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“In the prisoners' dock sit twenty-odd broken men.”―――declared one renowned American justice while fiercely pointing his fingers at the said individuals. Cautioning that “these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world after their bodies have returned to dust”, the American went on to assert that “[c]ivilization can afford no compromise with the social forces which would gain renewed strength if we deal ambiguously or indecisively with the men in whom those forces now precariously survive.”[1] In closing his case, he left the following concluding remarks: “[a]s an International Military Tribunal, it rises above the provincial and transient and seeks guidance not only from international law but also from the basic principles of jurisprudence which are assumptions of civilization and which long have found embodiment in the codes of all nations.”[2] These are excerpts from the late Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson’s opening and closing statements at the International Military Tribunal, or Nuremberg Trial, an informal name better known among laymen. In this trial, the Allied Powers prosecuted the fallen leaders of the Third Reich in the name of civilization. Indeed, the very word, “civilization”, was repeatedly used in Jackson’s speeches throughout the trial. In a similar vein, the former US president, George Bush proudly announced the advent of a new world order after his country’s swift victory in the Middle East. A decade later, his son declared the war on terror a struggle to preserve civilisation.[3]

Yet, what exactly did these political figures mean with their references to such vague terms as “civilization” and “world order”? Underlying these words is the premise that there exists a club of countries that share common values, interests, and culture, as well as identities, thereby excluding those who do not belong to or oppose such criteria and qualities. Nonetheless, does such a supranational entity exist in this complex society? The English School of international relations seems to offer us an answer with the concept of “international society”. Hedly Bull and Adam Watson prescribe the following definition to the said idea:

a group of states (or, more generally, a group of independent political communities) which not merely form a system, in the sense that the behaviour of each is a necessary factor in the calculations of the others, but also have established by dialogue and consent common rules and institutions for the conduct of their relations, and recognise their common interest in maintaining these arrangements.[4]

Claiming to have studied history, those English School theorists ascribe the criteria contained in the above definition to their picture of the world in which the international society allegedly exists.

Nevertheless, does the above definition given by mere two individuals vindicate the existence of the international community? In other words, can sociology, to which the two academics belong, render a satisfactory explanation in response to the question we are concerned with? Sociology, according to Max Weber, is defined as “a science which attempts to understand social action through a causal explanation of its course and effects.”[5] This is premised upon the mythos that society is a product of human will and behavior. This implies that a mere academic discipline called sociology conceives of “an unrealistic model of society and attempts to alter the reality through the application of such a model.”[6] Such an endeavor is no less ill-founded than that of Hegel’s idealism, which Carl von Clausewitz justly criticised by emphasising that “[j]ust as some plants bear fruit only if they don’t shoot up too high, so in the practical arts the leaves and flowers of theory must be pruned and the plant kept close to its proper soil――― experience.”[7] Methodological problems notwithstanding, there lies even a more fundamental issue in our way. Do we possess the ability to reform our own society with our humble power? Moreover, at the more fundamental level, do we, whose intellect is limited only to the lessons gained from our own experience, even have the ability to learn everything about the society? Sociologists utterly fail to answer these fundamental questions and assume the existence of international society, which is merely the reflection of “spectacle[s]” occurring in “a wonderful, ill-balanced mind in which sensations, emotions and images are too powerful.”[8]

For this reason, in order to ascertain the existence of as complicated an entity as international society, we must resort to human experience, or history for an answer. Yet, we must also not lose sight of the impossibility of rendering a perfectly objective picture of history. Cautioning that hindsight is not always twenty/twenty, the historian Herbert Bix rightly points out, “[p]ast events, of course, are refracted through the mind of the person who records them, shaped by the values that person seeks to realize in the present and future. Inevitably, they are slippery and fogged.”[9] Our attempt, therefore, will be subject to due criticisms that diverge from our views. Nevertheless, we shall labour to prove the existence of international society in as objectively a manner as possible. For this purpose, we shall first probe into the essence of society and the role of law in history. Our analyses will then superimposed upon international society and international law.

We must first commence our inquiry by defining civilised society. Yet, this investigation is already ill founded from the beginning, as we do not possess the ability to fully appreciate the fundamental question of society itself. Consider the following remark made by Rene Descartes: “it is observable that the buildings which a single architect has planned and executed, are generally more elegant and commodious than those which several have attempted to improve, by making old walls serve for purposes for which they were not originally built.”[10] This thinking presupposes the perfectibility of human reason and the absoluteness of propositions deduced from facts. This way of thinking, or constructivist rationalism, utterly disregards history and certain functions of the society, such as the self-regulating mechanism of market economy. It is nothing more than a serious symptom of paranoia, and history is abundant in the instances of such delusions, such as Jacobean French Revolution and Marxist-Leninist Russian Revolution. Society, then, is not constructed by certain generation of the present. The following quote from Edmund Burke further aids our appreciation of this undeniable nature of society:

a [society] is not an idea only of local extent, and individual momentary aggregation; but it is an idea of continuity, which extends in time as well as in numbers and in space. And this is a choice not of one day, or one set of people, not a tumultuary and giddy choice; it is a deliberate election of the ages and of generations; it is a constitution made by what is ten thousand times better than choice, it is made by the peculiar circumstances, occasions, tempers, dispositions, and moral, civil and social habitudes of the people, which disclose themselves only in a long space of time[11]

Thus, a society is based upon the accumulation of past wisdom and is to be preserved by the present generation. Eventually, it is to be inherited by the future generations so as to defend the thousands of years of human aspirations for peace and harmony through countless trials and errors that have rendered incalculable amount of blood and toil.

Such mores and customs inherited from the past by no means have physical forms. Nitobe Inazo made the following insightful observations of the moral foundation of Japan, or what he called Bushido:

Chivalry is a flower no less indigenous to the soil of Japan than its emblem, the cherry blossom; nor is it a dried-up specimen of an antique virtue preserved in the herbarium of our history. It is still a living object of power and beauty among us; and if it assumes no tangible shape or form, it not the less scents the moral atmosphere, and makes us aware that we are still under its potent spell. The conditions of society which brought it forth and nourished it have long disappeared; but as those far-off stars which once were and are not, still continue to shed their rays upon us, so the light of chivalry, which was a child of feudalism, still illuminates our moral path, surviving its mother institution.[12]

Friedrich Hayek proposed the concept that governs a society, namely “spontaneous order” comprising traditions, customs and other elements that are never to be fully perceived with our limited capacity. Adam Smith, for example, was justified when he ascribed “invisible hand” to the social force that regulates the market. A civilised society, then, may be deemed to be governed by an invisible social force as represented by such concepts as spontaneous order, thereby guaranteeing perpetual law and order.

Having ascertained the essence of civilised society, we shall proceed to identify the enduring features of such a community. First, the fundamental object of a civilized society is to safeguard individual liberty from totalitarianism and anarchism. Yet, such liberty does not grant one absolute freedom; historically shaped customs always intervene to halt before one abuses his privilege to such an extent that it harms the community. Individual freedom, according to Hayek, is shielded by the two major characteristics of civilized society, namely rule of law and market economy.[13] It is the former with which we are concerned in the present inquest. We shall not dwell too much upon the details of rule of law; rather, we will inquire into the concept where it is relevant to civilised society.

Defining rule of law is no easy matter. Nevertheless, it originates in German tribes during the Middle Ages and was long considered an eternal truth that was neither created nor changed; rather, it was to be discovered as the civilisation advanced. In other words, it is not the type of law legislated by the legislative branch. Instead, it was used as a source of reference for the judicial branch and developed as new cases were reviewed, setting precedents.[14] Altes gutes Recht, or good old law is “timeless in quality: the good law residing in common conscience and tradition, innovation, in which, theoretically, could take the form only of restoration.”[15] In other words, the power of law is so far-reaching as to have “an existence of its own, independent of the will of man, even perhaps of the will of God.”[16] St. Thomas Aquinas argued that natural law[17] was “that part of the law of God which was discoverable by human reason, in contrast with the part which is directly revealed. Such an identification of natural with divine law necessarily gave the former an authority superior to that of any merely positive law of human ordinance, and some writers even held that positive law which conflicted with natural law could not claim any binding force.”[18] For this reason, rule of law is distinguished from rule by law, which considers any statutes legitimate because it places absoluteness upon the legislative branch, allowing “rule by men”. In the final analysis, this Anglo-American legal tradition aims to function as the custodian of the positive legacies of the past and the customs and mores that are well alive today, effectively transferring them from the past to the present, then to the future. In the case of the United Kingdom, for example, rule of law has long been successful in upholding not only the invisible legacies, such as common law, but also the visible legacies, particularly the constitutional monarchy.

In the international realm, in which the international society developed along with international law, similar principles of society, as hitherto discussed above, may be ascertained. Nevertheless, the international society clearly diverges from a domestic civilized society in that the former utterly lacks an absolute supranational institutional authority and thus values the sense of brotherhood as the sinews of their bondage. The origin of the international society dates before the Peace of Westphalia, a historic event commonly attributed to the birth of such a society and international law. J. L. Brierly argues that the genesis of the international society was found among “a few kindred nations of western Europe which, despite their frequent quarrels and even despite the religious schism of the sixteenth century, had all and were all conscious of having a common background in the Christian religion and the civilization of Greece and Rome.” In essence, such a community was a “society of nations” [19] that shared the same religious and cultural roots. It is undeniable that the events in 1648 undermined the power of the Church and led to the European countries to recognise one another on equal terms through international law. Nevertheless, the new bondage formed in that year was nothing more than interdependence in “material things” and “though material bonds are necessary, they are not enough without a common social consciousness.”[20] Such sentiment of common brotherhood is a prerequisite to form any viable society. In the case of civilised society as discussed above, shared feelings are formed through the respect for the past wisdom of the ancestors and the sense of responsibility to preserve not only for the present, but also for the future. In the international society, the bases of the fraternal relations among the countries are “sentiment of shared responsibility for the conduct of a common life” and the necessary force behind any system of law.”[21] Indeed, when the Revolutionary France threatened the foundation of the Occidental Civilisation, Edmund Burke defined the chaos as a war between the insurrectionist France and the European civilisation founded upon the mores and order inherited from the ancient days as well as Christianity.[22]

Burke’s above statement implies that the sense of Christian brotherhood was well alive even more than 150 years after the rise of first modern states. The Peace of Westphalia, then, may be understood as nothing more than an expedient measure to protect the Christian foundation. Europe today is united under the single fraternity known as the EU. Yet, its history is illustrated with anything but perpetual peace and harmony among those kindred nations. The tragedies in the two Great Wars in the 20th century alone must have convinced those who survived those two wars of the doomed future of Europe. Nevertheless, it was the two criteria proposed by Hayek for civilized society, namely rule of law and market economy, which enabled the international society in Europe to preserve the very foundation of its civilisation as it persevered through incalculable amount of blood, and later the society gave in to have a more diverse, secular appearance. In other words, the European experience is a vindication that there is only one international society in the world. Other societies of nations, such as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the East Asian Community[23], were nothing but farces as they utterly lacked the common foundation for shared values. One need not be reminded of their utter failure to fulfill Hayek’s two criteria for civilised society; in the USSR, for example, planned economy and lawlessness prevailed, and communism as a shared value was only to be forcibly imposed to have any viable appearance. In the next segment, just as we examined the legal aspect of a civilised society above, we shall only consider rule of law in international law here.

Just the domestic legal traditions, such as the Anglo-American common law, international law also functions as the custodian of the elements which constitute the foundation of the international society. Just as national laws had set the precedents, during the early stages of its developments, international law also sought natural law for inspiration. Medieval writers of natural law held that international relations were to be controlled by a higher law, “not the mere creation of the will of any sovereign, but part of the order of nature to which even sovereigns were subjugated.” In other words, law of nature denied European country’s “irresponsibility and the finality of their independence of one another.”[24] These principles continue to this day to remain unwritten, but, despite different interpretations, the whole society of nations was to be ruled by the Law, or Altes gutes Recht. This idea of imposing limits upon sovereign rights is a clear reflection of the natural law tradition, drawing the essence of international law increasingly closer to that of common law.

Thus, the natural law tradition drew a clear distinction between the good and the evil, most notably between bellum justum and bellum injustum. According to Grotius, all wars, “if they are to be legitimate, aim at peace and therefore must have just causes.”[25] He further expanded this interpretation in order to include the right “to punish excessive violations of the Natural Law, whether the injuries are perpetrated against themselves or others with whom they have no direct involvement.”[26] We are once again reminded of the lessons from the International Military Tribunal. At the time, although the Kellogg-Briand Pact ruled that all wars were to be outlawed as early as 1928, war was still considered legal if it was waged for the purpose of self-defence. Moreover, the purpose of war was to be determined by the belligerent himself. Because of this paradox, the Pact utterly failed to fulfil its ideal and became nothing more than a piece of paper by 1939. This is because Hitler’s repugnant wars throughout Europe could well be justified as they were waged in search for Lebensraum for the Germanic peoples, which could be little different from the exportation of democracy by the US in the pure sense of self-defense. Yet, the higher law alone interpreted it otherwise. After the fall of Berlin, the Allied Powers quickly gathered to hold a trial of the former Nazi leaders. In his opening statement, the Chief Prosecutor Jackson eloquently expressed the natural law tradition of international law as follows:

The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated… This Tribunal, while it is novel and experimental, is not the product of abstract speculations nor is it created to vindicate legalistic theories. This inquest represents the practical effort of four of the most mighty of nations, with the support of 17 more, to utilize international law to meet the greatest menace of our times-aggressive war. The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which. leave no home in the world untouched. It is a cause of that magnitude that the United Nations will lay before Your Honors.[27]

The trial was perhaps the first attempt for the international society to materialise the will of the higher law in world history. Jackson’s objective in prosecuting the Nazi war criminals was clear: to preserve the conventions and traditions of the international society founded upon the Christian brotherhood. By setting a precedent, moreover, he also sought to prevent future wars. The same Christian fraternity of nations faced countless wars against one another in history. Nevertheless, based upon the principle of Altes gutes Recht, Jackson, a representative of civilisation, sought to discover new laws in complete accordance with the dictates of the Law. We have found that a civilised society is built upon the firm foundation comprising the wisdom of the past, such as mores and traditions, which are safeguarded by rule of law. Our examination of the essence of the international society, rule of law in that society, and Justice Jackson’s noble endeavour all vindicate the existence of such a community of nations.

As we have seen, despite the difficulties inherent in the theorisation of society per se, based upon the above philosophical and historical analyses, we may justly conclude that the international society exists. As Benedict Anderson argued, one may never actually experience the process by which people form bonds and create a viable society. Yet, this is far from a rebuttal of such concepts as society, country, nation, and community. A civilised society is composed of both visible institutions and invisible social forces. It is the latter which deserves greater attention due to their sheer importance. Mores, custom, and traditions may neither be written nor materialised. Therefore, they can only be safeguarded by rule of law, which ensures its functions with all its elasticity and acquaintance with changes. As we have seen, similar essences may be found in the international society. The grand failure of the League of Nations does not disprove the existence of the international community. It was merely one of many trials and errors in the course of human aspiration for peace and prosperity. Today, our civilisation is confronted once again by a major threat, namely global terrorism. Just as the Allied Powers rose from the ashes, the Almighty God shall always be on the side of peace-loving peoples of the international community.









Bibliography
Boucher, David: Political Theories of International Relations: From Thucydides to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Brierly J. L.: The Law of Nations (Oxford UP: 1955).
Burke, Edmund: The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke: 9. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
Clausewitz, Carl von: On War trs by Peter Paret and Michael Howard (Princeton UP: 1976).
Friedman, Michael Jay: War on Terror a Struggle for Civilization http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2006/September/20060911220404JMnamdeirF0.3696863.html , viewed on 3 Dec, 2010.
Hedley Bull and Adam Watson: Expansion of International Society, (Oxford Oxfordshire: Clarendon Press, 1984.).
Hogan, Michael J.: Hiroshima in History and Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Jackson, Robert H.: Closing Statement before the International Military Tribunal, http://www.roberthjackson.org/the-man/speeches-articles/speeches/speeches-by-robert-h-jackson/closing-address-before-the-international-military-tribunal/ ,viewed on 1 Dec, 2010.
Jackson, Robert H.: Opening Statement before the International Military Tribunal, http://www.roberthjackson.org/the-man/speeches-articles/speeches/speeches-by-robert-h-jackson/opening-statement-before-the-international-military-tribunal/ , viewed on 1 Dec, 2010.
Kern, Fritz: Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages trs by S. B. Chrimes (New Jersey: the Law Book Exchange, Ltd., 2005).
Maitland, F. W.: The Constitutional History of England (New Jersey: the Law Book Exchange, Ltd., 2001).
Nakagawa, Yatsuhiro: Seito no kenpo Burke no tetsugaku (Tokyo: Chuokoron-shinsha, 2001).
Nakagawa, Yatsuhiro: Seito no tetsugaku, itan no tetsugaku (Tokyo: Tokuma shoten, 1999).
Nitobe, Inazō: Bushido (Tōkyō: Kōdansha Intānashonaru, 1998).
Sabine, G. H.: A History of Political Theory (London: Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1966).
Taine, Hippolyte. "The Ancient Regime." June 22, 2008.http://www.gutenberg.org/files/23524/23524-h/files/2577/2577-h/2577-h.htm#2H_4_0067 , viewed on January 5,2010.
Descartes, Rene: Discourse on Method (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1997).
Weber, Max: Basic Concepts of Sociology (Tokyo: Iwanami Bunko, 1972).
Yazaki, Mitsukuni: “rekishi hogaku ha”, hogaku semina (May 1957).



[1] Jackson, Robert H.: Opening Statement before the International Military Tribunal, http://www.roberthjackson.org/the-man/speeches-articles/speeches/speeches-by-robert-h-jackson/opening-statement-before-the-international-military-tribunal/ , viewed on 1 Dec, 2010, Italics mine.
[2] Jackson, Robert H.: Closing Statement before the International Military Tribunal, http://www.roberthjackson.org/the-man/speeches-articles/speeches/speeches-by-robert-h-jackson/closing-address-before-the-international-military-tribunal/ ,viewed on 1 Dec, 2010, Italics mine.
[3] Friedman, Michael Jay: War on Terror a Struggle for Civilization http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2006/September/20060911220404JMnamdeirF0.3696863.html , viewed on 3 Dec, 2010.
[4] Hedley Bull and Adam Watson: Expansion of International Society, (Oxford Oxfordshire: Clarendon Press, 1984.), p. 1.
[5] Weber, Max: Basic Concepts of Sociology (Tokyo: Iwanami Bunko, 1972), p. 8.
[6] Nakagawa, Yatsuhiro: Seito no kenpo Burke no tetsugaku (Tokyo: Chuokoron-shinsha, 2001), p. 228.
[7] Clausewitz, Carl von: On War trs by Peter Paret and Michael Howard (Princeton UP: 1976), p. 61, Italics mine. In this sense, we may draw a striking similarity between the Clausewitizian dialectic its Marxist counterpart.
[8] Taine, Hippolyte. "The Ancient Regime." June 22, 2008.http://www.gutenberg.org/files/23524/23524-h/files/2577/2577-h/2577-h.htm#2H_4_0067 , viewed on January 5,2010.
[9] Hogan, Michael J.: Hiroshima in History and Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 80.
[10] Descartes, Rene: Discourse on Method (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1997), p. 22.
[11] Quoted in Sabine, G. H.: A History of Political Theory (London: Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1966), p.608.
[12] Nitobe, Inazō: Bushido (Tōkyō: Kōdansha Intānashonaru, 1998), p. 1
[13] Nakagawa, Yatsuhiro: Seito no tetsugaku, itan no tetsugaku (Tokyo: Tokuma shoten, 1999), p. 65.
[14] Nakagawa, Yatsuhiro: Seito no kenpo Burke no tetsugaku, p. 62-3.
[15] Kern, Fritz: Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages trs by S. B. Chrimes (New Jersey: the Law Book Exchange, Ltd., 2005), p. xi.
[16] Maitland, F. W.: The Constitutional History of England (New Jersey: the Law Book Exchange, Ltd., 2001), p. 301.
[17] Friedrich Carl von Savigny proposed that there existed little distinction between natural law and customary law in essence. Moreover, English law still uses the term “natural justice.” For this reason, we shall not distinguish the two here. See Yazaki, Mitsukuni: “rekishi hogaku ha”, hogaku semina (May 1957), p. 8-9.
[18] Brierly J. L.: The Law of Nations (Oxford UP: 1955), p. 18.
[19] Ibid., p. 41, Italics mine.
[20] Ibid., p. 42.
[21] Ibid., p. 42.
[22] Burke, Edmund: The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke: 9. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 240, 267.
[23] The concept of the East Asian Community has emerged at least twice in modern history. The first instance was recorded as early as the late 19 century when the Japanese ultranationalist launched a movement for Pan-Asianism in an attempt to exclude the Western imperialism from Asia. This, however, was limited only to ultranationalists until in the late 1930s when Pan-Asianism became the official foreign policy of Japan. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, inter alia, was the most explicit expression of Pan-Asianism of the time.
The second momentum for such a vague community reared its ugly head sometime around 2002. In 2009, the former prime minister of Japan, Hatoyama Yukio, declared the ideal for the East Asian Community once again to be adopted to his country’s foreign policy.
[24] Brierly J. L.: The Law of Nations, p. 19.
[25] Boucher, David: Political Theories of International Relations: From Thucydides to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 214.
[26] Ibid., p. 215.
[27] Jackson, Robert H.: Opening Statement before the International Military Tribunal, http://www.roberthjackson.org/the-man/speeches-articles/speeches/speeches-by-robert-h-jackson/opening-statement-before-the-international-military-tribunal/ , viewed on 1 Dec, 2010, Italics mine.

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Book Review: Clausewitz, Carl von: On War trs by Peter Paret and Michael Howard (Princeton UP: 1976).

Carl von Clausewitz’ magnum opus, On War, is considered one of the masterpieces of military philosophy along with such classical chef-d'œuvre as The Art of War by Sun Tzu and continues to exert enormous influence on military thinking to this day. Born in 1780, the Prussian general began his military career at the mere age of 13. From then onwards, he was to constantly confront Napoleon’s French Revolutionary Forces that played a crucial role in shaping his life and intellect. In 1816, he embarked upon theorising war based upon his experience at the Napoleonic Wars, the type of war that had not only altered the common knowledge of war itself, but had also forever changed the course of the Occidental Civilization. In 1827, having exposed his theory to the test of history, the Prussian general became convinced of the necessity of thoroughly revising his manuscript. Nonetheless, already at this point, he sensed that his hour was drawing near and left the following due warning to his future readers:“[i]f an early death should terminate my work, what I have written so far would, of course only deserve to be called a shapeless mass of ideas. Being liable to endless misinterpretation it would be the target of much half-baked criticism”.[1] His untimely death due to cholera in 1831 lamentably left behind his work largely unfinished, rendering the new revisions, such as Book VIII contradicting with his original ideas. Moreover, Clausewitz himself admitted that “[t]he first chapter of Book One alone I regard as finished.”[2] Coupled with On War’s sheer philosophical difficulty for laymen, his unfinished business continues to this day to trouble a number of readers. Therefore, when deciphering Clausewitz, the reader of On War is advised to take into account this historical background. Due to this incompleteness and his self-criticisms of his initial ideas, we deem it suffice to confine our present inquest to giving an insight into the significance of Clausewitz’ fundamental views of war instead of summarising the entire book, which Christopher Bassford is rightly justified in admitting simply as being “an impossible task.”[3] Then, as strategists, we shall inquire into the question of strategy in relation to his treatise.

In On War, Clausewitz attempted to unveil the true nature of war through the application of Hegel’s dialectical contrast between essence and phenomenon. Beatrice Heuser recognizes this approach well by differentiating between “at least two permutations, the wars of Clausewitz the Idealist and the wars of Clausewitz the Realist.”[4] Unlike Hegel, who continues to be criticised for being a pure idealist, Clausewitz, however, clearly understood the limits, if not the danger, of idealism and warned that “[j]ust as some plants bear fruit only if they don’t shoot up too high, so in the practical arts the leaves and flowers of theory must be pruned and the plant kept close to its proper soil――― experience.”[5] Instead, he recognized the importance of balance between theory and practice, which must always support each other.[6] Moreover, acknowledging the complex nature of war, he commenced his inquiry from parts to the whole. Unlike Jomini, who sought to ascertain the eternal principles of war and, as John Shy indicates, “wrote to publish and he published to impress”[7], Clausewitz remained focused on the heart of the object of his inquiry. This owes greatly to Prussia’s philosophical foundation established before the Napoleonic Wars by such philosophers as Kant and Hegel. By contrast, France utterly lacked such an intellectual basis because philosophy per se in that late-ancien regime and later revolutionary republic witnessed considerable stagnation despite the contributions to political and social ideals by Encyclopédistes, such as Rousseau. As a result, while Jomini focused largely upon topographical and physical factors and produced nothing more than another field manual aimed to offer an absolute recipe for military victory, Clausewitz successfully unmasked the nature of war by shedding light upon “the essence of the phenomena of war and to indicate the links between these phenomena and the nature of their component parts.”[8]

Based upon this methodology, the Prussian general sought to unite the social moment[9] and its natural counterpart in order to understand war, and we may ascertain here the single most important legacy of On War. First, Clausewitz argued that “war is nothing but the continuation of policy with other means.”[10] Here, he revealed the reality of war, whose planning, course, and objectives, inter alia, are ultimately determined by politics. Second, Clausewitz did not fail to take into account the natural aspect of war because, according to the Hegelian philosophy, social phenomena are a product of the sublation of natural laws by the society. Based upon this logic, he found that war might be reduced to the most fundamental level, that is, a duel between two persons. Here, he proposed his second notable proposition that “[w]ar is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.”[11] This would inevitably lead to the highest stage of violence where “a clash of forces freely operating and obedient to no law but their own.” Hence, war was to be both dictated and terminated by absolute violence.[12] The potential for such a great surge in violence originated in the human nature itself, thus excluding any socially constructed factors, such as mores. Nevertheless, “[o]nce”, cautioned Clausewitz, “the antagonists have ceased to be mere figments of a theory and become actual states and governments, when war is no longer a theoretical affair but a series of actions obeying its own peculiar laws, reality supplies the data from which we can deduce the unknown that lies ahead.”[13] Hence, the reality reappeared, and politics would regain the control of war. Again, the above quote is a vindication that Clausewitz perspicaciously understood the significance of reality and thus was no mere pure idealist. For this reason, we may even argue that the Prussian general even intellectually departed from the conventional Hegelian dialectic, which, according to Karl Marx, is “standing on its head” because, for Hegel, “the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’”[14] . These two types of war as discussed above are a product of the Clausewitian dialectic and may be referred to as Absolute War and Real War, respectively. The significance of On War, therefore, lies in Clausewitz’ understanding of war within the synthesis of the two moments of conflict, namely natural and social, and the following words may further aid our insight into the Prussian’s view of war:

War is more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to the given case. As a total phenomenon its dominant tendencies always make war a paradoxical trinity――― composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone. The first of these three aspects mainly concerns the people; the second the commander and his army; the third the government.[15]

In short, for Clausewitz, war was a “constant dialectic” of the two moments, “each penetrating and acting upon the other.”[16] Hence, when reading his treatise, one is expected to comprehend the dichotomy between the two types of war――― Absolute War and Real War――― first and foremost in order to grasp the nature of war.

Against this backdrop, he developed ideas that have hitherto greatly contributed to our interpretation of strategy. Before Clausewitz, a number of so-called strategists had attempted to yield strategic principles that would guarantee victory. Of those pseudo-strategists, again, Jomini, who have sought to provide formulae for strategy, stands out. Clausewitz’ French contemporary succinctly rendered his view of strategy, which epitomised the prevalent military thinking of the time:

That strategy is the key to warfare;
That all strategy is controlled by invariable scientific principles; and
That these principles prescribe offensive action to mass forces against weaker enemy forces at some decisive point if strategy is to lead to victory.[17]

As the above dicta demonstrate, the Jominian thinking reflected his obsession with ascertaining eternal principles, which, as the later history was to witness, would prove “to extol the Napoleonic model of massing, attacking, and quickly winning decisive victories. Anything less or different was reckoned as failure.”[18] Yet, we may soon detect the fundamental shortcoming of such a sweeping generalisation of as complex a human activity as war. It only treated war as phenomenon; the opposite dialectical end, essence is gravely ruled out in the above maxims. Indeed, Clausewitz, harshly denounced such a prescriptive approach for being “an oversimplification that would not have stood up for a moment against the realities of life.”[19]

Defining strategy as “the use of engagements for the object of the war”[20], he instead contended that “in war everything is uncertain, and calculations have to be made with variable quantities.”[21] He then went on to add that, in war, “all action takes place, so to speak, in a kind of twilight, which, like fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are.”[22] This pessimistic, yet critically realistic interpretation of the reality of battlefield led Clausewtiz to conceive of the idea, namely friction, which causes the disparity between the two types of war. Noting that “[e]verything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult”, the general explained that “[t]he difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war.”[23] Coupled with the fog of war, friction deeply affects human psychology on the battlefield. Hence, it is moral, not physical strength at which any strategy must be directed.[24] In the words of the general: “[a]ll war assumes human weakness and seeks to exploit it”.[25]

The moral factor is one of the key attributes of a military genius, who has the ability to overcome friction in war and consist in “a harmonious combination of elements,” including intellect and unswerving courage inter alia, “in which one or the other ability may predominate but none may be in conflict with the rest.”[26] Based upon these elements, Clausewitz proposed coup d'œil and determination as the required criteria for a military genius. The latter quality, as Michael Howard points out, is different from “mere obstinacy”; rather, it is “rooted in intellectual insight and composed of a rare blend of intellect and moral courage.” [27] Here, too, morale plays a crucial role. Therefore, the significance of Clausewitz as a strategist is attributed to his emphasis upon the essence of strategy as well as the moral factor, which was largely ignored by such thinkers as Jomini, who sought to prescribe absolute formulae for military victory.

These Clausewitzian concepts continue to endure the test of time as they find their increasing relevance to the contemporary debate over the influence of changing external factors upon strategy. Such is most explicitly evident in the field of technology, whose revolutionary breakthroughs have traditionally almost always attracted military leaders to sanguine views that often disregard the reality of battlefield, such as the fog of war. For example, the advent of telegraph prior to the WWI paralysed the thinking of the German general Rudolf von Caemmerer to such an extent that he even claimed that the “dangers of failure in the preconcentrated action of widely separated portions of the army is now almost completely removed by the electric telegraph.”[28] Even as recent as in 1995, Admiral William Owens commented that the new technology would “dissipate the fog of war.”[29] Just as Jomini and other strategists who focused merely upon physical facets of war, these strategists also failed to take into account the essence of strategy, which is dictated by the fog war and friction inter alia. Rather, just as the established Clausewitian Colin Gray points out, we are never saved from “the difficulties that impede strategic excellence” because any innovation in technology always is received as a “poisoned chalice.”[30] The essence of strategy, therefore, remains, by and large, static; rather, new external factors, including technology, further complicate the situation the strategist faces. Indeed, “every new devise and mode of war”, cautions Gray, “carries the virus of its own technical, tactical, operational, strategic, or political negation.”[31] Stressing that strategy is difficult, he concludes that “planning for the future, like deciding to fight, is always a gamble.”[32] The lessons from On War are still well alive in this complex world, in which strategists are all the more afflicted than ever not only by technology, but also by such new types of war as global terrorism and cyber warfare.

Our heretofore appraisal of On War has revealed Clausewitz’ immeasurable contributions to our understanding of war and strategy with his unprecedented attempt to bring to light the essence of war through the application of dialectic. Nevertheless, the Prussian general has, by no means, been free from criticism. We shall consider here Clausewitz’ definition of policy[33]. He prescribed the following definition to the word:

It can be taken as agreed that the aim of policy is to unify and reconcile all aspects of internal administration as well as of spiritual values, and whatever else the moral philosopher may care to add. Policy, of course, is nothing in itself; it is simply the trustee for all these interests against other states. That it can err, subserve the ambitions, private interests, and vanity of those in power, is neither here nor there. In no sense can the art of ever be regarded as the preceptor of policy, and here we can only treat policy as representative of all interests of the community.[34]

Seen through the lens of modern political standards, the above definition may appear nothing more than an oversimplification of as complex a phenomenon as politics. Indeed, it is noteworthy that while he successfully applied dialectic to the identification of the essence of war, he failed to do politics the same justice and seemed to judge it only by its appearance, or to borrow Hegel’s terminology, phenomenon.

Critics have accused Clausewitz for such a definition. Soviet critics, for example, charged the Prussian general with having “a wrong, idealistic notion of politics, which he saw as the rationality of a personified state. Moreover, he thought of all politics as foreign policy.”[35] Erich Ludendorff also complained of the vagueness of the Clausewitzian interpretation of policy. According to him, Clausewitz merely considered “foreign politics, which regulate the relations between States, declare war, and conclude peace.” Ludendorff went on even to argue that “[j]ust as the essence of war has changed since the time of Clausewitz, that is, since a century or so ago, so the relation existing between politics and the conduct of war has also changed, and politics, too, ought to have changed.” [36] By this he meant the total mobilization of both “spiritual and physical forces of the nation”[37] in order to “serve the preservation of the people” through war, which is “the highest expression of the national ‘will to live’.”[38] Yet, is the essence of war subject to change under different circumstances? To be sure, Clausewitz once said that “[e]ach period, therefore, would have held to its own theory of war, even if the urge had always and universally existed to work things out on scientific principles.”[39] While this statement justifies Ludendorff’s attempt to conceive of a new theory to meet the dictates of the time, it, nevertheless, makes no reference to the essence of war. Indeed, for Clausewitz, the essence of war was nothing more than one end of his dialectic of the nature of war. Just as observed above, it represented the natural moment of war, which is hardly susceptible to any changes at all because it is the reflection of both psychological and biological facets of human nature. Such a rudimentary misinterpretation, however, could have been avoided had Clausewitz treated the nature of politics equally in his discourse.

On War was truly a groundbreaking treatise of war as well as strategy and continues to endure the test of time. It was revolutionary in the sense that it attempted to unmask the nature of war by giving an insight to its essence and phenomenon through dialectic. Its synthesis, then, rendered the importance of the superiority of politics to war and the aim of war as forcing the enemy to acknowledge one’s will. Finally, it held that, in reality, war would never become absolute due to the political restraints. This logic of war directly influenced the principles of strategy, such as the fog of war, friction, and military genius. Rather than prescribing absolute formulae for strategy, Clausewitz instead exposed the essence of strategy, recognising its difficulty. Thus, he placed great emphasis upon the importance of the moral factor to guide strategists in the execution of their plan. Moreover, the apparent amelioration of external factors, such as technological breakthroughs, does not help; rather, it only further complicates the strategic environment. Yet, Clausewitz was by no means omnipotent. He clearly failed to expound upon the nature of politics. Ludendorff, for example, attributed this failure to the inapplicability of On War to his time. He was, however, mistaken in that he had modified the essence of war itself. Nevertheless, Ludendorff greatly influenced the military thinking of his time. History has shown us that he played an undeniable role in propagating the subjugation of politics to war, which contributed to the Third Reich’s ultimate demise.

Reading On War is difficult, but renders every potential to serve strategists as their indispensible torchlight to guide their way. It is, therefore, the job of the thinking people not to repeat the same blunders of the past and always toil to commit themselves to the accurate appreciation of Clausewitz’ wisdom.































Bibliography

Bassford, Christopher: “Review Essay: Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Berlin, 1832)”, Defense Analysis (June 1996)
Caemmerer, Rudolf von: The Development of Strategical Science During the Nineteenth Century, trs by Karl von Donat (London: Hugh Rees, 1905)
Clausewitz, Carl von: On War trs by Peter Paret and Michael Howard (Princeton UP: 1976)
Heuser, Beatrice: Reading Clausewitz (London: Pimlico, 2002)
Howard, Michael: Clausewitz: A Very Short Introduction
Jomini, Antoine H.: Traité Des Grandes Opérations Militaires, Contenant L'histoire Critique Des Campagnes De Frédéric Ii, Comparées À Celles De L'empereur Napoléon; avec un recueil des principes generauz de l’art de la guerre, 2d ed., 4 vols. (Paris, 1811)
Kowalke, Klemens: “Die Funktionale Bedeutung der Clausewitzschen Methodologie fur die Formierung der sowjetischen internationalen Politik mit besonderer Berucksichtigung des Einsatzes militarischer Macht” (MS Dr. phil. Mannheim, 1989/1990)
Koyama, Hirotake: Gunji shiso no kenkyu (Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1970)
Ludendorff, Erich. The Nation at War, trs by A S. Rappoport (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1938)
Mahnken, Thomas G, and Joseph A. Maiolo: Strategic Studies: A Reader (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2008)
Marx, Karl: Capital: A Critique of Political Economy - Vol. I-Part I: The Process of Capitalist Production: 1 (New York: Cosmio, Inc., 2007)
Murry, Williamson: “Does Military Culture Matter?” Orbis, vol. 43, no. 1 (Winter 1999)
Paret, Peter, Gordon A. Craig, and Felix Gilbert: Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1986)


[1] Clausewitz, Carl von: On War trs by Peter Paret and Michael Howard (Princeton UP: 1976), p. 70.
[2] Ibid., p. 70, Italics mine.
[3] Bassford, Christopher: “Review Essay: Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Berlin, 1832)”, Defense Analysis (June 1996), viewed on 1 Dec, 2010.

[4] Heuser, Beatrice: Reading Clausewitz (London: Pimlico, 2002), p. 43. (Italics mine)
[5] Clausewitz, Carl von: On War, p. 61, Italics mine. In this sense, we may draw a striking similarity between the Clausewitizian dialectic its Marxist counterpart.
[6] Ibid., p. 61.
[7] Ibid., p. 158.
[8] Clausewitz, Carl von: On War trs by Peter Paret and Michael Howard (Princeton UP: 1976), p. 61.
[9] Koyama, Hirotake: Gunji shiso no kenkyu (Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1970), p. 74. Here, I owe Koyama the use of the Hegelian terminology, namely “moment.”
[10] Clausewitz, Carl von: On War. p. 69.
[11] Ibid., p. 75.
[12] Ibid., p. 77-78.
[13] Ibid., p. 80.
[14] Marx, Karl: Capital: A Critique of Political Economy - Vol. I-Part I: The Process of Capitalist Production: 1 (New York: Cosmio, Inc., 2007), p. 25.
[15] Ibid., p. 89.
[16] Howard, Michael: Clausewitz: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 35.
[17] Jomini, Antoine H.: Traité Des Grandes Opérations Militaires, Contenant L'histoire Critique Des Campagnes De Frédéric Ii, Comparées À Celles De L'empereur Napoléon; avec un recueil des principes generauz de l’art de la guerre, 2d ed., 4 vols. (Paris, 1811), 2:312n. quoted in Paret, Peter, Gordon A. Craig, and Felix Gilbert: Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 146.
[18] Paret, Peter, Gordon A. Craig, and Felix Gilbert: Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, pp. 179.
[19] Clausewitz, Carl von: On War. p. 135.
[20] Ibid., p. 128.
[21] Ibid., p. 136, Italics mine.
[22] Ibid., p. 140, Italics mine.
[23] Ibid., p. 119.
[24] Howard, Michael: Clausewitz: A Very Short Introduction, p. 27.
[25] Ibid., p. 185.
[26] Clausewitz, Carl von: On War. p. 100.
[27] Howard, Michael: Clausewitz: A Very Short Introduction, p. 27.
[28] Caemmerer, Rudolf von: The Development of Strategical Science During the Nineteenth Century, trs by Karl von Donat (London: Hugh Rees, 1905), p. 171-71, quoted in Mahnken, Thomas G, and Joseph A. Maiolo: Strategic Studies: A Reader (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2008), p. 393.
[29] Murry, Williamson: “Does Military Culture Matter?” Orbis, vol. 43, no. 1 (Winter 1999), p. 37.
[30] Mahnken, Thomas G, and Joseph A. Maiolo: Strategic Studies: A Reader, p. 393.
[31] Ibid., p. 393.
[32] Ibid., p. 396.
[33] The German word, “politik,” has no differentiation between politics and policy in English. Hence, we shall use both terms interchangeably hereafter.
[34] Clausewitz, Carl von: On War. p. 606-607.
[35] Quoted in Kowalke, Klemens: “Die Funktionale Bedeutung der Clausewitzschen Methodologie fur die Formierung der sowjetischen internationalen Politik mit besonderer Berucksichtigung des Einsatzes militarischer Macht” (MS Dr. phil. Mannheim, 1989/1990), p. 85. Also quoted in Heuser, Beatrice: Reading Clausewitz (London: Pimlico, 2002), p. 190.
[36] Ludendorff, Erich. The Nation at War, trs by A S. Rappoport (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1938), p. 17, Italics mine.
[37] Ibid., p. 20.
[38] Ibid., p. 24.
[39] Clausewitz, Carl von: On War. p. 593.

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(I have yet to thoroughly edit the essay. Therefore, should you find any grammatical mistakes, I ask your forgiveness. I will begin editing at the earliest opportunity, but would be grateful if you could grasp the basic ideas from the following essay.)

History serves us as a copious reservoir of facts that attests to the proposition that even a single person has the ability to utterly alter the society as well as even people’s way of thinking. Not only are the legacies of revolutionaries influential, but they are also far-reaching and have lasting effects upon the course of humankind. Karl Marx is one such example, and his legacy still continues to affect the world affairs for better or worse.

In military affairs, Napoleon Bonaparte stands out with his revolutionary style of warfare which shocked the entire Europe even to the extent that the very foundation of the Occidental civilization was threatened. Beatrice Heuser observes that, prior to the advent of Napoleon, “ruses, diplomacy and other indirect approaches ”[1] were deemed ideal forms of warfare in Europe. Such an observation was made against the backdrop of the days where war was considered simply too expensive to be waged because of the potential financial damaged incurred by the loss of mercenaries. Hence, the term, “limited war” is always used in reference to the wars of those days. Indeed, one French military observer attached to Fredrick II of Prussia famously noted in 1789 that “there shall hereafter be no great wars. Perhaps, there may arrive a day when we no longer witness pitched-battles.”[2] Such sanguine views, however, were soon to be literally shattered by a single military genius hailing from the revolutionary France. Napoleon’s military success is largely attributed to his splendid ability to translate novel ideas into action, including the levée en masse as opposed to mercenaries of ancien regime.

Yet, “decisive battles” alone may be singled out as the most innovative, successful product of Napoleon. John Cross prescribes the following modern definition of decisive battle:

a decisive battle may possibly be best described as one in which a significant social or political change affecting several nations emerges as an outcome. Such a decisive battle could be either the final, climatic battle of a war or an intermediate battle that, while not crushing the enemy’s will or resources, served to foreshadow the outcome of a war.[3]

To the 21st century eyes, the word may be a self-evident truth which does not require such a definition as the one above. Nevertheless, the militaries of ancien regime stretching across Europe were taken by considerable surprise, and one could hardly even react to the swarming French army before one’s armed forces were crushed. Such battles were epitomised by the Battle of Jena-Auerstädt in 1806 in which the Prussian army was virtually wiped out, resulting in enormous humiliation accompanied by harsh peace terms, which subjugated the vanquished to Napoleon’s rule. Nonetheless, as Spencer Wilkinson harshly denounces, Napoleon reaped what he sowed; his folie de grandeur implanted in the European neighbors the euphoric sense of nationalism, which, coupled with the hard lessons learnt from Napoleonic warfare, soon proved to unleash an uncontrollable backlash against the French Emperor.[4]

His ultimate failure notwithstanding, Napoleon’s ruthless search for self-aggrandisement created potential for the development of modern military studies even to such an extent that it might attain an “established status in science.”[5] Out of such an environment emerged Antoine-Henri Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz, both of who played a major role in theorising modern war by shedding light upon the Napoleonic warfare, including decisive battle. We shall therefore commence our inquiry into the contributions Jomini and Clausewitz made to the conception of decisive battle by giving insight into their views of war, the theories of the battle the two philosophers propounded and their impact upon the subsequent history. It will be shown that the two military gurus analysed Napoleon’s decisive battles from different perspectives and that when read together in the 19th century, along with the influence of Social Darwinism, the two produced a grotesque synthesis, which led to the cult of absolute annihilation.

Despite their common combat experience in the Napoleonic Wars, Jomini and Clausewitz had wholly different views of war when they attempted to theorise them. His major treatise, The Art of War, aims to offer a successful recipe for military victory and is based upon the premise that there exist eternal principles of war, which formed the bases of successful military figures from Creaser to Napoleon. In his words: “Strategy, particularly, may be regulated by fixed laws resembling those of the positive sciences.”[6] With a purely analytical methodology, he begins his inquiry by investigating the significance of theory in war plans and dwell upon it as he advances his arguments. In doing so, he classifies war into different types with particular attention paid to the appearance and certain aspects of conflict. Without expounding upon such types further, he utterly fails to grasp the fundamental nature of war underlying these categorizations. The result is that he isolated “strategy from its political and social context”[7], limiting his outlook of war to the operational level. Moreover, Jomini’s theory of war revolves around geographical factors rather than the nature of war itself, and he finds in lines and directions something of absoluteness as if they represented a geometrical theorem. Hence, this inevitably leads to his conviction that the splendid utilization of lines of communications plays a major role in a military victory. As John Shy admits, Jomini “wrote to publish and he published to impress”[8], and for this reason, remained for a long time a celebrated figure among military professionals, especially in the US during the Civil War. Above all, however, it is noteworthy that while Encyclopédistes, such as Rousseau, contributed largely to the development of political and social ideals before the French Revolution, the country’s philosophy itself underwent serious stagnation. It is therefore understandable as to the reasons for Jomini’s oversimplification of war and his desire for creating more of a universal field manual than a treatise which touches upon the the nature of war itself.

By contrast, Clausewitz tackled the issue of theorising war from a whole new perspective. Heuser points out that there are “at least two permutations, the wars of Clausewitz the Idealist and the wars of Clausewitz the Realist.”[9] His presentation of such thesis and antithesis owes enormously to the Hegelian dialectic, which provided the defeated Prussia with an intellectual foundation for the development of theory of war. Unlike Hegel, Clausewitz clearly understands the limits, if not the danger, of idealism and warns that “[j]ust as some plants bear fruit only if they don’t shoot up too high, so in the practical arts the leaves and flowers of theory must be pruned and the plant kept close to its proper soil-experience.”[10] Instead, he recognizes the importance of balance between theory and practice, which must always support each other.[11] Moreover, acknowledging the complex nature of war, he commences his inquiry from parts to the whole. Prussia’s philosophical foundations thus allowed the Napoleonic Wars veteran to seek the nature of war instead of another field manual which Jomini and his followers never grew tired of making.

Based upon this methodology, the Prussian general seeks to unite the social moment and its natural counterpart in order to understand war.[12] First, Clausewitz argues that “war is nothing but the continuation of policy with other means.”[13] Here, he reveals the reality of war, whose planning, course, and objectives, inter alia, are ultimately determined by politics. Second, Clausewitz does not fail to take into account the natural aspect of war because, according to the Hegelian philosophy, natural laws are sublated by the society. He finds that war may be reduced to the most fundamental level, that is, a duel between two persons. Here, he proposes his second notable proposition that “[w]ar is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.”[14] This inevitably leads to the highest stage of violence where “a clash of forces freely operating and obedient to no law but their own.” Hence, war is both dictated and terminated by absolute violence.[15] Nevertheless, “Once”, cautions Clausewitz, “the antagonists have ceased to be mere figments of a theory and become actual states and governments, when war is no longer a theoretical affair but a series of actions obeying its own peculiar laws, reality supplies the data from which we can deduce the unknown that lies ahead.”[16] Hence, the reality reappears, and politics regains the control of war. These two types of war are a product of Clausewitian dialectic and may be referred to as Absolute War and Real War, respectively. When reading Clausewitz, one is expected to comprehend this dichotomy first and foremost in order to grasp the nature of war.

It has been shown that the two military gurus had utterly different appreciation of war. With this in mind, we shall now shed light upon their theoretical contributions to the concept of decisive battle, which formed the sinew of Napoleon’s warfare. According to Brian Bond, both Jomini and Clausewitz “reflected the spirit and outline of Napoleonic legacy.”[17] Indeed, both agreed that the most important lessons from Napoleon are the concentration of force and the employment of masses against the decisive points. Their divergence, then, will benefit our understanding when we take into account the difference of premises as discussed above.

Jomini’s view of decisive battle is succinctly summarised as follows:

That strategy is the key to warfare;
That all strategy is controlled by invariable scientific principles; and
That these principles prescribe offensive action to mass forces against weaker enemy forces at some decisive point if strategy is to lead to victory.[18]

Again, the significance of the above dicta lies in the fact that he was constantly concerned with finding the eternal principles of strategy. He developed his above maxims based upon his own observation of recent history. Yet, this by no means guarantees the validity of his argument, for he simply applied historical events that are favorable to the already established premise of the existence of eternal strategy.[19] For example, while recognizing the achievements of Fredrick III, Jomini, nevertheless, attributed the triumph to his tactical skills rather than strategy, which was only to be perfected by Napoleon.[20] Any historical facts which contradict his proposition were to be ignored. Decisive point, for instance, never received due treatment by the author and remained unclear. In a desperate attempt to justify his surmise, he commented at the end of his treatise that “[i]t is almost always easy to determine the decisive point of a field of battle, but not so with the decisive moment; and it is precisely here that genius and experience are every thing, and mere theory of little value.”[21]

In other words, without thoroughly investigating his own hypothesis, he remained content with his presumption. Jomini’s logic is gravely similar to that of Marx; there already exists a presumption upon which things are to be understood and accepts no criticisms against it. To Jomini, due to his prescriptive stance, his own dicta were to be received by his readers as gospel unto ye. It is therefore understandable that he is responsible for creating what Brian Bond calls “Napoleonic delusion” that splendid strategy will assure any military victory, regardless of the politico-social context in which a battle is placed.[22] Politics was thus excluded from Jomini’s discourse, and, as we shall see, this alone was to prove to have one of the most devastating effects in military history upon the later generations.

Although Clausewitz also recognized the significance of decisive battle pursued through concentration of forces against decisive points, he gave a wholly different meaning to it. He placed great importance upon the destruction of the enemy forces as the “overriding principle” to be pursued through one great battle.[23] Unlike Jomini, however, the Prussian general outright rejects the absoluteness of strategy by acknowledging that “the events of every age must be judged in the light of its own peculiarities.”[24] In other words, the degree of effort directed toward the decisiveness of the battle is always subject to political considerations which take into account various factors of the time. Indeed, as he exposed his original conviction in Absolute War to the test of history, not only did he discover the lack of validity of his theory, but he became determined to revise his treatise, the full accomplishment of which was hindered by his untimely death. One of his final revisions reveal Clausewitz’ more sophisticated understanding of decisive battle:

If war is part of policy, policy will determine its character. As policy becomes more ambitious and vigorous, so will war, and this may reach the point where war attains its absolute form. If we look at war in this light, we do not need to lose sight of this absolute: on the contrary, we must constantly bear it in mind.[25]

Therefore, for Clausewitz, decisive battle is never the absolute form of war. Rather, it is no more than one possibility as the most extreme expression of the natural moment of war. The nature of war, thus, is always conditioned by political considerations, which have every potential of elevating battles to an extreme end.

As we have seen, as the prominent philosophers of the Napoleonic Wars generation, Jomini and Clausewitz played a major role in conceptualising the legacy of the Emperor of Revolutionary France, namely decisive war. Nevertheless, the difference of philosophical foundations caused the two military sages to take wholly divergent paths. Their theoretical contributions must be assessed in the light of those who accepted them. For this purpose, we shall hereafter consider the impact of the two philosophers’ theories of decisive battles upon post-Clausewitz Germany.

Due to the sheer accessibility of Jomini, Clausewitz were virtually forgotten for a long time. Bond notes that it was, in fact, much easier to read Jomini in French than Clausewitz in German.[26] Even German students of Clausewitz found their ancestor’s work exhausting. For this reason, Jomini was accepted favorably in Germany.[27] It is, therefore, no surprise that the Jominian disregard of politics in relation to war shaped the thinking of the post-Clausewitian generations. John Shy observes that the qualities comprising The Art of War, namely simplifying, reducing, and prescribing, “combined to extol the Napoleonic model of massing, attacking, and quickly winning decisive victories. Anything less or different was reckoned as failure.”[28] Until the “rediscovery” of Clausewitz by German students after the Franco-Prussian War, it was Jomini who dominated the military thinking, and his influence was so far-reaching that the tenacity of the French military thought virtually fixed the mind of German military professionals. Therefore, even after the reemergence of Clausewitz, On War “simply reinforced Jomini’s emphasis on the massive, aggressive use of force.”[29]

By the time Clausewitz regained his prestige in his motherland, not only did the Jominian thinking paralysed the Prussian military, but a radical ideology, Social Darwinism, had been exerting considerable ill influence upon the entire society. Moltke the Elder, inter alia, was a great admirer of Clausewitz, especially his idea of annihilation of the enemy. Heuser points out that he even elevated Clausewitian ideal to “the chief aim of all military operations.”[30] The Jominian disregard of politics as being superior to military is clearly evident here. Nonetheless, Social Darwinism proved to exert even more undesirable impact upon the general’s thinking when he alluded to war as being a “last but perfectly justified means to defend the existence, the independence and the honor of a state… And that war also has its beautiful side, that it brings forth virtues which would otherwise slumber or become extinct, can hardly disputed.”[31] The plague of Social Darwinism into the already ill-founded military thinking rendered no less toxic than a marriage of Hitler’s Nazism and Haushofer ‘s geopolitik of the 20th century Third Reich. Thereafter, it was the obsession with annihilation, not politics which ruled Germany. This preoccupation with the crushing of the enemy persisted to such an extent that it itself became the purpose of war itself. Even the near annihilation of Deutsches Reich in the wake of the Great War from the cult of Absolute War did not wake the German military. Ideologues continued to emerge. Erich Ludendorff, for example, even expanded the scope of Absolute War and notoriously agitated in 1935 for the “annihilation of the enemy Army and of the enemy nation.”[32] It would take Germany “judgment of the Civilization” at the International Military Tribunal in 1945-46 to finally break the chains of curse that had bound the country for almost 150 years.

We have seen that both the two military theorists, Jomini and Clausewitz, greatly contributed to the concept of decisive battle with their unique views of war, theories of the battle, and the legacy that affected the later generations. Jomini was a product of France of his days; fascinated by Napoleon’s spectacular success itself, he lost sight of larger context of war by focusing upon the appearance of conflict and geographical factors. On the other hand, Clausewitz also reflected the philosophical current of the early 19th century Prussia, but this largely contributed to his unprecedented task of inquiring into the nature of war hidden underneath the various appearances of war propounded by his French contemporary. Therefore, while the former utterly ignored political considerations, the latter successfully ascertained the politico-military relations in war, something which deserves to be labeled as an eternal principle. Against this backdrop, decisive battle took entirely different meanings for Jomini and Clausewitz. While Clausewitz is often accused of stressing decisive battle as an ideal form of warfare, we have shown that this is not the case. Rather, it was Jomini who lacked the intellectual capacity to grasp the fundamental nature of war and entirely left aside the role of politics in war. This thinking, or the Napoleon paradigm, continued for almost 150 years because the Jominian philosophy had taken root so deeply in Europe, especially Germany that by the time Clausewitz reemerged onto the world scene, he was never to be appreciated accurately. Fueled by Social Darwinism, decisive battle was now expanded to total war, which aimed for the annihilation of the entire nation as Lundendorff agitated. It is only hoped that while denouncing Nazism and Fascism, the humanity will not lose sight of the fact that the ill understanding of military strategy in the 19th century was equally responsible for the great wars of the 20th century.






















Bibliography

Bond, Brian: The Pursuit of Victory: From Napoleon to Saddam Hussein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.)
Clausewitz, Carl von: On War trs by Peter Paret and Michael Howard (Princeton UP: 1976)
Cross, John: Decisive Battle and the Global War on Terror (Kansas: US Army Command and General Staff College, 2005)
Helmuth von Moltke: Aufzeichnungen, Briefe, Schriften, Reden (Ebenhausen bei München: Wilhelm Langewiesche-Brandt, 1942)
Heuser, Beatrice: Reading Clausewitz (London: Pimlico, 2002)
Heuser, Beatrice: The Evolution of Strategy: Thinking War from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
Ishiwara, Kanji: Saishū sensō ron sensōshi taikan (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1995)
Jomini, Antoine H. The Art of War (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1971)
Jomini, Antoine H.: Traité Des Grandes Opérations Militaires, Contenant L'histoire Critique Des Campagnes De Frédéric Ii, Comparées À Celles De L'empereur Napoléon; avec un recueil des principes generauz de l’art de la guerre, 2d ed., 4 vols. (Paris, 1811)
Koyama, Hirotake: Gunji shisō no kenkyū (Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1970)
Ludendorff, Erich: Der Totale Krieg (Munich: Ludendorff Publishing, 1935)
Paret, Peter, Gordon A. Craig, and Felix Gilbert: Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1986)
Wilkinson, Spenser: The French Army Before Napoleon (Oxford: the Clarendon press, 1915)




[1] Heuser, Beatrice: The Evolution of Strategy: Thinking War from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 89.
[2] Quoted in Ishiwara, Kanji: Saishū sensō ron sensōshi taikan (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1995), pp. 16. (translation mine). Lt. General Ishiwara Kanji of the Imperial Japanese Army is considered the foremost strategist of his days. A pupil of Clausewitz and Ludendorff during his studies in Germany as well as a fervent admirer of Napoleon and Lenin, he developed his own theory on a possible future of perpetual peace after the final war between the US and Japan. A man of action, Ishiwara translated his theories into action by conspiring to instigate hostility between Japan and China and later, the US. Hence the Manchurian Incident of 1931. Here, he is likely to be referring to Jacques Antoine Hippolyte, Comte de Guibert. His deliberate avoidance of mentioning Guibert’s name may be attributed to the fact that the first half of his treatise is based upon his major speech delivered to the civilian audience, whom Ishiwara might have deemed to lack any rudimentary knowledge of military history.
[3] Cross, John: Decisive Battle and the Global War on Terror (Kansas: US Army Command and General Staff College, 2005), pp. 7.
[4] Wilkinson, Spenser: The French Army Before Napoleon (Oxford: the Clarendon press, 1915), pp. 15.
[5] Koyama, Hirotake: Gunji shisō no kenkyū (Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1970), pp. 45.
It is interesting to note that Napoleon himself failed to develop any theoretical framework for his revolutionary warfare. A renowned Marxist as well as a military theorist of prewar Japan, Koyama Hirotake observes this absence of theorization by attributing it to Napoleon’s “bourgeois ambition for the world conquest” and the lack of intellectual foundation in France of the time that was ready to receive the new military revolution brought about the Emperor (Ibid., pp. 46.) Although Koyama’s analysis is by no means free from bias rendered by his obsession with Marxism, it, nevertheless, has merits.
[6] Jomini, Antoine H. The Art of War (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1971), pp. 321.
[7] Paret, Peter, Gordon A. Craig, and Felix Gilbert: Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 164.
[8] Ibid. pp. 158.
[9] Heuser, Beatrice: Reading Clausewitz (London: Pimlico, 2002), pp. 43. (Italics mine)
[10] Clausewitz, Carl von: On War trs by Peter Paret and Michael Howard (Princeton UP: 1976), pp. 61. (Italics mine) In this sense, we may draw a striking similarity between the Clausewitizian dialectic its Marxist counterpart.
[11] Ibid. pp. 61.
[12] Koyama, Hirotake: Gunji shisō no kenkyū, pp. 74. Here, I owe Koyama the use of the Hegelian terminology, namely “moment.”
[13] Clausewitz, Carl von: On War. pp. 69.
[14] Ibid. pp. 75.
[15] Ibid. pp. 77-78.
[16] Ibid. pp. 80.
[17] Bond, Brian: The Pursuit of Victory: From Napoleon to Saddam Hussein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.), pp. 44.
[18] Jomini, Antoine H.: Traité Des Grandes Opérations Militaires, Contenant L'histoire Critique Des Campagnes De Frédéric Ii, Comparées À Celles De L'empereur Napoléon; avec un recueil des principes generauz de l’art de la guerre, 2d ed., 4 vols. (Paris, 1811), 2:312n. quoted in Paret, Peter, Gordon A. Craig, and Felix Gilbert: Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 146.
[19] Koyama, Hirotake: Gunji shisō no kenkyū, pp. 100.
[20] Bond, Brian: The Pursuit of Victory: From Napoleon to Saddam Hussein, pp. 47.
[21] Jomini, Antoine H. The Art of War, pp. 334.
[22] Bond, Brian: The Pursuit of Victory: From Napoleon to Saddam Hussein, pp. 49.
[23] Clausewitz, Carl von: On War, pp. 258.
[24] Ibid. pp. 593.
[25] Ibid. pp. 606.
[26] Bond, Brian: The Pursuit of Victory: From Napoleon to Saddam Hussein, pp. 49.

[27] Paret, Peter, Gordon A. Craig, and Felix Gilbert: Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, pp. 176.
[28] Ibid. pp. 179.
[29] Ibid. pp. 178.
[30] Heuser, Beatrice: Reading Clausewitz, pp. 104.
[31] Helmuth von Moltke: Aufzeichnungen, Briefe, Schriften, Reden (Ebenhausen bei München: Wilhelm Langewiesche-Brandt, 1942), pp. 340f, quoted in Heuser, Beatrice: Reading Clausewitz, pp. 104.
[32] Ludendorff, Erich: Der Totale Krieg (Munich: Ludendorff Publishing, 1935), pp. 168, quoted in Heuser, Beatrice: The Evolution of Strategy, pp. 138. It is noteworthy to mention that Japan followed the exactly the same path as her “role model,” Germany, took. Indeed, Japan’s militarily reckless war in the Pacific was commanded by General Tojo Hideki, who studied Ludendorff during his years as a military attaché in Germany in the 1920s and assumed the responsibility as the Prime Minister, the Army Minister, and the Home Minister by the date of infamy.

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