On War: Unabridged and Illustrated Book by Carl von Clausewitz

On War (Vom Kriege) by Carl von Clausewitz, first published posthumously between 1832 and 1834, is the most influential work of military theory ever written, and one of the strangest. Clausewitz was a Prussian general who had fought in nearly every major campaign of the Napoleonic Wars, including the catastrophic Prussian defeat at Jena in 1806 and the great battles of the 1813–1815 coalition that finally destroyed Napoleon. He spent the last twelve years of his life as director of the Prussian War College in Berlin, drafting a vast treatise that would explain what war actually is. He died of cholera in 1831, aged fifty-one, with the book unfinished. His widow, Marie von Clausewitz, gathered his manuscripts and published them in three volumes over the following two years.

The argument of On War is built from two decades of direct experience of warfare under Napoleon, the most consequential military commander of the modern era. Clausewitz had watched the old eighteenth-century model of limited war — fought by professional armies for limited dynastic aims — give way to something new: war waged by entire nations, with mass conscription, popular passions, and political stakes that demanded total commitment. He set himself the task of building a theory that could account for what he had seen. The result is a book unlike any other in the history of military thought.

Its most famous concepts have entered the working vocabulary of strategy, statecraft, and history. War is the continuation of policy by other means. War involves friction — the small accumulated obstacles that make even simple actions difficult in practice. War is shaped by the trinity of violence, chance, and reason, embodied in the people, the army, and the government. War is enveloped in a fog of uncertainty that can never be entirely dispelled. These ideas have been argued over by generals, statesmen, historians, and strategic thinkers for nearly two centuries, and continue to shape how the modern world understands armed conflict.

On War is also a difficult book, and honestly so. Clausewitz was working through hard problems and died before he could finish. Only the first book and parts of two others had been revised to his satisfaction; the rest is working manuscript. Readers approaching the book for the first time are often advised to read Book One carefully and then move selectively through the rest. Book One alone, however, is enough to establish why On War has endured. It is the clearest statement ever written of what war is, what it costs, and why it cannot be understood apart from the political life of the societies that wage it.

This edition reproduces the Graham translation of 1873, the first English translation of Vom Kriege and the basis of all subsequent English-language editions.

A foundational work of modern strategic and political thought, by the most influential military theorist of the modern era.

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