Overview

On War by Karl von Clausewitz was first published in Germany after the Napoleonic Wars. As one of the most significant treatises on military strategy ever written, it is still prescribed at various military academies today. Its description of 'total war' and its insistence on the inevitability of combat and death have been blamed for the level of destruction involved in both the first and second world wars. Hew Strachan's accessible and readable book explains why and how On War was written, the impact that it made on conflict, and its continued significance in our world today.

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9781741148978

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Latest entry in the Books That Changed the World series, this one summarizing and analyzing what is arguably the most influential treatise on warfare ever written.Strachan (History of War/Oxford; The First World War, 2004, etc.) spends as much time agonizing over the difficulty of his task as he does executing it. The textual difficulties with Clausewitz are indeed formidable. As Strachan - a persistent and imaginative scholar - ably shows, On War is a work in progress: unfinished, self-contradictory, tentative in places, dogmatic in others, grounded firmly in its author's battle experiences during the Napoleonic wars. Strachan also notes that there are no great English translations of the multi-volume work, which first appeared in Berlin between 1832 and 1834, and that translators have disagreed on how to render some of Clausewitz's key terms. Unfortunately, this sort of close textual analysis and attendant hand-wringing go on far too long for the general reader. Some 30 pages in, Strachan finally introduces us to Clausewitz and swiftly summarizes his career. (He'd served in the Prussian army and even appeared at the margins of Waterloo.) This is interesting, but it's followed by more pages devoted to Clausewitz's style, diction and dialectics; these will no doubt appeal to fellow historians of war but will send many other readers to the Land of Nod. Once Strachan finally begins to conduct his tour of On War, interest once again revives. He explores the differences between strategy and tactics, considers Clausewitz's concept of absolute victory, examines the notions of escalation and balance of power. Although the author resists facile contemporary applications of the principles in On War, he does allude to Colin Powell's admiration for Clausewitz, and some later sentences about insurgencies seem pregnant with present relevance.Too often obfuscates rather than illuminates its celebrated subject. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Hew Strachan is Chichele Professor of Military History at the University of Oxford and a Life Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He is the author of the definitive three-volume history of the Great War, the first volume of which, To Arms, combined military and strategic perspective with cultural, diplomatic, economic, and social history, and represented the viewpoints of Germany, Britain and France with equal clarity. It was published in 2001 and described by the Guardian as 'a towering achievement' and by the Los Angeles Times as 'a masterpiece . . . sumptuous in the energy, clarity and breadth'.

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