Clausewitz, the son of a retired lieutenant who held a minor post in the

Prussian internal revenue service, first encountered war in 1793 as a

twelve-year-old lance corporal. In the previous year the French legislative
assembly had declared war on Austria, with whom Prussia had
recently concluded a defensive alliance. The French action was caused
less by considerations of national interest than by internal politics, but
it opened twenty-three years of conflict between revolutionary and later
imperial France and the rest of Europe. Aside from the Duke of Brunswick's
initial invasion, which came to a halt at Valmy, the Prussians did
reasonably well in a war to which the): never committed more than part
of their military resources. They defeated the French repeatedly in
Alsace and the Saar, and captured thousands of prisoners; when the
fighting ended in 1795,.they controlled the line of the Rhine. But these
achievements brought no political returns. As inight be expected, the war
with its exertions, bloodshed, and unspectacular outcome made a strong
impression on the young Clausewitz; he himself later wrote of its impact
on his emotions and thought. In the following years, while stationed in
a small provincial garrison, he drew some tentative conclusions from
these early experiences, three of which in particular were to have a lasting
influence: There was no single standard of excellence in war. The
rhetoric and policies of the French Republic, which proclaimed the coming
of a new age, by no means overpowered the armies of the ancien
rkgime. Mercenaries and forcibly enrolled peasants, led by officers whose
effectiveness still rested as much on aristocratic self-esteem as on professional
expertise, proved a match for the levke en masse. On the other
"ny interpretation of the genesis of Clausewitz's thought on war must rest not
only on his works on military theory and history but also on his extensive writings
on such subjects as education, politics, the theory of art, and on his correspondence.
Especially valuable analyses of aspects of his broad intellectual development are
H. Rothfels' Carl von Clause~vitzP: olitik und Krieg (Berlin, 1920), and E. Kessel's
introduction to C. v. Clausewitz, Strategie aus dem jahr 1804 (Hamburg, 1937).
Primary and secondary sources are discussed in detail in my book, Clausen'itz and
the State (New York, 1976). on which much of the following is based.

Clausewitz himself was still far from formulating a theory that explained
why and how the action of genius should be the finest rule. He
needed to develop additional analytic devices before he could advance
appreciably, and it might be added that he never fully overcame the difficulties
inherent in the dual role that he ascribed to the concept of
genius. The problems of theory, however, were not identical with the
problems of historical understanding; here attention to the emotions of
individuals and groups combined readily with belief in the particularity
of past epochs. Clausewitz's history of Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty
Years War, written about 1805, constitutes his initial effort to integrate
these two interpretive principles on a large scale.g It was a remarkably
successful attempt, and only the first of many historical studies he was
to write in the course of his life. Indeed, if quantity is the measure,
Clausewitz was more of a historian than a theorist. That he was innovative
in this discipline, too, tends to be forgotten-possibly because his
most original historical writings were not published for decades, and because
German historical scholarship soon developed and expanded the
vein which he had been among the first to work, while as a theorist he
remained without true successors. For a man of his time, he took an un-
7 IF. V. Clausewitz], "Bemerkungen," Neue Bellona, 9 (1805)~no . 3, pp. 276277.
8 On the Theory oft War," Book Two, Chapter 2, On War.
9 The study, "Gustav Adolphs Feldziige von 1630--1632,'' some hundred pages

long, was published in 1837 in volume 9 of Clausewitz's collected works, Hinterlassene

Werke des Generals Carl von Clausewitz, lo vols. (Berlin, 1832-1 837) .

develop these different types systematically. But he went further. As a

second major theme the revision would trace the political character of
war. The distinction he drew between the two themes is puzzling since
the previous paragraph declares that political motives determine whether
a conflict is limited or unlimited. Clausewitz did not explain his separation
of the dual nature of war and the political character of war, but
Eberhard Kessel has suggested a reason based on arguments and observations
that recur throughout Clausewitz's writings.lg War is influenced
by objective and by subjective political factors. The objective factors
comprise the specific characteristics and strengths of the state in question,
and the general characteristics of the age-political, economic,
technological, intellectual, and social. The subjective factors consist in
the free will of the leadership, which should conform to the objective
realities, but often does not. Put differently, Clausewitz separated the
political consequences of general conditions and those arising from individual
intelligence, emotions, genius. He may have sought analytic clarity
by linking his discussion of the objective political realities mainly to the
concept of the dual nature of war, and the issues of leadership mainly to
the concept of the political character of war. But however Clausewitz's
programmatic statement is interpreted, the reader of On War will find
himself in accord with its author if he gives the political motives and
19Kessel, "Zur Genesis der modernen Kriegslehre," pp. 415-417. See also the
same author's "Die doppelte Art des Krieges," Wehnvissenschaftliche Rundschau, 4
(July 19541, no. 7.