McNair Paper Number 52, Chapter 2, Notes, October 1996
1. Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State: The Man, His Theories, and His Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 71 and 74-75.
2. Clausewitz to Marie von Brhhl, 29 September 1806, quoted in Paret, Clausewitz and the State, 124. The three commanders-in-chief were King Frederick William III, who chose to accompany the army; Duke Karl of Brunswick, the nominal commander; and, Prince Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen, who was given command of half the army [Carl von Clausewitz, "From Observations on Prussia in Her Great Catastrophe," Historical and Political Writings, trans. and eds. Peter Paret and Daniel Moran (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 44]. Scharnhorst was one of the two chiefs of staff, but "no one high or low in the congresslike headquarters of the army had the kind of confidence in him that his task demanded" (ibid., 53).
3. Michael Howard, Clausewitz (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983),14 and 16; Clausewitz, "From Observations on Prussia in Her Great Catastrophe," 63. Frederick II's desperate gamble in the first Silesian War (1740-1742) to seize the Austrian province of Silesia through an unprovoked lightning attack almost doubled the size of his small kingdom [R. R. Palmer, "Frederick the Great, Guilbert, Bhlow: From Dynastic to National War," in Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret, with Gordon A. Craig and Felix Gilbert (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 96]. By the close of the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), which stripped France of her overseas empire, Prussia had become one of the main components in the European balance of power even though her size and population were considerably smaller than those of the other major powers (ibid., 104-105). At Jena and Auerstadt the French under Napoleon came close to eliminating Prussia as a state.
4. Carl von Clausewitz, "Ugber das Leben und den Charakter von Scharnhorst," Historisch-politische Zeitschrift, I (1832), quoted in Paret, Clausewitz and the State, 71; also see Carl von Clausewitz, Historical and Political Writings, 90.
5. Clausewitz, quoted in Paret, Clausewitz and the State, 191. The "little war" of detachments that was the subject of this lecture referred to the use of small units to guard an army, disrupt the enemy's forces, or gather intelligence.
6. Paret, Clausewitz and the State, 197-198.
7. Ibid., 202. Paret has argued (107) that with the final section of Clausewitz's April 1812 essay to the Prussian crown prince, he had developed the word 'friction' "into a comprehensive theoretical concept" for describing the vast gulf between theory and actuality in war.
8. Ibid., 148, 150, 156, and 361-363.
9. Ibid., 256; Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Peter Paret and Michael Howard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 119.
10. Marie von Clausewitz, 30 June 1832, in Clausewitz, On War, 65.
11. Paret, Clausewitz and the State, 202. On the view expressed in chapters 5-8 of On War's first book, the diverse factors that distinguish real war from war on paper include war's intense physical demands, its mortal danger, pervasive uncertainties, and the play given to chance in battlefield processes.
12. In an unfinished note believed to have been written in 1830, the year before Clausewitz died, he offered this appraisal of the manuscript his widow published after his death under the title Vom Kriege: "The manuscript on the conduct of major operations that will be found after my death can, in its present state, be regarded as nothing but a collection of materials from which a theory of war was to have been distilled....The first chapter of Book One alone I regard as finished. It will at least serve the whole by indicating the direction I meant to follow everywhere." (Clausewitz, On War, 70). In all probability, this chapter was the last part of On War Clausewitz wrote before he died [Edward J. Villacres and Christoper Bassford, "Reclaiming the Clausewitzian Trinity," Parameters (Autumn 1995): 18].
13. Paret terms this process phenomenological abstraction and associates it with Edmund Husserl's term Wesenschau (Paret, Clausewitz and the State, 357-358). However, this sort of analysis of pure concepts can be traced back at least to Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which was first published in 1781. There is no evidence that Clausewitz ever read any of Kant's critiques (ibid., 150). As Michael Howard has noted, the ideas that formed the basis of Kant's philosophy, particularly the distinction between the ideal and its imperfect manifestations in the real world, were so much a part of Prussian intellectualism that Clausewitz did not need to read the critiques to be familiar with this (Clausewitz, 13-14). Regardless, Johann Gottfried Kieswetter, who was one of the permanent faculty at the Berlin Institute for Young Officers when Clausewitz attended it as part of the first class overseen by Scharnhorst (1801-1804), was an influential popularizer of Kantian philosophy and is usually credited with having "strongly influenced Clausewitz's awakening interest in philosophic method" (Paret, Clausewitz and the State, 69). Paret is sometimes inclined to discuss the method employed in On War in terms of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Adialectic of thesis and antithesis," but Clausewitz's analysis of the pure concept of war is probably closer to Kant's method than Hegel's (ibid., 84, note 13).
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