Modernity of War: Carl von Clausewitz and His Theory

Abstract

This article discusses Сarl von Clausewitz’s theory of war in relation to war’s modernity. This relation is analyzed in two ways: by tracing its philosophical sources and the epistemological status of the theory, but also by following how it was received in Soviet “military philosophy.” The first part of the article looks into the influence of German idealism on Clausewitz. In the second part, it analyzes his original way of constructing a theory of war, which understands war as a thing that is complex, changeable, and not amenable to comprehensive conceptualization. Clausewitz offers a new way of theorizing: relativistic (as opposed to abstract or absolute modes of thinking), historical (as opposed to the invariance of logical categories) and pragmatic (as opposed to philosophically disinterested). In conclusion the author reconstructs Clausewitz’s place in Soviet military theory. In the 1920s-1930s Clausewitz was a regarded as an authoritative thinker; in the late 1940s, Stalin denounced him as a “Prussian reactionary” who wrote about the outdated “manufacturing period of war” rather than its modern machine age. In the 1960s-1980s even though the struggle against “kneeling before the West” was over, historical or theoretical studies of Clausewitz were not resumed. Only his name and his famous aphorism that “war is a continuation of politics by other means” were occasionally mentioned. The author considers this “overthrow of Clausewitz” as a victory for Stalinism, the result of ta replication of semantic and power relations and of mental and professional structures that were formed in late Stalinism. The militarized regime of Stalinist science has been perpetuated to some extent in current military-scientific institutions. “Military philosophers” tend to reproduce the same symbolic schemes of thought which are determined by their struggle over the “legacy of the Great Victory.”