Carl von Clausewitz

About this figure

Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) was a Prussian general and military theorist whose unfinished treatise "On War" (Vom Kriege) became one of the most influential works ever written on the theory of warfare. He entered the Prussian army as a boy of twelve, saw combat in the Rhine campaigns of the 1790s, and later studied under the military reformer Gerhard von Scharnhorst, whose emphasis on studying war analytically rather than through fixed rules shaped Clausewitz's own approach. After Prussia's defeat by Napoleon and its forced alliance with France, Clausewitz resigned his Prussian commission in protest in 1812 and served instead in the Russian army during Napoleon's disastrous invasion that year, later helping to negotiate the Convention of Tauroggen that turned Prussia against its former ally.

He returned to Prussian service, took part in the 1815 campaign that ended at Waterloo, and later served as director of the Prussian war academy in Berlin, where he spent much of the 1820s drafting and revising the manuscript of "On War." He died of cholera in 1831 with the work still incomplete, and it was his widow, Marie von Brühl, who organized and published it posthumously in 1832. The book is best known for describing war as "the continuation of policy by other means," for its analysis of the unpredictable friction and uncertainty, or "fog," that separates war on paper from war in practice, and for treating war as a shifting interaction of violence, chance, and rational political purpose rather than a fixed science governed by universal rules. Though written in the context of the Napoleonic Wars, "On War" has remained a standard reference in military education and strategic thought well into the twenty-first century.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.