Tag: Political Animal

Defining War – John Keegan

Synopsis:

John Keegan’s cultural theory of war takes aim at the linear approach of Carl von Clausewitz’s prime mover of warfare – i.e. politics. According to Keegan, culture sustains as well as defines politics within human action – which means cultural prime movers operate as the bona fide vital centers of war and strategy. Within such a construct, strategy may be directed by politics – but politics is directed by culture.

Excerpts:

“Clausewitz’s thought is incomplete. It implies the existence of states, of state interests and of rational calculation about how they may be achieved. Yet war antedates the state, diplomacy and strategy by many millennia.

“War as the continuation of policy’ was the form Clausewitz chose to express the compromise for which the states he knew had settled. It accorded respect to their prevailing ethics – of absolute sovereignty, ordered diplomacy and legally binding treaties – while making allowance for the overriding principle of state interest.

“Clausewitz was struggling to advance a universal theory of what war ought to be, rather than what it actually was and had been.

“The Philhellenes tried but failed to make the Greeks accept their military culture. Clausewitz did not try but would have failed to make the Cossacks accept his military culture. What he and they failed to see was that their own Western way of fighting was quite as much an expression of their own culture as the ‘live to fight another day’ tactics of the Cossacks and the klephts.

“Clausewitz, raised in a world in which royal mana and military taboos had been extinguished apparently for good, found the words to legitimize the new order. That it was no order at all, and that his philosophy of warfare was a recipe for the destruction of European culture, he failed to perceive altogether.

*All excerpts have been taken from A History of Warfare, Vintage Books.

War in Human History – John Keegan

Synopsis:

John Keegan partially defines his cultural theory of war in A History of Warfare by examining it in a context and comparison analysis with traditional Clausewitzian ideas. Keegan believed the Clausewitzian political prime mover for war as too narrow. Politics may be the fountainhead, but culture is the impetus of the flow – and the flow once released from the fountain spreads across all human action. If strategy is directed by politics, then politics is directed by culture.

Excerpts:

“The wars Clausewitz knew, the wars in which he fought, were the wars of the French Revolution, and the ‘political motive’ for which he always looked as the precipitating and controlling factor in warmaking was, at the outset at least, always present… It must also be recognized that Clausewitz as a historian had nothing to guide him toward the importance of cultural factors in human affairs.

“For Clausewitz, as I have said, was even in his time an isolated spokesman for a warrior culture that the ancestors of the modern state were at pains to extirpate within their own borders.

“War, when it came in a ‘true’ form to that corner of Polynesia called Easter Island, proved to be a termination first of politics, then of culture, ultimately almost of life itself.

“Had Clausewitz’s mind been furnished with just one extra intellectual dimension – and it was already a very sophisticated mind indeed – he might have been able to perceive that war embraces much more than politics: that it is always an expression of culture, often a determinant of cultural forms, in some societies the culture itself.

“Man is a political animal,’ said Aristotle. Clausewitz, a child of Aristotle, went no further than to say that a political animal is a warmaking animal. Neither dared confront the thought that man is a thinking animal in whom the intellect directs the urge to hunt and the ability to kill.

*All excerpts have been taken from A History of Warfare, Vintage Books.