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Notes on video lecture:
Carl von Clausewitz: On War
Notes taken by Edward Tanguay on November 20, 2015 (go to class or lectures)
Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:
influence, mimetic, 1831, chameleon, total, puzzle, military, politics, asymmetry, facets, cholera, fragmentary, Prussian, state, rational, break, finitudes, relative, antagonism, Napoleonic, escalation, inhibit, control, Politik, trinity, logical, unfinished, duel, concept, compel, existential, support, army, sovereignty
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Carl von Clausewitz (1780-        )
•
                 general
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in his book "On War" tried to distill a                of war
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a book that would have lasting                    on thoughts about war in the 19th century and beyond
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On War
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                     masterpiece
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a collection of              pieces that don't add up to one unified image
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struggled in his life to come to terms with the profound changes in warfare that he experienced in the                      wars
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died in the                epidemic
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tried to arrive at a systematic understanding of warfare
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on the other hand, the                        structure reflects the difficulty to write about the concept of war
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war is on the one hand a                   , meaning it has different shapes, forms, and manifestations
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war is a            phenomenon
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encompasses a society
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a unity phenomenon
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can be brought under a single concept
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a tension to arrive at a concept of war
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yet has many various             
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five of the most important definitions of war
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1. a         
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an antagonism in which two parties act on their will in order to              the other to act in some way
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an act act of force to compel the enemy to do our will
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therefore is fundamentally an instrument of                 
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2. distinction between absolute war and                  war
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war is the organized application of violence, and there is no                limit to the amount of violence that can be applied
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in the concept of war as an                     , there is a natural dynamic which tends toward escalation of ever more extreme uses of force and violence
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a. reciprocity
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b. loss of               
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sets up the idea of friction
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c.                principle
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antagonistic parties will imitate each other because they are in a competitive relationship and by imitating each other this will have a natural                      of violence towards an extreme
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counterpoises
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               this tendency to the extremity towards violence
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1. human psychology
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human frailties and                   
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bad judgement
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lack of courage
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2.                    between attack and defense
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3. anti-escalation
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to            the cycle of mimetic imitation
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3. war is the continuation of politics by other means
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ambiguity of how to understand the word               
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broad definition
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                       meaning
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the realization of the political
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narrow definition
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policy
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legitimate and                  instrument of policy
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war is rational to the extent that it serves rational means
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4. war as the holy               
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a sociological organization
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involves three different forms of agencies within a nation-state
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1. professional army
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2. national-state and                       
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declares the state of war and sends the         
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3. the people
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has to                the effort of war
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dysfunctions
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people are not on the side of war
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only the                  is active but not the government
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5. the importance of chance and fiction
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war is the rational activity of the           
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war is fundamentally predicated by friction and chance
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war is a rational activity that tries to master chance
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the form of war is to be a game, a war game
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the attempt for different parties to master the game

Vocabulary:

mimesis, n. from the Ancient Greek μίμησις, the imitative representation of nature and human behavior, imitation of another's gestures and actions ⇒ "In the concept of war as antagonism, there is a natural dynamic which tends toward escalation of ever more extreme uses of force and violence which include three aspects: (1) reciprocity, (2) loss of control, and a (3) mimetic principle in which antagonistic parties will imitate each other in a competitive relationship which leads to a natural escalation of violence towards an extreme."
salient, n. a piece of land or section of fortification that juts out to form an angle ⇒ "The front line of World War I formed a salient surrounding Ypres on three sides, and this area saw some fof the most bitter and contested fighting during the war."

People:

Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831)
Prussian general and military theorist who stressed the moral, psychological, and political aspects of war in his book "On War" ("Vom Kriege")
  • a realist and, while in some respects a romantic, also drew heavily on the rationalist ideas of the European Enlightenment
  • stressed the dialectical interaction of diverse factors, noting how unexpected developments unfolding under the "fog of war", that in the face of incomplete, dubious, and often completely erroneous information and high levels of fear, doubt, and excitement, nevertheless call for rapid decisions by alert commanders
  • he argued that war could not be quantified or reduced to mapwork, geometry, and graphs
  • "War is the continuation of politics by other means."

Spelling Corrections:

assymetry ⇒ asymmetry
Carl von Clausewitz: On War
The Nature of Colonialism Wars
1916 Zurich and Perspectives on the Great War
The Necessity of War in Politics
Eucken's Interpretation of Fichte
Husserl, the Great War, and the Meaning of Death
Henri Bergson on WWI Germany and France
Hermann Cohen on Judentum and Deutschtum during WWI
Hodgson and Reinach on Foreboding