Resumen
Resumen de De la guerra
Para quién es
For readers who love history, politics and strategy, and anyone who wants to think about power and decisions under pressure.
De qué trata este libro
On War is an unfinished treatise by Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian officer who fought in the wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. He wrote it in the years after 1815, while he directed the war school in Berlin, and he was still revising it when he died of cholera in 1831. His widow, Marie, edited the papers and published his collected works in the years that followed. The work runs to eight books, and only the first was close to finished in his own eyes.
Clausewitz did not want to give generals a rulebook. He wanted to understand what war really is, so that a commander could think clearly when the guns are firing and the facts are poor. He had seen Prussia crushed at Jena in 1806, and he had watched Napoleon change what armies could do. Those years convinced him that old formulas about lines, angles and bases explained very little.
For you, the book offers a way of thinking about conflict that reaches beyond the battlefield. It deals with violence, politics, chance, fear, planning and judgment. In the next fifteen minutes you will meet its main ideas in order, beginning with the plainest and most disturbing one: that war is a duel on a very large scale.
En este resumen
- 1War is a duel on a vast scaleFree
- 2War is policy carried on by other means
- 3Real war falls short of absolute war
- 4Three forces make up the nature of war
- 5Friction and fog shape every plan
- 6Genius and moral forces decide close contests
- 7Theory should educate judgment, not give formulas
- 8Defense is strong and attack has limits
- 9The book is unfinished and still argued over
Idea clave 1 de 9
War is a duel on a vast scale
Clausewitz begins with a simple picture. Imagine two wrestlers, each trying to force the other to do his will. That, he says, is the heart of war, only multiplied across whole nations. War is an act of violence meant to compel an opponent to accept our terms.
From this picture he draws a hard conclusion. Violence has no built-in limit. If one side holds back from using force, while the other uses all it has, the restrained side will lose. So each side is pushed to match the other, and then to go a little further. Clausewitz calls this a tendency toward extremes, and he treats it as a pull that is always present in war.
To win the duel, he says, you must disarm the enemy. That means destroying his fighting force, but also taking his land and breaking his will to go on. All three matter, because an enemy who still has the will to fight can rebuild an army. Clausewitz therefore keeps returning to the idea that the aim of war is a state of helplessness in the other side, not death for its own sake.
He also refuses to make war sound gentle. He writes that kindly souls might imagine a clever way to defeat an enemy without much bloodshed, and he warns that this is a mistake. Those who shrink from blood will be beaten by those who do not. He does not say that cruelty is good. He says that ignoring the nature of the thing leads to disaster.
For a modern reader this opening is a corrective to wishful thinking. It reminds us that conflict has its own pressures, and that good intentions do not cancel them. It also sets up the rest of the book, because everything that follows is about what holds this pull toward extremes in check.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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About this edition
Every format is free to start, and print and large print are at cost.
- LengthAbout 296,000 words
- Reading timeAbout 19 h 40 min
- Listening time32 h 50 min
- FormatseBook, large-print eBook, audiobook, 15-minute summary
- LanguagesEnglish and 11 other languages