Now, along comes John Keegan (1934- ), British historian cum journalist, to turn back the clock. Keegan's Clausewitz, heavily discussed in the author's widely reviewed A History of Warfare (1993),*8 is a narrow-minded regimental officer who typifies the Frederician tradition of Cadavergehorsam, unthinking obedience to savage discipline. He is the brutal philosopher of pitiless, aggressive, total war; an "unpromoted" and "unhonoured"*9 but self-seeking sucker-up to authority (and simultaneously a traitorous dog who willfully disobeyed his rightful monarch) whose career was blighted by his own extremism; a saber-rattling Prussian militarist who worshipped Napoleon and understood warfare only through the Napoleonic lens; the intellectual cause of the pan-European disaster of World War I;*10 and a theorist whose ideas are obsolete, irrelevant, and actively dangerous. Clausewitz even seems to have done in the poor Easter Islanders and inspired Shaka Zulu and the Mongols.
This seems rather an odd introduction to the shy, retiring Clausewitz, a man of bourgeois social origins who nonetheless died, young at 51, as a respected general in the Prussian service; who spent his free time going to lectures on art, science, education, and philosophy; who suffered political isolation for advocating the British parliamentary constitutional model in Prussia and for lauding the virtues of citizen soldiers over mindless Prussian discipline; who risked his career by resigning his Prussian commission in principled protest over the aggressive alliance with Napoleon in 1812;*11 who maintained that conquerors like the French emperor would—and should—be defeated by the European balance of power mechanism; whose arguments on limited war and the superior power of the defense were roundly condemned by most European military writers on the eve of the Great War; and whose works, since the debacle in Vietnam, have provided much of the intellectual basis for advanced officer education in America's resurgent military institutions.