Burke and Clausewitz on the limitation of war

Abstract

Restraining the violence of war is difficult under the best of circumstances. In their observations on the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, Edmund Burke and Carl von Clausewitz consider the peculiar violence of wars fought for abstract and world-transformative goals. While the beliefs that animated those wars have faded, in this essay we argue that Burke and Clausewitz offer insight into the ways that modern political violence becomes unmoored from limitation and restraint and that their arguments show a surprising unity between the concerns of realists and just war theorists about the limitation of war.