Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1994. But Christopher Bassford is part of a new generation of scholars who are developing alternative perspectives on this influential military philosopher. Even more important is Bassford's analysis of the ways that complex ideas are transmitted and assimilated. Military thought is like military justice or military music. Each is a means to a wider end rather than an end in itself.
Military thought is significant only insofar as it contributes to the effective waging of war.
For that reason its patterns of diffusion are at least as important as its patterns of development. Unless armed forces recognize, accept, and institutionalize a particular system of military theory, that system will remain no more than a footnote to the history of war. Bassford argues that while soldiers in general may not be particularly interested in the intellectual currents dominating their times, military thinkers are remarkably aware of them. Clausewitz's ideas were strongly influenced by the German reaction against the Enlightenment and its emphasis on reason and the exact sciences as models for the conduct of warfare. This approach stood in sharp contrast to British and U.S. military cultures still dominated by Enlightenment patterns of thinking.