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Articles

Clausewitz and People’s War

Pages 450-456 | Published online: 11 Jan 2017
 

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. by Richard Crawley and ed. by Robert B. Strassler, in The Landmark Thucydides (New York: Free Press, 1996), Bk 1.22, 16. Carl von Clausewitz, ‘Author’s Comment’ and ‘Note of 10 July 1827,’ in Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton UP 1976 [1832]), 63,69–70.

2 Clausewitz, On War, Bk. I, Ch. 1, 75, 89.

3 Most of Clausewitz’s work is available in Werner Hahlweg, Carl von Clausewitz: Schriften – Aufsätze – Studien – Briefe (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1966) 2 Vols.

4 For claims of Clausewitz’s irrelevance in the contemporary era, see Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: Free Press 1991); Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford University Press 1999), Ch. 2; John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Knopf 1993).

5 Christopher Daase and James W. Davis (eds.), Clausewitz on Small War (Oxford UK: Oxford UP 2015). Subsequent references to these four works are to the Daase and Davis translations.

6 Clausewitz, ‘Lectures’, 52, 167.

7 Hew Strachan, ‘Clausewitz and the Dialectics of War’, in Hew Strachan and Andreas Herberg-Rothe (eds.), Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford UP 2007), 17.

8 Clausewitz, ‘Lectures’, 21.

9 Beatrice Heuser, ‘Small Wars in the Age of Clausewitz: The Watershed Between Partisan War and People s War’, Journal of Strategic Studies 33/1 (2010), 139–62.

10 Clausewitz, On War, Bk. VI, Ch. 26. On the evolution of Clausewitz’s thinking on small wars see Christopher Daase, ‘Clausewitz and Small Wars’, in H. Strachan and A. Herberg-Rothe (eds.), Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century, 192.

11 Clausewitz, ‘Testimonial’, 189.

12 Clausewitz, ‘The arming of the people’, 224.

13 Clausewitz, On War, Bk I, Ch. 3, 112; Bk III, Ch. 3, 184–85.

14 Michael Howard, ‘The Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy’, Foreign Affairs 57/5 (1979), 977.

15 Clausewitz, On War, Bk. I, Ch. 1, 89.

16 Martin van Creveld, for example, argues that for Clausewitz the people ‘were not expected to hate [or] cheer…,’ in The Transformation of War, 39.

17 Clausewitz, On War, Bk. I, Ch. 1, 89. The trinity also includes ‘chance and probability.’

18 Clausewitz, ‘Testimonial’, 196.

19 Clausewitz, ‘The arming of the people’, 222.

20 Ibid., 222–23.

21 Clausewitz, ‘The Prussian institution of the Landwehr’, 217.

22 Clausewitz, On War, Bk. VI, Ch. 1, 358.

23 Clausewitz, ‘Lectures’, 63–65.

24 Clausewitz, ‘Testimonial’, 211–14.

25 Clausewitz, ‘Lectures’, 26.

26 Clausewitz, ‘Testimonial’, 226.

27 Quoted in V. Kubálková and A. A. Cruickshank, Marxism-Leninism and theory of international relations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1980), 107.

28 Beatrice Heuser, Reading Clausewitz (London: Pimlico 2002), 139–40.

29 Azar Gat, A History of Military Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001), 494–514. Clausewitz’s term ‘Politik’ is sometimes translated as ‘policy’ (in the Howard and Paret edition, for example) and sometimes as ‘politics.’ On the debate about the different substantive implications of these translations see Antulio J. Echevarria II, Clausewitz and Contemporary War (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007), Ch. 4; Christopher Bassford, ‘The Primacy of Policy and the ‘Trinity’ in Clausewitz’s Mature Thought’, 74–90, Jan Willem Honig, ‘Clausewitz’s On War: Problems of Text and Translation’, in H. Strachan and A. Herberg-Rothe (eds.), Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century, 74–90, 69–72; and James W. Davis, ‘Introduction to Clausewitz on Small War’, in C. Daase and J.W. Davis, Clausewitz on Small War, 4–6.

30 Clausewitz, On War and ‘Note of 1827.’

31 Daase and Davis, Clausewitz.

32 Van Creveld, Transformation of War, 40.

33 Kaldor, New and Old Wars, 15. For a useful critique of these arguments see Davis, ‘Introduction,’ 8–11.

34 Clausewitz, On War, Bk. I, Ch. 1, 89.

35 Echevarria, Clausewitz and Contemporary War, Ch. 4.

36 Clausewitz, On War, Bk. VIII, Ch. 3B, 586. For an analysis of the coevolution of war with changing political and military organization, threat environment, political economy, and weaponry over the last eight millennia, see Jack S. Levy and William R. Thompson, The Arc of War: Origins, Escalation, and Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2011).

37 I view Clausewitz as providing a conceptual framework for thinking about war rather than either an explanatory theory with testable propositions or a prescriptive theory with mechanistic rules.

38 Edward J. Villacres and Christopher Bassford, ‘Reclaiming the Clausewitzian Trinity’, Parameters 25/3 (1995), 15

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jack S. Levy

Jack S. Levy is Board of Governors’ professor of Political Science at Rutgers University and Affiliate at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. He is a past president of the International Studies Association (2007–08) and of the Peace Science Society (2005–06). He has previously held tenured positions at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Minnesota and visiting or adjunct positions at Tulane, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and NYU. Levy received APSA’s Helen Dwight Reid Award (1977) for the best dissertation in International Relations in 1975–76 and the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Foreign Policy Analysis Section of the International Studies Association (2000). His research focuses primarily on the causes of war, foreign policy decision-making, and qualitative methodology.

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