ABSTRACT
The author aurges that war, thus conceived, has involved from the outset a tendency to expand or escalate; and that it is this inherent but by no means all-determining tendency which gives to war, in its collective sense, such intelligibility as it possesses. But we also think of war in a collective and, in some degree, a cumulative sense: comparable in its duration and development to the practices of agriculture and building, of marriage and hospitality, of story-telling and record-keeping, and of the education of the young and the burial of the dead. Clausewitzs exposition of the concept of war proceeds dialectically, and it is far from easy to decide whether its opposed theses are ever quite satisfactorily reconciled. The wars of Napoleon gave the lie to such futilities. Calculation and organization are of course indispensable in all war: but only with a view to injecting and unleashing superior force at the critical place and time.
