Clausewitz, War, Dialectic and Political Economy

Primary version of this post at Barry Stocker's Weblog

I’m following on from remarks I made yesterday at the end of my post on Carl von Clausewitz’ On War. Something I’ve mentioned before is the link between Clauswitz’s approach and German Idealist philosophy of the time. I’m not concerned with details of influence here, but with significant similarities with regard to ideas and methods which did not appear before. There is a ‘dialectical’ approach in Clausewitz’ book in its concern with the relation between part and whole and between opposites. Tactics and strategy only exist in comparison with each according to a boundary which shifts according to context. The success of Napoleon’s battles and campaigns changes according to how much we think about the overall consequences of a battle and consider what might have happened if Napoleon had done something different, or if his opponents had judged the situation more accurately. What I didn’t talk so much about yesterday is how far Clausewitz suggests that the success of one side in a battle depends on its relation to original goals. A battlefield victory in which the general does not achieve goals with regard to destroying the enemy’s army or occupying territory is not a real victory. A defeat in which the general was intending to retreat to predetermined lines while destroying as much of the enemy as possible is not a defeat.

This does parallel Hegel’s idea of dialectical method in philosophy, which emphasises context, relation between part and whole, the move from particular to universal and simple to complex as all relevant concepts are brought in relation to a single concept, the importance of conflict and resolution between differing ideas.

It also parallels political economy, which must have had some impact of Hegel. What I mean by political economy is largely Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). What Smith is concerned with is how trade and commerce integrates differing and competing interests from different parts of a country and even the world. On a very simple level, we can only understand why a village bake makes bread in relation to the demand for bread from other villagers. At a slightly more complex level, we can only understand why wheat is grown in certain parts of a country because of the demand from bakers for the materials to make bread. Economic processes allow the mergence of very complex co-ordination of a mass of different points of production and demand through a mass of individual decisions to respond to demand and production. What happens at any one point can be partly understood through a simple relation, people in that village want bread, but only fully understood through the complex set of intersecting relations in the economy as a whole.

Some of what Clausewitz says about military organisation and decisions applies to economic activity. Smith referred to the economic gains of dividing a production process between simple repeated actions carried out by distinct individuals. Famously is model was a match factory. Clausewitz recognises the value of routine to reduce friction in the operations of an army. He sees the battle as made up of a complex interaction of decisions made by junior officers, which the commander-in-chief cannot control.

Clausewitz is very concerned with an overall estimate of costs and benefits, and the hidden costs of not following a certain course of action. This is the sort of thinking with which economists are very concerned, what are the hidden costs of an individual, corporate, or governmental decision; how to calculate the opportunity cost of lost benefits from another decision and the ways that not thinking about opportunity costs. Smith has a classic account of this at the governmental level in Book IV of The Wealth of Nations, ‘Of Systems of Political Economy’.

Some of this might sound very commonsensical, but as I pointed out yesterday Clausewitz explains that the importance of numerical supremacy had largely been ignored in war. What can seem like the obvious now, may not have seemed at all obvious for millenia of previous history.

Adam Smith’s attention to the basic forms of economic interaction and the appearance of complex systems, was certainly known to Kant as he refers to the role of self-interest and trade in creating human communities and unifying human communities. Before Smith it may have seemed to bizarre to think that humans come together because of self-interest, but Smith explains who competitive self-interest and co-operation need each other and even if they conflict sometimes they also depend on each other.

Kant rejected the idea of ‘dialectic’ in philosophy, nevertheless his philosophy is dialectic in the sense that it deals with complexity, parts and wholes, interaction. Kant rejected ‘dialectic’ because he thought it was a kind of reasoning that lacks reference to experience, but in Smith we see a dialectic in an area of empirical study. We don’t have to call it dialectic, Smith did not, but it we describe Hegel’s ‘dialectic’ in the simplest terms possible we can see a connection. The connection goes indirectly through Kant, but also directly as Hegel thinks of law arising from the need to mediate property disputes within the kind of economy described by Smith. This is a dialectical move, law which is universal within a community emerges from conflicting particular interests.

It maybe that Hegel’s attempt at a dialectic of spirit or logic, is too abstract and speculative, but even if we think that, we can still take bits of Hegel independently of that grand project. This kind of social-political argument in Kant and Hegel, has an impact in their philosophy as a whole.

There are certainly other things to be taken into account, the development of science, the influence of slightly earlier and contemporaneous philosophers are among the most obvious; but the methods of German Idealist philosophy have some connection with political economy. Clausewitz could not have written On War before the era of political economy and German Idealism.

Reading Clausewitz, On War

Primary version of this post at Barry Stocker's Weblog, with picture of Clausewitz, not just the link!

Clausewitz is pictured above.

I’m continuing my reading of Carl von Clausewitz’ On War (I last posted on this n 12th July), certainly one of the greatest books written about military strategy, in a style of interaction between part and whole (a dialectical approach), which matches the constant unstable interaction between tactics and strategy which Clausewitz refers to as a characteristic of war. Cluausewitz famously refers to war as the continuation of politics, and like Michel Foucault we might to want to turn that back and understand politics as a form of war.

Clausewitz surprisingly emphasises something that appears absurdly obvious, that is the importance of numbers in war, that it is important for an army to have more soldiers than the opposing army, Clausewitz recognises that this might seem to be a truism, but assures the reader that until quite recently in history, right into the Eighteenth Century, that this issues was ignored. Earlier accounts of war fail to mention numbers or pay little attention to the idea of using superior numbers as an advantage against the enemy. Looking at the background to Clausewitz’ remark, we can remember that a lot of cultured references to war go back to the Ancient Greeks, and the defeat of a vast Persian army, including the resistance of just 300 Spartan soldiers at Thermopylae known through The Histories of Herodotus. Expanding on that, we might also note that the history of war used to be the history of heroes, reflecting an attitude that monarchs and aristocrats were the only memorable people in war, or any other aspect of history.

In the Eighteenth Century, Giambattista Vico noted in The New Science the mythical aspects of historical writing about ancient wars, in what must have been a battle between large armies is sometimes reduced to the story of battle between a few heroes. What Vico says can be seen as part of an Enlightenment shift towards a greater interest in the equal status of all humans, so that war can be taken as essentially a conflict between masses of men in which the vulgar issue of numerical supremacy may be more important that the leadership of aristocratic generals.

In his usual dialectical style, Clausewitz suggests that surprise as a means of gaining an advantage in war must be in a trade off with the general efficiency of military action. Surprise can only be achieved by doing something that is costly in terms of time and organisation and which loses some kinds of military advantage. The point of a surprise is to do something costly and inefficient because that is what the enemy does not expect. Surprise becomes generally less useful the higher the level of war, so surprise may often work as an improvised tact at a low level in the military command in the heat of battle, it is much less likely to have success at the general or commander-in-chief level in planning strategy for a whole battle or a whole campaign. Surprise therefore belongs more to tactics than strategy, though if it does work at a higher level there could be enormous benefits.

Despite his great respect for Napoleon Bonaparte, Clausewtiz is very critical of claims that Napolean used surprise with great success. Where he did have success it was early in his wars, when it the opposing generals and monarchs became very demoralised by defeat in one battle, where Bonaparte used strategy that was new to them. The early reaction of opposing countries (Prussia, Austria and Russia being the most important) was to agree to a peace favourable to Napoleon after losing an apparently major battle. Later on opposing powers kept fighting after losing a battle and found they could wear down Bonaparte’s armies and particularly after they were able to join forces. This partly relates to Clausewitz’ remark that war is the continuation of politics by other means and also suggests that a dramatic victory involving surprise may not be a truly strategic victory. Clausewitz suggests that the brilliant use of surprise attributed to Napoleon’s victories in his first great campaign, in Italy, overlooks what might have been achieved if Napoleon had done something else; and overlooks the tendency of the Habsburg Empire to withdraw and give in to easily which may explain what look like the brilliant victories of an emergent genius. He also suggests that Napoleon’s genius as he fought off the opposing coalition in 1813 may have been exaggerated. His battle plans of that period have often been praised for genius though he inevitably lost to such a huge and strong opposing coalition. Clausewitz, suggests that what looks like military genius as Napoleon moved his armies rapidly between the armies of different powers, so that he could defeat them in isolation, was an error since Napoleon was exhausting his resources through such manoeuvres and that preparation for a decisive battle with the coalition would have been better. So in general Clausewitz is sceptical of the value of surprise and suggests that the value of Napoleon’s surprise strategies has been greatly exaggerated.

Clausewitz’ remarks in surprise are remarks about trade-offs cost and benefits, hidden costs. The significance of this and its relations with dialectic in Clausewitz is something I will deal with in tomorrow’s post.

Thoughts on the Philosophy of Peace Conference

Primary version of this post at Barry Stocker's Weblog, with pictures!

The ‘Philosophy of Peace III’ conference at Boğaziçi (Bosphorus) University, Istanbul ended two days ago. My last three posts write up each day of the conference. The biggest conference focus was on Kant’s essay ‘Perpetual Peace’ (‘Zum ewigen Frieden’). The front cover of the first German edition is shown above. Not every paper referred to Kant, but his philosophical view of the possibility of permanent peace was discussed many times. Those papers which did not directly refer to Kant still engaged with the issues that Kant deals with: how there can be universal peace, and associated issues of communication, justice and ethics.

I won’t react to the conference by detailing my reaction to individual papers, all of which were summarised on the last three posts. I will list, in no particular order, some things I learned in general mixed in with some points I would like to work on in reaction to what happened at the conference.

The tension between ideas of natural law (law that supposedly all humans agree on if they are thinking clearly and which therefore come from nature rather than human institutions) and socially constructed order, in thinking about how human communities might move towards peace.

The permanence of war in the sense that peace can only be maintained by states (or possibly one integrated global state) using a monopoly of violence to repress threats to peace within the state and in relations between states. Since politics is the competition to control the state monopoly of violence, politics and all associated social conflicts must be seen as war of some kind.

The likely necessity of war in bringing the world closer to perpetual peace, as aggressive states have to be defeated. Efforts to defeat aggressive states, along with violent non-state organisations, are not only likely to require violence, they are likely to cause reactive violence. The movement towards perpetual peace must be labyrinthine.

There is no purely moral government, state or political leader. That may seem to be a statement of the obvious, but work on ‘Peace’ tends to be hovering on verge of assuming the goal of a purely non-violent ethical order, of law without force. This could only happen from a anarchist perspective. When I say anarchism, I do not mean chaos, I mean anarchism as a political project. In general the political project of anarchism is a society governed by laws which have been adopted by peaceful consensus of the community as a whole. I do not think this is a realistic project. As was pointed out in the conference, stateless ‘primitive’ communities fight each other and have a high rate of death by violence.

War as we know it is inevitable for many future decades, at least, and war in the general sense that politics always refers to the state’s use of force is inevitable in any conceivable society. In that case we must be concerned with the ethics of war, so we can pursue the highest ethical standards in all out military wars and in the war of politics. When I say highest ethical standards, I do not mean that ethical purity is possible, I mean that the labyrinth of individual and collective passions and interests needs to be regulated from the point of view of some ethical standard.

War cannot be taken in a purely negative sense, even though we should work for a world without war, at least in sense of the full out military conflict. Kant himself though war can be morally elevating if conducted according to laws of humanity. There are various ways in which military virtues have played a part in the history of moral thought, and taken in its broadest sense that includes the role of war and warriors in artistic works with moral qualities. War has often been associated with broad political and social changes, and all of us can think of some political or social changes associated with some wars, which we find desirable however much we hate the suffering of war. Military ideals have appeared in political thought in all traditions, liberal and Marxist as well as conservative and nationalists. Sometimes conservatism is more pacific than other political currents because of fear of the social and political changes brought about by war.

If Kant is a convenient starting point for the study of peace, then Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831, portrait at bottom of post) is a convenient starting point for the study of war, in his unfinished but still monumental On War (Vom Kriege, front cover of first edition at bottom of post). The lives of Kant and Clausewitz overlap and they were both German subjects of the Prussian monarchy. It is widely accepted that Clausewitz’ writing is marked by German Idealist philosophy. If Clausewitz belongs to the study of war, he must belong to the study of peace as Kant must belong to the study of war. Just as we can find antique precedents for Kant’s cosmopolitanism in antique Stoicism and Virgil’s Roman-Augustan universalism in the Aeneid, we can find antique precedents for Clausewitz in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War and in Homer’s account of the Trojan War in the Iliad.

I will end just by referring to the classic explanation, and justification, of Samurai spirit in Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s (1659-1719) Hagakure (The Book of the Samurai), which suggests that the Samurai warrior belongs with the Buddhist priest in the practice of compassion and of fearlessness before death. Tsunetomo himself was a samurai from the end of the Samurai era who became a Buddhist monk.