ABSTRACT
Clausewitz is often referred to as though his opus magnum, On War, had been created ex nihilo, without precedent or notable tradition of thinking or writing about war. Clausewitz's education only really took off when, at the age of 21, he joined the first promotion of the newly founded War Academy that had just been opened by General Gerhard von Scharnhorst, a rather homespun outfit, as one can gather from Scharnhorst's lecture notes. As far as content was concerned, it was most crucially Count Guibert who had a key influence on Clausewitz's thinking. Guibert's idea of the citizen army that would defend its state to the end against any external aggression is also at the basis of Clausewitz's idea of the people's war or insurgency. Symmetric conflicts by contrast had been the core subject of writing on war, as was their perception as something like a duel, which according to a fourteenth-century jurist goes back to Germanic perceptions of war.
