The Lives of Clausewitz and the Remaking of "On War"

Carl von Clausewitz outpaces every contemporary from Napoleon and Jomini to Scharnhorst and Wellington as the premier military theorist of the modern age. His masterwork, On War, published posthumously in 1832, gave the intellectual rationale for later thinking on mid-nineteenth-century warfare and advanced the first rigorous case for civilian control of the military. Admirers have called him the “Shakespeare of military writers” and the “Marx of military theory.”