Ĭlausewitz served in the Rhine Campaigns (1793–1794) including the Siege of Mainz, when the Prussian army invaded France during the French Revolution, and served in the Napoleonic Wars from 1806 to 1815. Clausewitz's family claimed descent from the Barons of Clausewitz in Upper Silesia, which was eventually confirmed, but now is doubted by scholars.
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Clausewitz entered the Prussian military service at the age of twelve as a Lance-Corporal, eventually attaining the rank of Major-General. Clausewitz's father was once a lieutenant in the Prussian army and held a minor post in the Prussian internal revenue service. His grandfather, the son of a Lutheran pastor, had been a professor of theology. Life and military career Ĭlausewitz was born on Jin Burg bei Magdeburg, Kingdom of Prussia, the fourth and youngest son of a middle-class family. Nonetheless, reputable Clausewitz experts such as Peter Paret and sources such as Encyclopædia Britannica still use Gottlieb instead of Gottfried, presumably based on their reading of handwritten birth records. "Carl Philipp Gottfried" appears on Clausewitz's tombstone, and this is most likely to be correct. He spelled his own given name with a "C" in order to identify with the classical Western tradition writers who wrongly use "Karl" are seeking to emphasize his German identity, often to serve hostile purposes. Ĭlausewitz's Christian names are sometimes given in non-German sources as "Carl Philipp Gottlieb" or "Carl Maria" because of reliance on mistaken source material, conflation with his wife's name (Marie), or mistaken assumptions about German orthography. Clausewitz had many aphorisms, of which the most famous is that "War is the continuation of Politik by other means" ( Politik being variously translated as "policy" or "politics", terms with very different implications), a description that has won wide acceptance. In contrast to Antoine-Henri Jomini, he argued that war could not be quantified or reduced to mapwork, geometry, and graphs. He saw history as a vital check on erudite abstractions that did not accord with experience. He stressed the dialectical interaction of diverse factors, noting how unexpected developments unfolding under the " fog of war" (i.e., in the face of incomplete, dubious, and often completely erroneous information and high levels of fear, doubt, and excitement) call for rapid decisions by alert commanders. His thinking is often described as Hegelian because of his references to dialectical thinking but, although he probably knew Hegel, Clausewitz's dialectic is quite different and there is little reason to consider him a disciple.
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His most notable work, Vom Kriege ( On War), was unfinished at his death.Ĭlausewitz espoused a romantic conception of warfare, though he also had at least one foot planted firmly in the more rationalist ideas of the European Enlightenment. In Prussian service, by Karl Wilhelm WachĬarl Philipp Gottfried von ClausewitzĬarl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz ( / ˈ k l aʊ z ə v ɪ t s / J– November 16, 1831) was a German-Prussian soldier and military theorist who stressed the "moral" (in modern terms, psychological) and political aspects of war.