Clausewitz as a political thinker; or the honor of Prussia - (Carl Schmitt)

Revista de Estudios Políticos Issue 163, January/February 1969

I. HAHLWEG’S EDITION OF “VOM KRIEGE”

Today the name of Clausewitz is more than eloquent enough. It does not only evoke, as before, the image of an effective adjutant, who has collaborated in the reform of the Prussian army, in the shadow of his genial chiefs Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and who wrote the famous book On War.

In the meantime his name became world famous. Partisans of the world revolution such as Lenin and Mao-Tse-Tung have placed him in the great context of world history. Not even in the discussion on weapons and means of destruction of nuclear war has he lost his relevance. His theory of war is, today, rather modern than technically outdated and — beyond the content of expositions rooted in his time — has become a touchstone for the relationship between theory and practice. To fully appreciate the magnificent editorial work presented by Werner Hahlweg, with his new Clausewitz papers, one must take into account the aspects evoked by this great name¹.

Clausewitz's memorandum-confession in the labyrinth of legitimacy. This volume of documents has its climax in the so-called memorandum-confession which Clausewitz wrote in February 1812. The young Prussian officer asks his king to launch into the desperate adventure of a war against Napoleon, and no one can escape the compelling intensity of his report. All the tension of the years 1807 to 1812 is concentrated here in a crucial moment in February 1812, and symbolically represented in a document. The tension increases for the reader who learns that, in that same month of February, the king made a pact with Napoleon.

The memorandum-confession of 1812 moves within the framework of a policy that Gneisenau, Clausewitz's boss and teacher, had pointed out in his memoirs of August 1808 and 1811. It was to incite the cautious and indecisive king to war against Napoleon. The memorandum derives its name from the three “confessions” of which it is composed. The Prussian officer declares himself in favor of the existential struggle against Napoleon –- a risky venture in the situation of the time: first, “as a spontaneous reaction of the heart and voice of feeling”; second, on grounds of political reason, which is not affected by fear and which leads to the awareness that Napoleon is the irreconcilable enemy of Prussia, and that he will not be reconciled by submission either; third, on the basis of a calculation of the military situation, whose last and really desperate hope is an armed popular uprising. All this does not cease to be a memorandum. Because of these three confessions it can be called a memorandum-confession. To call it exclusively a “confession” would insinuate a kind of false irrationality that does not correspond to the document. This military report, almost technocratic, from a true general staff officer, is neither a profession of faith in the style of the Reformation or in the style of the ancient Church, nor is it a Rousseauan confession, nor a declaration of guilt, much less a philosophical-moral formulation².

At the heart of this memorandum is a clear answer to a clear question: Who is the real enemy of Prussia? The answer, carefully thought out and reflected upon in all its problematics, is: Napoleon, Emperor of the French, who has imposed the continental blockade on Europe and who has to annihilate a state like Prussia, even if Prussia sincerely seeks reconciliation. Notes, critical or affirmative, in the hand of Gneisenau or Boyen, are reproduced in the margin of the text, which increases the interest of the read; for example, a pencil note by Boyen (p. 740) who is indignant against the saying, then common, that “the German is no Spaniard” –- we will encounter this statement again later on. A small detail (p. 691), which we perceive in its astonishing concrete reality thanks to the extremely accurate textual criticism of this edition, allows us to recognize, in a flash, what we are dealing with here. In his second confession –- which refers to reason unaffected by fear –- Clausewitz speaks of economy, which he qualifies as “the most common vital principle of our social constitution.” He recalls the painful economic situation resulting from the continental blockade, the threatening cataclysm which would be “a real bankruptcy, that is, a multiplied bankruptcy of each one against each other,” and which could not be “compared with an ordinary state bankruptcy.” The economic situation is the consequence of the measures of a “victorious general from the Ebro to the Niemen.” In the original of Clausewitz's handwritten sketch, Gneisenau underlined in pencil the word general and added in the margin, also in pencil, “lucky bandit.”

“Bandit” was the expression Napoleon used to use, with preference, for Spanish guerrillas. It contains a discrimination, from the point of view of the regular troops, full of reason. In the national people's war, on the contrary, the imperialist invader is a “bandit,” no matter how regular his troops may be. Here, opposite justifications of the war collide, and increase its intensity. The situation of the year 1812 had in itself an inextricable jungle of opposing “legitimacies.” With this word we designate here the various principles and systems of justification that guarantee the right to war and the tranquility of conscience in case of coercion.

By speaking of legitimacy in the plural, we depart from the current linguistic usage, which uses the singular, although the coexistence of different types and kinds of legitimacy is nowadays commonplace and even immanent to a pluralistic worldview. We distinguish dynastic legitimacy, national-democratic legitimacy, revolutionary legitimacy and even charismatic legitimacy, and, on closer inspection, many more legitimacies could be recorded. But the word legitimacy has been for a whole century the exclusive word for one kind of legitimacy, that is, dynastic legitimacy, and linguistic usage continues to use the singular, sub or half-conscious of the persistence of this monopoly. The word legitimacy serves us for a quick orientation on the situation of the year 1812, which Clausewitz had to go through. It is characterized by the collapse of core legitimacy, the open collision of dynastic legitimacy and national legitimacy, together with many attempts at coexistence and compromise in which the opponents sought to overlap or undermine each other, so that open collision and secret collaboration were often confused, and a murky collusion of clashing legitimacies poisoned the political atmosphere.

The King of Prussia felt that his dynastic legitimacy was threatened by the popular armament plans desired by the military reformers. The army reformers thought of the war potential found in the two opposing legitimacies, and hoped to be able to change it. Faced with an enemy like Napoleon, the risk was obvious. Not even three years earlier, in 1809, the Emperor of Austria had attempted a combination of dynastic and national principles by authorizing the popular uprising of the Tyroleans. The result had been overwhelming: recognition of Joseph Bonaparte as king of Spain, the marriage of a daughter of the Habsburg emperor to the victor Napoleon and the shooting of Andreas Hofer, a loyal Tyrolean partisan, by direct order of Napoleon. Such a mixture of open collision and secret collusion of dynastic-familial and national-popular legitimacy was bound to turn the public life of Europe into a labyrinth of ghosts.

The national-revolutionary legitimacy of the Jacobins had made the transition, in 1793, to the dynastic-legitimate-hereditary king of France. Barely ten years later, in 1804, a new hereditary dynasty of Bonaparte had arisen, related to the oldest legitimate dynasties and recognized throughout Europe by international law conventions, alliances and marriages. Against the neo-legitimate dynasty of Bonaparte, the kings of Spain of the house of Bourbon, Charles IV and Ferdinand VII, of ancient legitimacy, played a particularly sad role. Even Chateaubriand, their active collaborator at the time of the Holy Alliance, found, in the end, no other qualification for them than that of “miserable.” And in the same case of the great Napoleon, fortunate founder of a new legitimate dynasty, the contradictory legitimacies accumulated and mixed in such a way that, from the present-day perspective, he will not be left with much more than a “charismatic” legitimacy, a category he can share, according to Max Weber, with Kurt Eisner and other demagogues.

In such times of open collision and secret collusion of legitimacies, the “landscape of betrayal” emerges, as Margret Boveri has called it in describing it for our own times. For the topography of such landscapes, the behavior of a man like Clausewitz is of more importance than the novelistic success of Bernadotte's social ascent or even the farce of a cheerful profiteer of legitimacy like Jérôme Bonaparte, then (1807-1812) neo-legitimate king of Westphalia and ally of the king of Prussia. In his memorandum-confession of 1812, a strictly confidential report and addressed to immediate superiors, the Prussian officer appeals to posterity “with the voice of sentiment” and cries out, “I surrender this slight leaf on the sacred altar of History.” The appeal was echoed, and the moral and intellectual force of his memorandum was strong enough to reach posterity.

II. SPANISH PRACTICE AND PRUSSIAN THEORY OF THE POPULAR UPRISING

Clausewitz himself played no leading role in the scene of great politics. His career as a professional military man was by no means brilliant, but developed in the wake of his superiors Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. He did not achieve a reputation as a great strategist. His fame — to recall it again — is based exclusively on a book on war theory published after his death. The problem of the relation between theory and practice here has its special aspects, which arose for Clausewitz when the irregular resistance of the Spanish people against the Napoleonic armies began to become an essential factor of belligerence.

Clausewitz thought of going to Spain to fight there against the French, like other Prussian officers such as Grolmann and Schepeler, but alongside regular English or Spanish troops, and not as a guerrilla companion of the “Empecinado” or similar partisans. A spark flew, at that moment, from Spain to the North. There he became a political myth that effectively helped fuel German resistance against Napoleon. Pessimists, defeatists and Napoleon's supporters reacted with the phrase: The German is no Spaniard. Also the military reformers, both Austrian and Prussian, took into account the Spanish experiences, but it was very difficult to get correct information, because, with the traffic and communication system of that time, Germany was farther away from Spain than today from Vietnam.

In his book Spanien und die deutsche Erhebung 1808–1814, Rainer Wohlfeil gives us a graphic description of the reception and repercussion, of the judgment, exploration and application that the Spanish events have found. The description is documented with a wealth of valuable material, but it seems to me that it does not take into account the special, strong, and ultimately decisive character of the Prussian army reform, and the ideological and sociological specificity of a small but intense power elite that risked and eventually won the war against Napoleon. Wohlfeil perceives that Prussia lacked what he calls “the human basis” for a people's war. It seems doubtful to him that the Spanish War of Independence was not only an impetus and model for Gneisenau (and this is meant for Clausewitz as well), but that it also “included a grave danger of dragging the monarchy into a struggle for its existence with completely insufficient means of warfare” (p. 229). The memorandum-confession of 1812 shows that the Prussians were well aware of the risk. The problem would then be whether the “metaphysical basis” of their courage should be respected, even if their moral and intellectual energies had other sources than the courage of the Spanish people.

Wohlfeil denies this problem dogmatically. In his opinion, the idealism of the Prussian reformers does not constitute a sufficient basis for a popular uprising. With a single sentence he liquidates the philosopher Fichte. He says: “Fichte has indeed been concerned with ‘creating a spiritual basis for a popular uprising,’ but those ‘human bases,’ which existed in Spain and were lacking in Prussia, couldn’t be provided by any philosopher” (p 229).

The subject and material of the book Spanien und die deutsche Erhebung 1808–1814 may have closed the author's perspective in gauging Fichte's importance and the peculiarity of the Prussian enmity against Napoleon. It would be unfair to make this a reproach to an important scientific work. It is true that Fichte has little to do with Spain, and Spain has nothing to do with Fichte. We are interested in the enmity against Napoleon, which we shall deal with in more detail in sections 4 and 5. First I would like to mention a “Précis de la guerre en Espagne et en Portugal”, used by Wohlfeil (p. 225) and published in Hahlweg's book (pp. 604-611). This “précis” is from the year 1811 or 1812, and refers to the period from November 1807 to June 1811. It contains only a short, simple enumeration of important military events on the Iberian Peninsula in date order. According to Hahlweg, “it is not clear whether this is a private work or rather an official commission.” It is probably just notes, as is often done in preparation for reports, lectures or classes, in order not to lose sight of the chronological order. In this work, it is striking that only the fighting and movements of regular troops are mentioned, but not a word about the small war. Only once, in connection with the Madrid uprising of 2nd May 1808, is there mention of a levée genérale de l'Espagne, and the significant phrase appears: Partout le voile était levé, tout le peuple se declare ennemi de la France [Everywhere the veil was lifted, all the people declared themselves enemies of France].

It is a sentence of particular interest, precisely because it lacks the sober precision of a concrete report which otherwise characterizes this “précis.” The same goes for the following assertion that the Junta de Sevilla had constituted itself as the “first authority in the Kingdom.” It is natural that the information about the guerrillas cannot be as precise as the news about battles of uniformed armies. It is all the more striking that this “précis” completely ignores the most characteristic moment of the Spanish People's War, which must have been for the Prussian reformers the most topical moment from the military point of view. Compared with Prussia, the Spanish events of the 2nd of May are nowhere near as important as the fact that the Spanish guerrilla war began later, in the autumn and winter of 1808-1809, after the Spanish and English regular armies had been fatally defeated by the French in open battle, and after the military war seemed to be over. The “précis” points, consequently, to the battles of Zornoza, Tudela and Medellín, and Napoleon's apparently definitive victory at the end of 1808 (p. 607). But neither here nor later does he speak of popular or guerrilla warfare, although both now began, towards the end of 1808, to constitute a decisive war potential.

The defeat of the regular army is a touchstone of a people's ability to make armed resistance against a foreign invader. In 1807, the war between Prussia and France was completely over after the defeat of the last regular Prussian army at Friedland. In Spain, on the other hand, the People's War began after the great defeats of the regular troops. This fact is decisive for our consideration. In view of this, the real cause of the resistance of the Spanish people is of secondary importance; whether it be the fanaticism of the priests and monks who, according to Napoleon, were the real stirrers, agitators and provocateurs of the resistance, or the loyalty of the Spanish people to the legitimate monarchy, or the poverty and poor education of the people, or the help of English troops, agents and money, or the collaboration of regular troops and partisans. In any case, the absence of a central leadership was essential. It was precisely this lack of central leadership that made possible the true spontaneity of the People's War. The enmity which the Spanish people felt against the French did not need any theory, nor the teachings of a Bakunin or Kropotkin, to understand that a Napoleonic army could be effectively disrupted by hindering its ammunition and preventing it from being supplied. Consequently, the People's War dissolved into dozens or even hundreds of local actions, i.e., into something which the planners of the Prussian resistance considered an enormous disadvantage, and which they wanted to avoid with their planning.

Anyway, in Spain there was for five years, from 1808 to 1813, a people's war and an effective guerrilla war, but no trace of a corresponding theory. No one will consider the annulment of the Junta de Sevilla of 1808 or the Corso Terrestre of 1809 — Spanish formations of the People's War — as a theory of war. Whoever made theories in Spain at that time in one form or another was a Frenchman. In Prussia, however, a brilliant theory of guerrilla warfare and armed popular uprising emerged, whereas in practical reality there was only a classical fight of uniformed troops and a final decision was only seen in open battle. The difference is striking, and the question of the relationship between theory and practice is presented here in all its intensity.

All this should not be viewed abstractly. In 1814, Napoleon also tried to unleash a partisan war in France, following the Spanish example, when the Allies penetrated his territory. He was unsuccessful. Ten years later, in 1823, the same Spaniards did not engage in guerrilla warfare when the French again penetrated Spanish territory, this time, however, under the protection of dynastic legitimacy, on behalf of the Holy Alliance and the Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis. Napoleon, as a common enemy, had been so strong that he did not allow the diversity of principles of legitimacy to be seen and provoked a unitary, or rather an undifferentiated, Spanish front. In the future, the development of Spanish nationalism would not lead to wars with France. German nationalism, however, is essentially determined in its development by enmity and wars against France. This was influenced by a decision taken in Berlin in the years 1807-1812, which meant that German enmity against Napoleon was not identical with Prussian enmity.

III. PRUSSIAN ENMITY AGAINST NAPOLEON

The question extends to a general problem concerning Germany and the Germans: the Germans in their relationship to France and Europe. At the heart of the problem is the Prussian enmity against Napoleon, the emperor of the French, which arose back then. Clausewitz's memorandum-confession of 1812 is in its entirety a disturbing document of a deep and desperate enmity. In reality, the Germans were a divided people in Napoleon's eyes. Hegel's admiration for Napoleon is well known. The end of Chapter IV of his Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hoffmeister, p. 472) could be interpreted to mean that Napoleon was for Hegel ‘the God present among us’ and that Hegel himself was the other belonging to this God, i.e. the pure and conscious knowledge of this revelation³. Goethe's hymn to the Emperor and his “Empire,” which will secure peace on earth, dates from July 1812, a few months after Clausewitz had written his memorandum and a few days after Napoleon's great army had entered Russia. German dissent from Napoleon is a historical reality; it constitutes an important chapter in European spiritual history and could be entitled Russia and the self-understanding of Europe. We refer here to Dieter Groh's book of this title, which deals masterfully and comprehensively with the period between 1789 and 1848⁴.

For the Spanish, too, Napoleon was the national enemy. And the Spaniards were also divided, because there were many friends of France and French supporters, especially among the educated population. A comparison with Germany provides some instructive parallels. However, the profound differences in national substance and historical situation should not be ignored. The different geographical situation was bound to produce different political results, because Spain's only continental neighbor — apart from Portugal — was France. Prussia, on the other hand, also had Russia as a neighbor. And the example of Poland showed that it was precisely its proximity to Russia that could be a well-founded reason for friendship with Napoleon. We are interested in capturing the specific and concrete character of Prussia's enmity towards Napoleon. We are looking for a true picture of a political enmity, a typical and ideal case for the systematic exposition given by Julien Freund in chapter VII of his great work L'essence du politique, under the title L'ami et l'ennemi⁵.

The two enmities, both Spanish and German, were genuine. Both proved fatal to Napoleon, but at the time the Prussian-German enmity was the more dangerous, and it was only because of it that German enmity in general was the cause of his ruin. Spain had other reserves of political strength than Germany; more intense, pre-revolutionary reserves. The Germans felt nothing like the religious and moral indignation of the Spaniards against the enemy of faith and the plunderer of their churches. Napoleon, the great secularizer of 1803, had a concordat with Rome in his pocket. But this was of no use to him in Spain. In Germany, even the most pious Catholic dynasties had accepted the secularized church property from Napoleon with the clearest conscience in the world. Throughout Germany there was adversity, hatred and enmity against Napoleon, but Prussian enmity had its own specific features.

The founder of Prussia as a great power, Frederick the Great, embodied the spirit of modern Prussia. He attempted a combination of military state and philosophy; but he remained a solitary man, with an excellent Prussian army and surrounded by French philosophers. This, however, did not yet constitute a spiritual elite, nor could his generals be considered a “general staff” in the modern sense. As is well known, it is precisely with regard to Napoleon that there has been talk of an “alliance of philosophy with the sword.” This probably filled him with pride. But it was only among the small power elite of the Prussian reformers in Berlin in the years 1807 to 1812 that a new alliance of military and philosophy was the exception. Its military contingent was represented by the reformers of the Prussian army, among them Gneisenau and Clausewitz.

The full measure of the enmity against Napoleon, but also of the great difference between the two nationalisms, is revealed in an idea that occurred to Gneisenau in the spring of 1815, when Napoleon was defeated on the island of Elba and while the victorious Allies were fighting over the spoils at the Congress of Vienna. On 18 February 1815 (Pertz-Delbrück, v. 322) Gneisenau wrote to his friend Clausewitz that the defeated Emperor of the French should be allowed to “return to the scene;” this would be the surest means of “injecting France with civil war.” Gneisenau's idea deserves a moment's reflection, for the continuation of events demonstrates the superior strength of French nationalism.

It was a Machiavellian idea born of genuine enmity. It is astonishing that Napoleon anticipated this daring plan, leaving Elba at the end of February 1815, a few days after Gneisenau's letter, and without the permission of the victors, who were still quarrelling at Viena. On his own initiative he returned “to the scene.” The indignation of the victorious Allies was enormous. The next hundred days of new Napoleonic rule were a brief interlude. The subsequent “white terror” of the re-emigrants did indeed contribute to “injecting France with civil war.” The gulf between monarchists and republicans, conservatives and republicans, clerics and laymen, rightists and leftists deepened in the French nation, and continues to this day. In spite of everything, Napoleon finally defeated his enemy Gneisenau, precisely because he had not returned from Elba with the help of France's enemies, but as their enemy. Only in this way can it be explained that a few years later he entered the French myth as a national hero, decorated with all the historical honors of national legitimacy. French nationalism was so strong that it could digest defeats, civil wars and the double collapse of Bonapartism.

Napoleon realized the German enmity too late, and never understood it. He considered himself its benefactor, the one who passed on to all — princes and peoples — the good fruits of the revolution, sparing them its terrors. The grace of an averted revolution seemed to him a sufficient basis of legitimacy. From Germany came to him such sincere admiration that he could regard German enmity as the malicious fanaticism of a few ideologues. We repeat as an example of German admiration for Napoleon the case of Goethe and his hymn of July 1812. Where, then, were the moral and intellectual energies of a German enmity against Napoleon to be found? In the case of Spain, the conqueror clearly saw the spiritual front: fanatical priests; 300,000 monks had raised a superstitious and underdeveloped people against him, so Napoleon said. In Germany, however, there was no clericalism or priestly rule. The Germans were a hard-working, industrious, and reasonable people. As the glorious victor of the French Revolution, he had brought them peace and progress, sparing them a bloody revolution. Their enemy could be the Russian, the Scythian, the barbarian. In 1812, they became Napoleon's open enemy, so where did the Germans' enmity come from?

Clausewitz offered a harsh and sober, one might say Prussian, reply to Napoleon's peaceful intentions. It is to be found in the second book On War, Chapter 5, under the title “Character of Strategic Defence,” and reads:

“The conqueror is always peaceful (as Bonaparte always used to assert), he would like to enter quietly into our State; but for this not to be possible for him we must want war, and prepare for it.”

This Prussian reply made such an impression on Lenin that he copied it by hand and in German in his notebook of extracts, the Tetradka, adding in Russian a vividly affirmative gloss⁶. How would Napoleon have reacted to Clausewitz's memorandum-confession if he had come to know its content? The question makes sense, because it can shed light on the specific character of Prussian enmity as opposed to German enmity in general.

It is not difficult to construct a reply by Napoleon to the memorandum of the Prussian staff officer by thinking of his well-known attacks on the German patriots. I would have called it the infamous work of a dangerous ideologue. But in the exposition of this Prussian there was something specific compared to the considerations and reflections of other German patriots, including Freiherr vom Stein. Napoleon, as an experienced general, would naturally have grasped the rational discipline with which this obscure Clausewitz faced an irreconcilable enemy, fearlessly considering a desperate military situation. The emperor's anger would probably have turned to rage. Apart from exact military calculations, the memorandum contains another ingredient which touches on the sensitive point of Napoleon's moral and intellectual existence; it has something very “philosophical” in it which cannot be dismissed with the insulting qualification of “ideology.” It involves a genuine part of the philosophy of German idealism, which corresponds specifically to the times and which had been given to him by a great philosopher in Berlin, Fichte. In Spain at the time, Napoleon could not have encountered this kind of philosophically founded enmity.

IV. FICHTE, THE PHILOSOPHER OF ENMITY AGAINST NAPOLEON

“There is no doubt that Fichte's speeches to the German nation are the origin of Clausewitz's memorandum of confession⁷.” Fichte has shaped the spirit of the German wars of liberation against Napoleon, at least as far as Prussia is concerned. In doing so, he achieved a double effect: he gave the German enmity against Napoleon the claim to national-revolutionary legitimacy and, at the same time, he gave the reborn Prussian state the spiritual consecration of the Protestant principle in a modern continuation of the Reformation. In this way he “fused Prussia with the Reformation by way of the philosophy of German idealism⁸.” The two things — national-revolutionary legitimacy and Protestant principle — are, for a moment, historically inseparable in the concrete situation of regenerated Prussia. But they also, later on, became decisive for the German nation-state of the 19th century, essentially determined by Prussia.

a) Let us begin with the first element of this amalgam, with national-revolutionary legitimacy. For a complete picture of Germany in the years 1807 to 1812, one must include a critical-synoptic comparison of Hegel's admiration for Napoleon with Fichte's enmity against Napoleon. But this exceeds the scope of our considerations and annotations. We leave it, then, as well as the relations between Fichte and Goethe and his friendship with Johannes von Müller, a Napoleonic enthusiast. In the case of Clausewitz it is a question of Fichte's decisive influence. The philosophical, historical, and general literature on Fichte is almost inexhaustible, and its interpretations and judgements of Fichte are often as contradictory as the master himself with his extreme contrasts of freedom and coercion, individual and nation, nation and humanity. Bernard Willms' book on Fichte, Die totale Freiheit, contains fascinating descriptions of the continuous shifting of these extremes, and shows that Fichte's closed commercial state — according to Willms the true expression of the philosopher's political theory — is in fact a total society, where mankind will find absolute freedom after the coercion of an omnipresent police has destroyed all illiberal coercion. All this has nothing to do with Clausewitz. But it highlights the peculiar character of the enmity against Napoleon of the political thinker Clausewitz as opposed to the ideological enmity of the philosopher. Willms speaks neither of Clausewitz nor of the small power elite in the Prussian military state, which was defeated by Napoleon and which rose up after the defeat. It was an elite that had found, in Königsberg and Berlin, contact with the philosophy of German idealism.

By highlighting the sudden change of extremes, the abstract contradictions appear between the absolute freedom of an “I” that first acts very absolutely, but is then fully grasped only to find itself again in inter-dependence, inter-personality and, finally, in a permutability of humanity and nation, where it will be integrated without residue, despite its absolute and unconditional freedom. Willms also speaks of the manifold, concrete enemies (he says “adversaries”) of Fichte in his early period. Apart from princes, nobles, Church and Jews, these was also the military (p. 28). From 1807 onwards, Fichte's great enemy in his later period appears on the scene: Napoleon. All the enmity that a revolutionary philosopher can feel is now concentrated in Fichte against the French emperor, taking a solid form.

Napoleon provoked an enormous coalition of enemies to which he finally succumbed. These enemies were so heterogeneous that one could establish a phenomenology of enmity in general by comparing the various types. Land and Sea, East and West, conservatives and liberals, clerics and Jacobins; met in a common front against this man. The literary front embraces such names as de Maistre and Benjamin Constant, Ernst Moritz Arndt and Joseph Görres⁹, Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Schlegel. Goethe and Hegel, the two great admirers of Napoleon, who continued to respect him even after his defeat, helped to complete the myth. In book 4 of his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe created the much-discussed demonization, giving it the enigmatic Latin epigraph nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse¹⁰ [no one is against God but God himself]. Hegel saw Napoleon's greatness in the fact that only an enemy of his own making, and no other, could defeat him.

Fichte is the true philosopher of the enmity against Napoleon. It can even be said that he is so in his very existence as a philosopher. His behavior towards Napoleon is the paradigmatic case of a very precise kind of enmity. His enemy Napoleon, the tyrant, the oppressor and despot, the man who “would found a new religion if he had no other pretext for subjugating the world,” this enemy is “his own question as a figure,” a not-self created by his own self as a counter-image of ideological self-alienation. Goethe realized this. In a note in his diary of 8th August 1806, he claims to have found Fichte's theory in Napoleon's deeds and procedures¹¹.

Fichte's national-revolutionary impulse provoked an extensive literature. Nevertheless, it did not penetrate deeply into the general consciousness of the Germans. The disturbing idea of a national- revolutionary legitimacy was soon lost, when Napoleon was defeated, and thus the general enemy was missing. In the 19th century Germans — Protestant and Catholic, friend and foe of the French — agreed on a kind of all-purpose national-dynastic legitimacy which, for their part, could only exist on the more or less clear condition of a victorious two-front war between West and East. But in any case, the brief moment of national-revolutionary contact, concentrated in the Prussian military reformers from 1807 to 1812, was enough to impose a transcendental decision against Napoleon and to some extent against the West, both for Prussia and Germany and for the whole of continental Europe in the 19th century.

Napoleon could not respond to the enmity of the Prussian philosopher Fichte, at least not on the same level. From the year 1808 to 1812, the Emperor of the French became more and more determined to win the Germans — and not only the princes of the Confederation of the Rhine — as friends for himself and his empire. The emperor's need for friendship grew as the crisis of his continental European power system and his French domestic base increased. It intensifies as war with Russia becomes inevitable. At the same time, the neo-legitimate dynastic Bonaparte is once again reminded of its own origins in revolutionary national legitimacy, which had nothing to do with dynastic inheritance, princely marriages, or feudal traditions. The consecration of revolutionary legitimacy had come to the plebeian-plebiscitary potentate from the opposite side. It had its origin in the philosophy of the enlightenment and its ideas of freedom, progress and reason. Napoleon's self-consciousness and self-understanding were based on the belief that he was at the head of such a revolutionary movement.

Neither the concordat with Rome nor the marriage to a Hapsburg princess could loosen or remove the neo-dynastic upstart's link with such an origin. As soon as this natural child of the revolution felt a whiff of enmity that came not from the old hereditary-dynastic legitimacy, but from a new philosophical consciousness, his own sense of security was shattered and he was left with nothing but the blind defense of his power. For him, the Spaniards were superstitious fanatics; the Russians, barbarous Scythians; the Germans, good working people. But what were those Prussians who opposed him on the battlefield East of the Elbe in the spring of 1813, and what did they want? He found for them nothing but outbursts of moral indignation at their ungratefulness and fits of rage. He reproached himself for not having annihilated the Prussian state in time, as he had seriously thought of doing during the winter of 1809-1810, after the war with Austria. In desperation, he blamed the Germans: “Do you Germans know what a revolution is? You do not know it, but I know it” (on the 26th April 1813, to Weimar Chancellor Friedrich von Müller). The consciousness of freedom, characteristic of German idealism, and Fichte's revolutionary philosophy felt superior to the French enlightenment of the 18th century. With their feeling of superiority they made no exception for Frederick the Great either. Fichte boasted that “we shall understand Rousseau better than he understood himself¹².”

The critical eye of the new enemy saw in Napoleonic imperialism, with its accumulation of crowns on the heads of a new lineage and with its successive legitimacies, one denying the other, nothing but an absurd contradiction, a betrayal of the great ideas of the revolution, an impertinent exploitation of all the legal titles, old or new, which had a course through Europe. The ruler himself had already concentrated so much power in his own person that he could not clearly realize such a new enemy. But this did not change the fact that a revolutionary philosophy from Prussia confronted the ex-revolutionary with the claim to understand Rousseau, the revolution and his son better than they understood themselves.

In this way, Napoleonic imperialism received an answer that could not have come from Spain or Austria, nor from Russia or England. It was an answer that escaped the Emperor's conscience. For a brief moment, the universal spirit seemed to reside in Berlin. Napoleon imagined that he had settled the French revolution. In reality, it was different. The French Revolution was not settled, neither in the person of Napoleon, nor by him. Revolutionary legitimacy was integrated into national legitimacy, which was strong enough to absorb Napoleon's glory in its favor as well. But as such national legitimacy was not strong enough to legitimize French imperialism, especially vis-à-vis other nations on the European continent. Rather, strong French nationalism forced neighboring peoples to remember their own nation and their own national legitimacy and to take risks in the national test. Both the Spanish and the Germans have become European nations, in the modern sense of the word, thanks to the confrontation with French nationalism. In any case, it was demonstrated in these continental-European struggles, often fierce, that France, thanks to its revolution, had become a model for the idea of nationhood. It had created a new type of national legitimacy. The Prussian-German attempt did not succeed. Nevertheless, it was strong enough to defeat the Bonapartism of the first and second French empires. It even defeated the latter without any outside help, by its own national strength, in 1870.

b) Let us look at the second formative element — apart from the national-revolutionary element — of the newborn Prussian state of 1807-1812, the Protestant principle. The Prussian state that rose from defeat in the years 1806 to 1807 was Protestant according to the place and time of its rebirth. The religious sentiment of the former provinces was Protestant. The sentimental world of pietism, the philosophy of German idealism and the culture of the new bourgeois strata have never denied or forgotten their origin in the Protestant Reformation. Fichte's Protestantism is different from that of Hegel. It is revolutionary, just like Fichte's political philosophy. But after the victory over Napoleon it was not the philosophy of Fichte, Napoleon's enemy, that philosophically determined the Protestant principle for Prussia, but the “mediating” interpretation of Napoleon's admirer, Hegel. In the year 1830, the year of the death of Gneisenau and Clausewitz, towards the end of the great epoch of the German spirit, Hegel formulated and proclaimed a Protestant principle with full historical-philosophical awareness. Hegel's much discussed historical-philosophical formulation is found in an addendum to the 3rd edition of his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Lasson, p. 469), and reads:

“It is a stupid mistake of modern times to believe that one can change a system of outmoded customs, a state constitution and legislation without also changing religion; to believe that one has made a revolution without a reform.”

This is addressed — as are the corresponding enunciations in Hegel's lectures on the Philosophy of History — to the Latin peoples of Europe where Roman Catholicism rules: to France, Italy and Spain. Hegel believes himself superior to their false liberalism and constitutionalism. He does not ask himself the question of what the Protestant Reformation itself was, and whether it could perhaps also be called a revolution. This problem is not thought through to the end. The philosopher-historian Hegel, who was otherwise well acquainted with Hobbes, does not realize that the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes concretely represents the Reformation consummated in a bloody revolution¹³. Hegel's formulation in 1830 could comfortably be interpreted to mean that the Reformation of the territorial sovereigns in Germany had already accomplished all that was essential, so that German philosophers could now, with a clear conscience, take on the role of augurs to watch the flight of Minerva's owl without “rushing” into the messy reality of a revolution.

In the interval in Prussia “between Reformation and revolution” (see the title of Reinhart Koselleck's book, note 9), the school of Hegel has raised, with all its acuteness, the philosophical problem of the relation between theory and practice. For Hegel himself, theory and practice coincide in the process of the emancipating spirit. Right Hegelians compose and reconcile the “revolution through a permanent Reformation” and by “continuous regeneration.” The Left Hegelians oppose this “relaxation of the Protestant principle” with their critique. Criticism for them essentially means the pragmatic mediation of theory and practice. Bruno Bauer's pure critique was equal to revolution, but it remained on the individual level and hostile to the masses, and thus pure “theory¹⁴.” The young Karl Marx spoke out against both positions — mere reformism and pure theory — when he said impatiently: “In politics, the Germans have thought what other peoples have done”.

What should the Germans have done in the face of Napoleon? Should they or should they not have accepted his offer to spare them revolution? Is it possible for a great people to spare itself revolution by simply submitting to the victor of a foreign revolution? And if a people cannot spare itself revolution, is it licit to demand revolution on principle, revolution at all costs, revolution for revolution's sake alone? This would be an ethic of professional revolutionaries and, logically, it could make sense and be valid only for a people of professional revolutionaries. In any other people it would be a sad struggle. Let us recall Boyen's note in Clausewitz's memorandum-confession and the sentence that is criticized: The German is not Spanish! It is not that the Spaniards are a people of professional revolutionaries. Nor were they against Napoleon.

So what should the Germans have done in the face of Napoleon? The Philosophy of History of Napoleon's old admirer Hegel is a philosophy of mediation, as Joachim Ritter has shown. It often comes close to the Olympian patience of Napoleon's old admirer Goethe, who appeases the theory of violence, which he finds unpleasant, with the patient verse (in the classical Walpurgis Night):

“Calm down, it is only thought.”

The ideological justification of Napoleon by Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx is based on Hegel, while Moses Hess is of the opinion that “the positive evolution of freedom” began precisely with Fichte and ended with Hegel¹⁵. With that phrase of the young Marx, one cannot put an end to Fichte. Fichte radically thought through to the end what the French had begun in their political practice. True, he has only thought, there is no doubt about that. But in view of some expressions of his theoretical radicalism, the idea of a possible practical realization of such thoughts fills us with horror. Or must we see an imbalance between theory and practice because Fichte has decided against and not in favor of Napoleon? And what about Clausewitz, whose memorandum-confession was sponsored by Fichte? As an enemy of Napoleon, Clausewitz became the originator of a political theory of war. He has thought what he and his friends have done. For this reason alone his theory is authentic, and as an authentic theory it was able to be effective, beyond the limits of the historical moment of its origin, and even to enter into the teaching and practice of world revolutionaries like Lenin and Mao.

V. CLAUSEWITZ AS A POLITICAL THINKER

The philosopher Fichte with his speeches to the German nation was the godfather of the 1812 memorandum-confession. During the years 1807 to 1812 the Prussian power elite received strong intellectual and moral energies for their struggle against Napoleon from Fichte. But in the decisive point, in the determination of the concrete enmity, the reformers of the Prussian army were guided exclusively by political considerations. They were neither founders of religions, nor theologians; they were neither ideologists nor utopians. The book On War was not written by a philosopher, but by a Prussian general staff officer, who developed his theory of “war as a continuation of politics" into worldwide consequences and repercussions. Any intelligent politician can read, understand and practice this book without knowing anything about Fichte and his philosophy. The autonomy of the categories of the political becomes evident. Nor can it be said that Fichte represents the theory and Clausewitz the practice. In the case of Clausewitz, the political categories impose themselves in all their purity, free of all the ideological and utopian propagations of the brilliant philosopher Fichte.

The French sociologist Julien Freund, a disciple of Raymond Aron, works with the categories of Max Weber's sociology. It should be noted that he translates Wertfreiheit by neutralité axiologique. His systematic work L'essence du politique uses the distinction of friend and foe not as a “criterion” of the political — as in my Theory of the Political — but as one of the three pairs of notions, présupposés, which signify preconditions and essential prerequisites for the possibility of the political. These three pairs are: command-obedience, public-private, friend-enemy. The dialectic of each of these pairs of notions is developed in an admirable systematic construction, with a wealth of encyclopedic material, to cement the autonomy of the political from the economic, the aesthetic, and the moral.

In the chapter on the dialectic of friend and foe (pp. 538-633) there is a special section (§ 134, p. 590) devoted to Clausewitz and his concept of war. According to this, Clausewitz has definitively developed the ideal type of war (in Max Weber's sense) in such a way that it is valid even in an age of thermo-nuclear threat. Julien Freund sees this as proof of the scientific soundness of Max Weber's sociological method. What interests us here is not a methodological or scientific-theoretical controversy, but an important insight into the political thinker Clausewitz. The French sociologist demonstrates that the theory of “war as a continuation of politics” makes it possible for purely military warfare — which has an immanent tendency to the unlimited use of force — to be limited by fitting it into the reality of the political. Enmity and war are inevitable. What matters in their delimitation. The inhumane unleashing of the means of destruction provided by scientific progress must be avoided. According to Julien Freund, the object of the political struggle is not the destruction of the enemy, but the seizure of power. Clausewitz also understands the so-called “battle of destruction” as a contest of forces, between two organized armies, which is nothing other than the destruction of one part of mankind by another in the name of mankind.

In Julien Freund's book L'essence du politique, Fichte is not cited as an example. The wealth of quotations and illustrations is so extensive that the author was able to dispense with the case of Fichte as a paradigm. For our contemplation of the political thinker Clausewitz, it was necessary to clearly separate Fichte's ideological enmity against Napoleon from Clausewitz's political enmity in order to understand a political thinker in his autonomy and in his particular character. The political unit from which Clausewitz thinks is and remains the State, precisely his own state, which exists concretely. Fichte's political theory, however, finds its expression in the “closed commercial state,” as Bernard Willms has shown, and this is not a state, but a society, and precisely a total society. Fichte's categories are self, society, nation, empire, and humanity. The state is, for him, a means to an end and a house of correction. Political parties in the sense of a liberal or democratic constitution were hardly in sight at that time¹⁶. Neither Fichte, nor Hegel, nor Clausewitz could think politically of a revolutionary and international party of a class.

We have quoted (note 7) the statement that “Prussia became Fichte's destiny and homeland.” This is accurate. However, it would be impossible to define Fichte as a Prussian. Clausewitz, on the other hand, is pure Prussian, in his whole existence, not only because of his origin and as a Prussian officer. He belongs to the small power elite that was able to regenerate the Prussian military state in the years 1807 to 1812 after its total defeat so successfully that it was able to take its chances in the race with the rapid industrial development of the 19th century. Clausewitz is more important for what the much-discussed name of Prussia means in the end, but also for what remains and continues to radiate after the victors of the Second World War have suppressed this Prussia than many others who are cited today to save the honor of Prussia.

In the existential attachment to the military and continental state of Prussia, one can see a certain limit, not to say a certain narrowness, of the political thinker Clausewitz. His book On War considers exclusively land warfare. The great world of the oceans, the oceanic maritime wars, with their own notions of enemy and war and booty, are completely neglected. Necessarily, the Prussian staff officer thinks and argues from the situation of his own state, a continental military force closely wedged between great continental powers, which has never been autarkic, which has always needed alliances, without much chance of survival in the extreme case, always under the constraint of the alternative of rise or fall, win or succumb. Each great victory increased and intensified the obligation to rise further, until at last the race with industrial progress forced the so honored continental military state to “throw in its lot with world power,” and this dragged it into catastrophe. Prussia-Germany no longer produced a Clausewitz of maritime warfare.

The narrowness in this case caused the concreteness of thought, and this is the cause of the immense success of the theory of war. No prognosticator, no prophet of the 19th century could have foreseen that this theory rooted in Prussian narrowness would enter into the great world-political practice of the 20th century. In the meantime, the victors of WWII have finished off Prussia, so that the old animosity against Prussia, once so widespread, no longer affects Clausewitz. But instead of this there are already historians who regard his current worldwide fame as politically suspect, because professional revolutionaries like Lenin and Mao essentially participated in creating this universal fame.

It is understandable in itself that a political thinker should be involved in the enmity of the fighting fronts. The notion of the political implies this. Right thinking neither eliminates nor softens this danger. Rather, it increases and sharpens it. The scientific ideal of “Wertfreiheit” could not change anything of this fact. A category like “Wertfreiheit” can only fail as to the truth and reality of the political, because the philosophy of values turns the political friend into a mere “value,” and the political enemy into a “non-value.”

“Le combat spirituel est plus brutal que la bataille des hommes.”

1. Carl von Clausewitz: Schriften - Aufsiitze - Briefe. Dokumente aus den Clau, sewitz-Scharnhorst und Gneisenau- Nachlass sowie aus óffentlichen und privaten Samm- lungen, edited by Werner Hahlweg, with an introduction by Karl Dietrich Erdmann I (Gottingen, 1966).

2. In the comprehensive work Spanien und die deutsche Erhebung 1808-1814, by Rainer Wohlfeil, interesting for its material, this report is mentioned alternatively as “Bekenntnisdenkschrift” or “Bekenntnisschrift” (pp. 227, 229). It is not clear whether the author changes it intentionally or not. But even if it were unintentional, the alternation would be symptomatic for the underlying associations of ideas and feelings that cannot be easily separated from the German word “Bekenntnis”. In my work Theorie des Partisanen, Zwischenbemerkung zum Begriff des Politischen (Berlin, 1963) I refer to various themes and problems in Wohlfeil's book. See the review by Hans Ulrichscupin in Der Staat, 5 (1966), pp. 245-50. The Spanish translation was published under the title Teoría del Partisano, Acotación al concepto de lo político, in the Colección “Ideologías Contemporáneas”, directed by Jesús Fueyo Alvarez, Instituto de Estudios Políticos. Madrid, 1967.

3. Alexandre Kojéve: Introduction a la lecture de Hegel (Paris, 1947), pp. 144-5, 153-4, 163-4, 195, 267, 404-5.

4. Dieter Groh: “Russland und das Selbstverständnis Europas. Ein Beitrag zur europäischen Geistesgeschichte”, in Politica, 3 (1961), pp. 81-101: Russia at the beginning of the European Civil War and in the perspective of Napoleon's supporters and enemies. In my work Theory of the Partisan, see n. 1, in the chapter “From Clausewitz to Lenin”, pp. 57-58, I have commented on an interesting remark made by De Maistre in the summer of 1811, which I found in the collection of texts Europe and Russia, edited by Dimitrij Tschizewski and Dieter Groh, 1959, Verlag der wissenschaft. Buchgesellschaft Darmstadt.

5. Julien Freund: L'essence du Politique (Paris, 1965), pp. 442-537. See, below 6, “Clausewitz as a political thinker”.

6. On the Tetradka: W. Hahlweg: “Lenin und Clausewitz”, in Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 36 (1954), pp. 30-59 and 357-387; furthermore, my work Theory of the Partisan. A note in the edition Vom Kriege by E. Engelberg (Berlin, 1957), p. 413 (n. 59, p. 908) admires Clausewitz's “blunt irony”. It seems to me that the ironic effect is all the greater the more Clausewitz spoke with relevance and without ironic intent. This is typical for intensely political statements. Try supplementing Raymond Aron's masterly exposition in his book Paix et guerre entre les nations (Paris, 1962), pp. 400 ff., 654 ff. (on persuasion, deterrence and conversion of the enemy) with a synoptic reading of this 5th chapter of Clausewitz.

7. Wilhelm Wagner: Die preussischen Reformer und die Zeitgenössische Philosophie (Cologne, 1956) (a work from 1922 which won a Kantgesellschaft prize at the time), p. 144; see also chapter 3 (Zeitsituation der Reden und Zeitkritik) in Arnold Gehlen, Deutschtum und Christentum (Berlin, 1935) and Bernard Wlllms, Die totale Freiheit. Dieter Bergner, Neue Bemerkungen Zu I. G. Fichtes Stellungnahme Zur nationalen Frage (Berlin, 1967), pp. 45 ff., rightly states that Prussia had become for Fichte since 1800 “fatherland and destiny”. The national arrogance and the Prussianophile interpretation can be explained by the underdevelopment of the bourgeois class in Germany at that time. As B. Willms rightly says, Xavier Léon's book, Fichte et son temps, “is indispensable for research on Fichte because of its richness of significant data”. We are particularly interested in part 11 of the 2nd volume “La lutte pour raffranchissement national, 1806-1813”(Paris, 1927). For more than a century Fichte has been a violently contested figure in the nationalist polemic between the French and the Germans. All the more astonishing is the perfect objectivity of Xavier Léon's book. Nothing escapes his scientific attention, neither the letter about Machiavelli that Captain Clausewitz wrote from Kónigsberg to Fichte, nor the details of the friendship with Johannes von Müller. It is a pity that Hugo Ball did not know this magnificent book (see n. 8).

8. The expression is from Hugo Ball, Die Flucht aus der Zeit (with a preface by Hermann Hesse) (Munich, 1931), p. 234, note of 31 July 1918. Ball underestimated the political-theological importance of the jus reformandi, and he was a clear groom of the Reformation consummated by Hobbes' Leviathan. Consequently, he also failed to understand Barbey d'Aurevilly's statement, which he himself quotes, that the two most important books of the modern age are Hobbes' Leviathan and Demaistre's Du Pape. On the subject of “The consummated reform”, see. Der Staat, 4 (1965), pp. 51 ff. and below, n. 13.

9. To the insult “Stockpreusse” (Prussian big-headedness) Clausewitz replied with the expression “stockdemokratisch” (democratic big-headedness). Gorres' writings seemed to him to be “eaten away by the passion of democratic despotism”. See also Reinhart Koselleck, Presussen Zwischen Reform und Revolution (Industrielle Gesellschaft, vol. 7) (Stuttgart, 1967), pp. 297-641.

10. Adolf Grabowski (Trivium, III year, No. 4) was the first, after 1945, to search for the origin and meaning of this heading. He commented on this on a series of essays of the Goethe-Jahrbuch for the Goethe-Gesselschaft. Eduard Spranger (Goethe-Jahrbuch, XI;. 1949) assumes that either Goethe or Riemer formulated the expression, claiming it to be ancient, i.e. from Zincgref's Apophegtomata. Christian Janentzky, Siegfried Schei, be, Momme Mommsen made other attempts at interpretation. We are particularly interested in the work of M. Mommsen, volume XIII, pp. 86-104, because of its connection with Napoleon. Mommsen also quotes Goethe's diary entry on Fichte and Napoleon mentioned above.

11. B. Willms quotes (lug. cit., p. 156, note 709) Friedrich Meinecke, who had the idea that perhaps Fichte's image of the nation is no more than an extension of the philosopher Fichte himself. The historian immediately rejects this idea as a “pedantic interpretation”. Meinecke says nothing that the enemy Napoleon could be Fichte's own problem.

12. On this annexationist phrase by Fichte, see Bernard Willms, Die totale Freiheit, lug. cit., pp. 18-19, n. 95.

13. Carl Schmitt: “Die vollendete Reformation”, in Der Staat, 4 (1965), p. 1 ff; see above n. 7.

14. Hans-Martin Sass: “Emanzipation der Freiheit. Hegels Rechtsphilosophie als Strategie pragmatischer Politik und Rechtskritik”, in ARSP, LIII (1967), pp. 257 ff, especially p. 254. According to Hegel, the French Revolution did not surpass the Reformation. He stresses the need for the emancipation of the Protestant conscience as a reconciliation of conscience and law. On Bruno Bauer and Moses Hess, see the second and third parts of the book by Horst Stuke: Die Philosophie der Tat, Industrielle Gesellschaft, vol. 3 (Stuttgart, 1963).

15. Iring Fetscher, Karl Marx und der Marxismus; von der Philosophie des Proletariats zur proletarischen Weltanschauung (Munich, 1967), p. 298.

16. “The social strata, still distinguished as estates, came to have the outline of parties: less in the sense of an organisation or only of a supra-provincial agreement than in that of political currents. Behind them, and beyond the noisy Burschenschaft, there are commercial, economic and, above all, corporate groups in the old sense. Their constitutional requirements hindered administrative planning and thus the common good as the administration understood it”. Reinhardt Koselleck, p. 297.