‘The most beautiful of wars’: Carl von Clausewitz and small wars

Abstract

Carl von Clausewitz was both an avid analyst of small wars and people's war and, during the wars of liberation, a practitioner of small war. While Clausewitz scholars have increasingly recognised the centrality of small wars for Clausewitz's thought, the sources and inspirations of his writings on small wars have remained understudied. This article contextualises Clausewitz's thought on small wars and people's war in the tradition of German philosophical and aesthetic discourses around 1800. It shows how Clausewitz developed core concepts such as the integration of passion and reason and the idea of war in its 'absolute perfection' as a regulative ideal in the framework of his works on small wars and people's war. Contextualising Clausewitz inevitably distances him from the twenty-first-century strategic context, but, as this article shows, it can help us to ask pertinent questions about the configuration of society, the armed forces and the government in today's Western states.

War without contact: Berenhorst, Bülow, and the avoidance of violence as the core paradigm of military science

“…68 Ever since, researchers have tried to solve the 'Clausewitz puzzle', 69 that is, to give a rather more modern twist to a famous work which defines the 'main battle' as a 'purpose in itself' and which is notorious for its 'combatcentric perspective on war'. 70 Indeed, Clausewitz had tried to integrate Bülow's more pacifistic approach -even though with only limited success. 71 Recently, Sibylle Scheipers has convincingly argued that Clausewitz's attempts to find a reconciliation of passion and reason in his theory of war have led him to an intense '"dialogue" with the German aesthetic discourse around 1800', more particularly with the aesthetics of Kant and Schiller.…”

Small Wars and People’s Wars: A Clausewitzian Perpective on the South African War, 1899–1902

“…60 As Scheipers indicates, it was inevitable that in recent reconfigurations, the contextualisation of Clausewitz's theories on war would distance him from the twentyfirst-century theoretical-strategic context. 61 Herberg-Rothe refers to studies since the 1990s, where influential writers on the theory of war have argued that Clausewitz's theories are no longer applicable, not only in relation to contemporary conflicts, but also in general. Van Creveld (1991) is even more forthright in describing Clausewitz's theories as harmful, while Keegan (1993) goes so far as to describe Clausewitz's ideas as destructive.…”