Volume 23, Number 16 · October 14, 1976
Which Side Was Clausewitz On?
By C.B.A. Behrens
Clausewitz and the State
by Peter Paret
Oxford University Press, 476 pp., $18.50
The German military historian Delbrück, writing in 1907, said of Clausewitz that he was the greatest of all military thinkers: he wrote with the precision of a philosopher and the elegance of Goethe, and his works on strategy were the only ones hitherto produced that deserved the name of classics. Everything which Professor Paret says in his Clausewitz and the State suggests that he would endorse Delbrück's judgment, but it is nevertheless not one with which he is directly concerned. 'I have written this book,' he says, 'neither to evaluate the adequacy of Clausewitz's theories nor to trace their impact on the conduct of war in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.' His object, he explains in his preface, 'is not the interpretation of Clausewitz's theories but their psychological and historical genesis.'
Review, 3360 words
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