compared and contrasted, criticised and re-phrased the teachings of his chosen authors on peace and war. (shrink)

For the last two centuries “Vom Kriege” has been used to justify two different kinds of totalitarianisms: Marxism-Leninism and Nazism. However, during the 1950s liberal thinking also made use of that work. In line with liberal thinking, Raymond Aron’s “Penser la Guerre, Clausewitz” presents Clausewitz’s work as moderate and liberal and underplays its totalitarian connections.

The article studies the influence of the ideological heritage of the Prussian war theorist Carl von Clausewitz on the works, worldview, and political views of the French researcher Raymond Aron. For a long time, in France the value and relevance of Clausewitz’s theory of war was acknowledged only in the light of specialized military issues. Aron was one of the first in the country to recognize the value and methodological potential of Clausewitz’s political philosophy of war for the understanding (...) of the preparation and usage of military force, maintenance of national and international security, and Aron made efforts to popularize the Prussian theorist’s doctrine. The analysis of Aron’s works, in which he appeals to Clausewitz and the theory of war, has revealed the evolution that occurred in attitude towards the ideological heritage of the Prussian philosopher. Clausewitz’s works, which were primarily a source of citation for Aron at first, turned into the methodological framework for a philosophical conceptualization of war and international relations, in particular in the nuclear era. Based on the results of a thorough study of Clausewitz’s works and a deep reflection on his legacy, Aron in his later years wrote a two-volume work about him, seeing the Prussian thinker primarily as a political philosopher of war. An important reason for the interest of the French scholar was the personality and biography of Clausewitz himself: his character, relations with authorities, political position, acceptance by contemporaries, and the fate of his doctrine. In this regard, Aron’s understanding of Clausewitz is emotionally loaded, and the book about him significantly differs from Aron’s other works by the author’s personal attitude. The comprehension of Clausewitz and his ideological heritage encouraged Aron’s self-reflection and change of self-identification, a better understanding of the military culture of Germany and France. The article concludes on the importance of further conceptualization and development of the scientific legacy of Clausewitz and Aron. (shrink)

Two centuries after Carl von Clausewitz wrote On War, it lines the shelves of military colleges around the world and even showed up in an Al Qaeda hideout. Though it has shaped much of the common parlance on the subject, On War is perceived by many as a “metaphysical fog,” widely known but hardly read. In War as Paradox, Youri Cormier lifts the fog on this iconic work by explaining its philosophical underpinnings. Building up a genealogy of dialectical war (...) theory and integrating Hegel with Clausewitz as a co-founders of the method, Cormier uncovers a common logic that shaped the fighting doctrines and ethics of modern war. He explains how Hegel and Clausewitz converged on method, but nonetheless arrived at opposite ethics and military doctrines. Ultimately, Cormier seeks out the limits to dialectical war theory and explores the greater paradoxes the method reveals: can so-called “rational” theories of war hold up under the pressures of irrational propositions, such as lone-wolf attacks, the circular logic of a “war to end all wars,” or the apparent folly of mutually assured destruction? Since the Second World War, commentators have described war as obsolete. War as Paradox argues that dialectical war theory may be the key to understanding why, despite this, it continues. (shrink)

My thoughts on the relationship between war and politics will follow three distinct steps. First off, in an exposition of the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz and German political philosopher Carl Schmitt, I will attempt to illustrate that politics, as such, is rooted in war and that the latter can never be understood as a mere instrument of the former. A second step will highlight, using above all Schmitt, traditional manifestations of the religious containment of war, with (...) particular emphasis on the interconnectedness of duels and divine judgment. And finally, this essay will delve into Schmitt's desperate wrangling with how biblical revelation effectuated a dissolution of conventional law, and how... (shrink)

This paper attempts to understand the nature of guerrilla warfare as taught by T.E. Lawrence in light of Clausewitz and Liddell Hart.

ABSTRACTThis article provides the first comprehensive and chronological analysis of Carl Schmitt’s reception of Carl von Clausewitz. While earlier scholarship has mostly stressed Schmitt’s shift from Clausewitzian ‘instrumentality’ to an ‘existential’ view of war, I note some inherent difficulties in this dichotomy and instead promote the parallel distinction between two argument types: those of containment and intensification. Schmitt theorized both limited political war and the intensification of war out of traditional bounds, and focusing on one should not eclipse (...) the other. Further, both elements are identifiable already in Clausewitz. I analyse Schmitt’s oscillation between containment and intensification arguments chronologically from the mid-1920s to the 1960s. Despite sometimes nominally rejecting Clausewitz’s famous thesis of war as the continuation of politics, Schmitt nevertheless affirmed the idea of war’s political nature. I conclude that Schmitt’s view can be read as a radicalized version of the Clausewitzian political theory of war rather than a strict deviation from it. This becomes evident as soon as we place Schmitt’s partly incoherent observations on Clausewitz in their argumentative contexts. (shrink)

My paper aims to outline the concept of the pathic foundation of political institutions. I depart from the observation of a lack of clarity concerning the resources of institutional stability in the work of Chantal Mouffe and the proponents of agonistic democracy. Drawing from the ideas of Claude Lefort and Carl von Clausewitz, I sketch the idea that the experience of confict itself generates the moral and epistemic groundings that legitimize and stabilize its institutional regulations. It is within the (...) pathic experience of exhaustion in the face of the results of escalating confict that a common ground of legitimacy is reached. The bulk of my paper is dedicated to the phenomenological analysis of the foundational pathic experience, of the pathic disposition of political subjectivity resulting from it, and of its institutional manifestations. (shrink)

Recent experimental work suggests that the concept of contextual fields should be generalized to allow the modulation of local information extraction by both external and internal context. The external context relates to the coherent information of the stimulus; the internal context refers to the parts of this information which are relevant for behavior. This dual interaction, present at every level of the hierarchy, requires a fundamental unit of processing more complex than a single neuron appears today. We argue that the (...) cortical column supplies the required mechanisms for a separate top-down and bottom-up processing and allows for interaction without destructive cross-talk. This flexibility might explain why the same basic architecture of a cortical column is used in the whole isocortex. (shrink)

Is it possible to preserve national security through ethical policies? Richard Ned Lebow seeks to show that ethics are actually essential to the national interest. Recapturing the wisdom of classical realism through a close reading of the texts of Thucydides, Clausewitz and Hans Morgenthau, Lebow argues that, unlike many modern realists, classic realists saw close links between domestic and international politics, and between interests and ethics. Lebow uses this analysis to offer a powerful critique of post-Cold War American foreign policy. (...) He also develops an ontological foundation for ethics and makes the case for an alternate ontology for social science based on Greek tragedy's understanding of life and politics. This is a topical and accessible book, written by a leading scholar in the field. (shrink)

The nineteenth-century strategist Carl von Clausewitz describes “fog” and “friction” as fundamental features of war. Military leverage of sophisticated information technology in the twenty-first century has improved some tactical operations but has not lifted the fog of war, in part, because the means for reducing uncertainty create new forms of it. Drawing on active duty experience with an American special operations task force in Western Iraq from 2007 to 2008, this article traces the targeting processes used to “find, fix, (...) and finish” alleged insurgents. In this case they did not clarify the political reality of Anbar province but rather reinforced a parochial worldview informed by the Naval Special Warfare community. The unit focused on the performance of “direct action” raids during a period in which “indirect action” engagement with the local population was arguably more appropriate for the strategic circumstances. The concept of “data friction”, therefore, can be understood not simply as a form of resistance within a sociotechnical system but also as a form of traction that enables practitioners to construct representations of the world that amplify their own biases. (shrink)

El trabajo analiza el estatuto de los afectos en los procesos de subjetivación política atendiendo al debate sobre el populismo y sobre la obra de Ernesto Laclau. Para ello apela a la teoría de la guerra moderna de Nicolás Maquiavelo y de Carl von Clausewitz abonando, a su vez, una comprensión más acabada sobre el rol de los afectos en la gestación de un grupo o unidad política. Sin embargo, en el artículo se analiza por qué la teoría de (...) la guerra debe ser inscripta en una reflexión política de más largo alcance que se pregunte, a su vez, por la organización afectiva y sus niveles de heterogeneidad inerradicables. En ese marco, es que se apela a la teoría psicoanalítica de raigambre lacaniana. (shrink)

This book pursues the problem of whether violence can be understood to be constitutive of its own sense or meaning, as opposed to being merely instrumental. Dodd draws on the resources of phenomenological philosophy, and takes the form of a series of dialogues between figures both inside and outside of this tradition. The central figures considered include Carl von Clausewitz, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernst Jünger, and Martin Heidegger, and the study concludes with an analysis of (...) the philosophy of Jan Patocka. (shrink)

This book pursues the problem of whether violence can be understood to be constitutive of its own sense or meaning, as opposed to being merely instrumental. Dodd draws on the resources of phenomenological philosophy, and takes the form of a series of dialogues between figures both inside and outside of this tradition. The central figures considered include Carl von Clausewitz, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernst Jünger, and Martin Heidegger, and the study concludes with an analysis of (...) the philosophy of Jan Patocka. (shrink)

Is something like a true "philosophy of war"—understood as a coherent system of ideas, or a clearly articulated theoretical posture adequate to fully addressing the enduring chal-lenges of war on a properly philosophical register—at all possible? What follows is an attempt to outline, in four problems, the parameters of any future critique of a philosophy of war: the problem of categories, the problem of representation, the problem of violence, and finally the problem of peace. It is argued that within each (...) horizon delimited by these four problems philosophy encounters a potential limit, one that raises fundamental doubts regarding the cogency of any philosophy of war considered as a systematic enterprise. (shrink)

In _Battling to the End _René Girard engages Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian military theoretician who wrote _On War_. Clausewitz, who has been critiqued by military strategists, political scientists, and philosophers, famously postulated that "War is the continuation of politics by other means." He also seemed to believe that governments could constrain war. Clausewitz, a firsthand witness to the Napoleonic Wars, understood the nature of modern warfare. Far from controlling violence, politics follows in war's wake: the means of war (...) have become its ends. René Girard shows us a Clausewitz who is a fascinated witness of history's acceleration. Haunted by the French-German conflict, Clausewitz clarifies more than anyone else the development that would ravage Europe. _Battling to the End _pushes aside the taboo that prevents us from seeing that the apocalypse has begun. Human violence is escaping our control; today it threatens the entire planet. (shrink)

The University of Greenwich Generator is setting sail on a thrilling new journey of knowledge exchange with the launch of its first-ever podcast the Navigator. Crafted in collaboration with Lucien von Schomberg, Senior Lecturer in Creativity and Innovation at Greenwich Business School it promises to be an exciting platform for innovation, entrepreneurship, and thought-provoking conversation. The podcast aims to bridge the gap between academic insights and real-world issues in an easily digestible way. Through engaging conversations, listeners can expect to gain (...) valuable knowledge from industry leaders and academic experts alike. Operating on three key principles—knowledge communication, knowledge exchange, and knowledge creation—this podcast embodies the essence of the Generator's mission, inspiring, educating and fostering collaboration. The first episode explores the limitless potential of AI in today's world, unravelling its impact on business, education, and society. Guests share their profound insights, experiences, and practical advice, shedding light on how AI is shaping our future. The episode delved deep into the ethical implications but also vast potential of using AI in the future and how it will affect both education and the wider world. The episode boasts an impressive lineup of inaugural guests, including Jane Harrington, the Vice-Chancellor of The University of Greenwich, Carl Thomas, Enterprise Advisor, and founder of Audiowings, Ghislaine Boddington, Professor in Digital Immersion, and Neil Saunders, Senior Lecturer in Mathematical Sciences. Together, these guests provide diverse perspectives on the future of AI at the university and beyond. (shrink)

At the beginning of the 19. century the call for a general reform of the State rose in Prussia: after the collapse of the German Empire in 1806, the need for reform became still more pressing. A fundamental part of this renovation process was the reform of the Prussian army, to which men like Clausewitz, the general von Scharnhorst, the war ministers von Stein and later von Boyen contributed. All they were convinced that a new way of making war was (...) necessary for freeing Prussia from the French invader: only that the military reform should be founded on a spiritual renovation of the political and military life. In particular, a new conception of the soldier as human being and of the war as spiritual event should be established and trained by means of a new organization of the military forces and of the cultivation of a shared national feeling. The purpose of the present essay is to point out the position of Fichte towards both the problems connected to the war, the Napoleonic invasion and the crisis of the traditional State and the proposals formulated by the reform party in order to solve those problems. In this way it is possible to achieve a better comprehension of Fichte’s political thought in the last period of his life, the so called “national” period, by highlighting the correspondences existing between his thought and the political context of his time.Am Anfang des xix. Jahrhunderts stand Preu.en im Zentrum einer gewaltigen Reformbewegung, die jeden Bereich des staatlichen Lebens neu gestalten wollte. Nach dem Sturz des Reiches im Jahre 1806, als das Reformbedurfnis des Staates mit noch gro.erer Dringlichkeit empfunden wurde, erwarb die Reform des Heeres eine zentrale Stelle. Zu dieser trugen Personlichkeiten bei wie Carl von Clausewitz und der General von Scharnhorst in Zusammenarbeit mit den Ministern von Stein und spater Hermann von Boyen. Die ihrem Engagement zugrunde liegende Uberzeugung war es, dass eine neue Art der Kriegsfuhrung unausweichlich, jedoch nur auf der Basis einer neu gedachten Anthropologie zu verwirklichen sei. In dem Ma.e, in dem die Reformbewegung sich nicht auf eine verwaltungsorientierte Neugestaltung des Staates bzw. des Heeres beschrankte, sondern auf einer grundlegenden Erneuerung des nationalen Geistes beruhen sollte, muss sie in einen weiteren, nicht nur politischen, sondern in erster Linie geistigen, kulturellen und philosophischen Zusammenhang eingeordnet werden. Der vorliegende Beitrag setzt sich zum Ziel, die Stellung Fichtes im Zusammenhang der preu.ischen Reformbewegung hervorzuheben, mit der Absicht, die gegenseitigen Einflusse und die Ubereinstimmungen zwischen Fichtes politischen und padagogischen Ansichten einerseits und dem Reformgeist, seinen politischen Anspruchen und militarischen Vorschlagen andererseits klar herauszustellen. (shrink)

Scientists cannot take a neutral position regarding the way progress evolves. The environment, social justice and international order are the key factors for constructing peace.

This is the first English translation of the majority of Fichte’s 1807 essay on Machiavelli, which has been hailed as a masterpiece and was important for the development of German idealist political thought, as well as for its reception by figures such as Carl von Clausewitz, Max Weber, Leo Strauss, and Carl Schmitt. Fichte’s essay attempts to resuscitate Machiavelli as a legitimate political thinker and an “honest, reasonable, and meritorious man.” It tacitly critiques Napoleon, who was occupying Prussia (...) when Fichte composed the piece, and calls on the Germans to resist the French. And some have argued that it marks a shift in Fichte’s political thought toward a more realist position. (shrink)

This is the first English translation of the majority of Fichte’s 1807 essay on Machiavelli, which has been hailed as a masterpiece and was important for the development of German idealist political thought, as well as for its reception by figures such as Carl von Clausewitz, Max Weber, Leo Strauss, and Carl Schmitt. Fichte’s essay attempts to resuscitate Machiavelli as a legitimate political thinker and an “honest, reasonable, and meritorious man.” It tacitly critiques Napoleon, who was occupying Prussia (...) when Fichte composed the piece, and calls on the Germans to resist the French. And some have argued that it marks a shift in Fichte’s political thought toward a more realist position. (shrink)

In children experiencing pain, the study of the social context of facial expressions might help to evaluate evolutionary and conditioning hypotheses of behavioural development. Social motivations and influences may be complex, as seen in studies of children having their ears pierced, and in studies of everyday pain in children. A study of opposing predictions of the long-term effects of parental caregiving is suggested.