[...]... it? This is the journalist’s use of On War, and it is the mirror image of the uses to which the book was put by Clausewitz s critics in the 1990s None of them needed Clausewitz to sustain their basic points The rise of the guerrilla, the role of culture in shaping war, and the predominance of warlords were no more or less true for their being presented as part of a demolition of Clausewitz The notion... (Oxford, 1983) Clausewitz and the Dialectics of War 17 Or so it seemed Clausewitz never knowingly underestimated the contribution of his wife, Marie, both in stimulating his intellect and in assuaging his tensions But if he felt disappointed in the twilight years of his life, he may unwittingly have done so Beginning in 1832, the grieving widow set about the publication of Clausewitz s writings It was... gradual changes The 9/11 attacks were certainly a defining moment in people’s lives, and not just in the United States Thanks to the real-time reporting of television, they became the sort of event which prompted individuals to locate their reactions to the news in terms which were subjective more than objective, in what they were doing and where they were as the aircraft hit the twin towers—just as... as the starting point for his entire theory, he repeated the ‘formula’ indirectly and in a somewhat weaker form Policy in the trinity enjoys equal status with the other two tendencies in war, with primordial violence and the interplay of probability and chance At the conference, it did not prove possible to reach agreement on the differentiation of the ‘trinity’, but it was understood as the starting... manifestations in the art of war,’ 12 and to the review of the history of war which Clausewitz provided in book VIII, chapter 3B, of On War, where he described the semibarbarous Tartars, the republics of antiquity, the feudal lords and trading cities of the Middle Ages, eighteenth -century kings and the rulers and peoples of the nineteenth century as ‘all conducting war in their own particular way, using different... Clausewitz really meant when he wrote as he did Clearly, there is no strict demarcation between these four groups, and the insights of one discipline can generate insights for another Indeed that is the premise both of the Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War and of the conference on Clausewitz in the twenty-first century which it sponsored The programme aims to look at war in. .. wars’ Münkler shows how the application of Clausewitzian theory to today’s ‘privatized wars’ presupposes a fundamental interpretive shift, which involves moving away from what Aron called the ‘formula’, in other words war as a continuation of policy by other means, to an explicit engagement with the ‘fascinating trinity’ of war In the trinity, which Clausewitz stressed contained his actual concept... especially the war in Iraq—as though they were the exclusive templates for war in the coming century Striking here is the lack of perspective, which fails to look at other wars going on elsewhere in the world at the same time, or neglects to look at current events in historical context, and so does not distinguish what is really new from what seems to be new Clausewitz confronted the same difficulty Having... as the main allied armies were advancing on Paris, Clausewitz s corps was retreating He never fully threw off the charge of undue caution in the field The accusation was unjust, but incontrovertible: unjust because Clausewitz was not the field commander on that day or any other, incontrovertible because he would never again have the chance to disprove it in battle In 1818, he became the director of the. .. is a political instrument does not become either more or less true because of what Clausewitz believed about the relationship between the two In the introduction to his chapter in this book, Christopher Bassford identifies four approaches to the study of Clausewitz First, the original intent school’ are historians who focus on Clausewitz and his writings in the context of the times in which he lived . war, not because they are particularly interested in understanding Clausewitz. The presumption in much contemporary comment in the opening years of the twenty-first century, and even more in the governmental. University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © The several contributors 2007 The moral rights of the authors have. governments were Clausewitzian in the most hackneyed sense. Since the attacks, not least thanks to the length, bloodiness, and persistence of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to the growing belief