Clausewitz, Carl von

On War

On War is the first robust philosophical treatise to study war. It continues to maintain significant influence, sometimes more so outside the West than in the West. It was a favorite of Vladimir Lenin's and was relied upon by Mao Zedong. Clausewitz is known to have studied philosopher Immanuel Kant, and to perhaps have known philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, but there is no agreed upon philosophical influence in his study.

Clausewitz is best known for defining war as the continuation of politics by other means. He also maintains that war is the use of force on another to realize one's will. As such, there is a subordination of goals in war. There is the immediate goal of causing harm or destroying others property, but this is nested within the larger political goal that might have nothing to do with the military goal.

Clausewitz is sometimes cited as maintaining that in war, there are no laws. However, this is a misunderstanding of a more general point that he was making about the nature of war. Once a nation is committed to the use of war as a means to a political end, he argues, the rules governing this kind of behavior are not the same as those governing political actions independent of war. If a nation refuses to commit specific kinds of actions during war, then this becomes a source of weakness for that nation and a possible strength or advantage for the other side. The nation with such restrictions has placed a limit on its political goal by indicating in essence where it will stop in pursuit of this goal.

In a similar way, Clausewitz argues that the more powerful the motives for a war, the more this war will affect all aspects of the existence of the nations involved. The more powerful the motives, the more each nation will be given to the final destruction of its enemy. The limits in war are therefore relative to these initial motives for the war, and these in turn place restraint on the extent to which a nation will act to achieve its goal.

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