ABSTRACT
In Vom Kriege (Of War), published posthumously in 1832, Carl von Clausewitz maintained that ‘the defensive form of leading a war is in itself stronger than the attacking one’ (Clausewitz [1832] 1963:139; emphasis in the original). He expounded: ‘He who is on the attack has only the advantage of the sudden attack, whereas he who is on the defence is able to permanently surprise the enemy in the course of the battle in terms of the strength and forms of his counter-attacks’ (ibid.: 141). It hardly needs to be stressed that academic disputes are not military battles and that the critics of a particular theory and its advocates are not warriors attempting to defeat each other by all means, including the extinction of the adversary. Nevertheless, the view appears to be widespread that there are some similarities between intellectual debates and military battles. Otherwise it would be difficult to understand why the former are frequently described in terms of a vocabulary that derives from the realm of the latter. Two examples suffice to illustrate this. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk in a heated controversy about alternative theories of value and distribution between advocates of the classical cost of production theory on the one hand and advocates of marginal utility theory on the other spoke of the ‘showdown between the old and the new doctrine’ (Böhm-Bawerk 1892:321). And John Maynard Keynes coined the formula that ‘Ricardo conquered England as completely as the Holy Inquisition conquered Spain’ (Keynes 1936:32).
