Anti-Imperialism, War
and Peace, Part 1
On War
Michael Howard, translator of Clausewitz’ work and author of
“Clausewitz”, opens his
Introduction with a quote from one Bernard Brodie, about Clausewitz: “His is not simply the greatest, but the
only great book about war;” and Howard records his own agreement with this
assessment.
If you can get it, Howard’s book helps readers a lot to
understand Clausewitz’ “On War” (Chapter 1, the
summarising chapter, is linked below) but in one respect Howard appears to be
mistaken. After describing Clausewitz’ “dialectic” (e.g. the relationship
between physical and moral forces; between historical knowledge and critical
judgement; between idea and manifestation; between “absolute” and “real” war;
between attack and defence; and between ends and means) Howard writes: “The dialectic was not Hegelian: it led to
no synthesis which itself conjured up its antithesis. Rather it was a
continuous interaction between two poles, each fully comprehensible only in
terms of the other.”
But it would seem to be perfectly Hegelian to conceive of such
a unity and struggle of opposites; and as to whether Clausewitz’s dialectic
lacked a forward dynamic, or not, is something that can be settled at once by
reading only a few pages. Whereupon it will be found that Clausewitz is surely
one of the most dynamic authors ever.
Clausewitz was ten years younger than Hegel, but died only
two days after Hegel on 16 November 1831. They were both victims of the same
cholera epidemic.
Since Hegel’s was the official philosophy of Prussia, and
Clausewitz was in charge of the Prussian War College in Berlin for twelve years,
while Hegel was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Berlin, it is
impossible to believe that Clausewitz was not familiar with Hegel’s ideas.
These were the same Hegelian ideas that seized the
imagination of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (both of whom spent time in
Berlin during the late 1830s to early 1840s) and upon which their thinking
relied for the rest of their lives. Clausewitz and Marxism are not far apart,
neither in their pedigree, nor in the philosophical structure of their
thinking.
Much is made, in the commentaries on Antonio Gramsci’s
20th-century writings, of the contrast between wars of manoeuvre and of
position. But the military breakthrough of Clausewitz’s lifetime was the French
revolutionary campaign against its neighbours, including Prussia
Clausewitz defined strategy and tactics as “the linking
together of separate battle engagements into a single whole, for the final
object of the war.” To define strategy in this way, as end, and tactics as
means, was a profound contribution for which we in South Africa
Equally as profound is the complex of thinking around
Clausewitz’ well-known understanding of war as an extension of politics, by
other means.
Not only does this mean that war is always and everywhere
subordinate to politics; but it also means that war (the breakdown of
negotiation and the resort to force) must, and can only, return the parties to
the negotiating table. War is an interlude of brutality between negotiations.
This was Clausewitz’s most famous insight.
To sum up: The world of 1848, when the Communist Manifesto
was first published, was already charged up with historical potential by great
preceding events, first and foremost among them the Great French Revolution and
the Napoleonic Wars that followed it; and also by great thinkers and writers,
foremost among them GWF Hegel and Carl von Clausewitz, whose
insights will assist us to understand the place of violence in the history of
revolution.
Please download and read the text via the following
link:
On War, Chapter 1, What is War?, 1827,
Clausewitz (7916 words)
Further
reading:
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