Peter Paret

Felix Gilbert

Gordon A. Craig

American military scholars discuss the evolution of modern war strategy, paying special attention to its nonmilitary phases in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age

Michael Howard

On War

Originally published in 1976, Clausewitz and the State presents a comprehensive analysis of one of the significant thinkers of modern Europe. Peter Paret combines social and military history and psychological interpretation with a study of Clausewitz's military theories and of his unduly neglected historical and political writing. This timely new edition includes a preface which allows Paret to recount the past thirty years of discussion on Clausewitz and respond to critics. A companion volume to Clausewitz's On War, this book is indispensable to anyone interested in Clausewitz and his theories, and their proper historical context.

The Man, His Theories, and His Times

Clausewitz and the State

These essays provide an authoritative introduction to Carl von Clausewitz and enlarge the history of war by joining it to the history of ideas and institutions and linking it with intellectual biography.

Essays on Clausewitz and the History of Military Power

Understanding War

Far from being a detached theorist, Carl von Clausewitz was as intensely aware of the cultural and intellectual currents of his time as he was engaged in its political and military conflicts. The society in which he lived and the people with whom he served affected the analytic method he developed in his writing and the conclusions he reached. The essays in this volume examine Clausewitz in comparison with teachers, friends, and opponents, a perspective enriched by significant documents which have been previously ignored. They deepen our knowledge of Clausewitz's life and how he enlarged his understanding of warfare from its mechanisms and the interaction of its elements to its apparently permanent place in the relation between states.

Essays in the Cultural and Intellectual History of Thinking about War

Clausewitz in His Time

Responding to the enemy's innovation in war presents problems to soldiers and societies of all times. This book traces Napoleon's victory over Prussia in 1806 and Prussia's effort to recover from defeat to show how in one particular historical episode operational analyses together with institutional and political decisions eventually turned defeat to victory. The author moves from a comparative study of French and Prussian forces to campaign narrative and strategic analysis. He examines processes of change in institutions and doctrine, as well as their dependence on social and political developments, and interprets works of art and literature as indicators of popular and elite attitudes toward war, which influence the conduct of war and the kind and extent of military innovation. In the concluding chapter he addresses the impact of 1806 on two men who fought on opposing sides in the campaign and sought a new theoretical understanding of war--Henri Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz. Fields of history that are often kept separate are brought together in this book, which seeks to replicate the links between different areas of thought and action as they exist in reality and shape events.

Prussia 1806

The Cognitive Challenge of War

Helga Thieme

This first book-length critical study of Jeremy Irons concentrates on his key performances and acting style. Through the analysis of some of the major screen roles in Irons' career, such as Brideshead Revisited, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Reversal of Fortune, Swann in Love, Dead Ringers, and Lolita, Mark Nicholls identifies a new masculine identity that unites them: 'the prince of perversion', an emblematic figure of the 1980s and 1990s presented as an alternative to the action hero or the common man. Using clear explanations of complex theoretical ideas, this book investigates Jeremy Irons's performances through the notion of perversion, both as sexual inversion and as a form of social rebellion, to uncover an entirely original but recognizable screen type.

Barlach's Drawings on the Nibelungen

Myth and Modernity

ter Paret

The conflict between National Socialism and the sculptor Ernst Barlach, and the ideological battle involved.

Ernst Barlach, 1933-1938

An Artist Against the Third Reich

The essays in this volume analyze war, its strategic characterisitics and its political and social functions, over the past five centuries. The diversity of its themes and the broad perspectives applied to them make the book a work of general history as much as a history of the theory and practice of war from the Renaissance to the present. Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age takes the first part of its title from an earlier collection of essays, published by Princeton University Press in 1943, which became a classic of historical scholarship. Three essays are repinted from the earlier book; four others have been extensively revised. The rest--twenty-two essays--are new. The subjects addressed range from major theorists and political and military leaders to impersonal forces. Machiavelli, Clausewitz, and Marx and Engels are discussed, as are Napoleon, Churchill, and Mao. Other essays trace the interaction of theory and experience over generations--the evolution of American strategy, for instance, or the emergence of revolutionary war in the modern world. Still others analyze the strategy of particular conflicts--the First and Second World Wars--or the relationship between technology, policy, and war in the nuclear age. Whatever its theme, each essay places the specifics of military thought and action in their political, social, and economic environment. Together the contributors have produced a book that reinterprets and illuminates war, one of the most powerful forces in history and one that cannot be controlled in the future without an understanding of its past.

For thousands of years, art has interpreted the experience of war_its methods, human costs, and moral ambiguities_and has offered historians a wealth of testimony that is only beginning to be systematically explored. In this wide-ranging study, Peter Paret discusses forty-seven paintings and prints as complex documents of war in Europe since the Renaissance and as examples of the artist's use of war as a metaphor for the human condition. The images include works by such major artists as Uccello, Géricault, and Dix as well as academic history paintings and popular prints. By setting each in its historical environment and analyzing it from the perspective of the wars of its time, illuminates the place of war in Western consciousness and expands our understanding of works that are too often approached with little concern for the reality they depict or symbolically transform. Perhaps the most significant of the themes he traces over five centuries is the gradual change from the prince or general to the common soldier and civilian victim as central figures in the interpretation of war in art.

Peter Paret

Books

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