caption serviceyears commands death_date death_place birth_place unit placeofburial_label battles birth_date rank image article_title name
portrait wach while in prussian service , by karl wilhelm 1792 -- 1831 '' kriegsakademie '' 16 november 1831 breslau , prussia burg bei magdeburg , prussia russian-german legion place of burial siege of mainz napoleonic wars 01 june 1780 major-general carl von clausewitz.png carl von clausewitz
 carl philipp gottfried von clausewitz
carl von clausewitz

carl philipp gottfried -lrb- or gottlieb -rrb- von clausewitz -lrb- ; june 1 , 1780 -- november 16 , 1831 -rrb- was a prussian general and military theorist who stressed the `` moral '' -lrb- in modern terms , psychological -rrb- and political aspects of war .
his most notable work , `` vom kriege '' -lrb- `` on war '' -rrb- , was unfinished at his death .
clausewitz was a realist and , while in some respects a romantic , also drew heavily on the rationalist ideas of the european enlightenment .
his thinking is often described as hegelian because of his references to dialectical thinking but , although he was probably personally acquainted with hegel , there remains debate as to whether or not clausewitz was in fact influenced by him .
he stressed the dialectical interaction of diverse factors , noting how unexpected developments unfolding under the `` fog of war '' -lrb- i.e. , in the face of incomplete , dubious , and often completely erroneous information and high levels of fear , doubt , and excitement -rrb- call for rapid decisions by alert commanders .
he saw history as a vital check on erudite abstractions that did not accord with experience .
in contrast to the early work of antoine-henri jomini , he argued that war could not be quantified or reduced to mapwork , geometry , and graphs .
clausewitz had many aphorisms , of which the most famous is `` war is the continuation of politics by other means . ''
