War without contact: Berenhorst,Bülow,and the avoidance of violence as the core paradigm of military science

I. Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst (1733-1814)

Berenhorst was the illegitimate child of a Prussian field marshal, the German Prince, Leopold I of Anhalt-Dessau. While still a teenager, Berenhorst was placed in a Prussian regiment. During the Seven Years’ War, he became an adjutant to Prince Henry and, subsequently, to King Frederick II of Prussia. His experiences in the Prussian army and on the battlefields converted him into one of the earliest and most radical critics of Prussian militarism and, in more general terms, of ‘the bloody industry of battle’ which was ‘defiling mankind’. ¹³ He feared this industry would one day endanger the prosperity of Europe. Faced with the many violent conflicts of Europe in the late eighteenth century, Berenhorst felt that it was his responsibility to issue a sincere warning to Europe’s intellectual elite:

As never before, war – free or forced – preoccupies all the rulers of Europe [. . .]: all their actions, all their revenue [. . .] are now directed towards war and its tremendous demands [. . .]; it is war alone which devours and exhausts the vigor of all states, and which, as compensation, gives reason to expect developments as unpredictable as they are to be feared. ¹⁴

The interesting thing about his Reflections on the Art of War (Betrachtungen über die Kriegskunst), issued in three volumes (1797/8/9), is that rather than taking a moralistic approach Berenhorst took the stance of science. It was in essence this scientific approach, which led him to the conviction that a merely pragmatic use of military force would, sooner or later, have to eventuate in the total breakdown of an ever more interconnected European society. The connection to Immanuel Kant’s booklet Perpetual Peace, published in 1795 only shortly before Berenhorst’s Reflections, has been emphasized by Dietrich Allert. ¹⁵ The basic problem addressed by Kant was the same: ‘military build-up knows no limits’. Characteristically, Berenhorst made this the central topic of his Reflections on the Art of War addressing it under names such as the ‘prevailing systems of the over-distention of all vigour’. ¹⁶ Yet it was not just this parallel alone that was of import. His knowledge of Kant went deeper. He himself referred to his Reflections as a ‘Kantian Critique’. ¹⁷ What Berenhorst had done was to declare that war theory up to that point in time had lacked the epistemic tools to be considered a proper science, which would have made it possible to regulate. Thus, it was his resolute pacifism that led to his demand for a true science of war which alone would allow its regulation!

His ‘Kantian critique’ posed the question as to whether war theory had been able to make its own foundations explicit, so that it could be considered an object of human knowledge. Berenhorst maintained that reasoning about war was useless until the human mind ‘had a complete conception [“Totalidee”] of it and was able to fathom and conceive the formal as well as the material elements in it’. ¹⁸ This was an approach which would revolutionize the thinking about war. The war theorist Julius von Voß wrote in 1807,

Indeed, Berenhorst preceded with the same crushing method as Kant and he squelched almost all that had hitherto been deeply worshiped. ¹⁹

How did Berenhorst achieve this and what were the results of his ‘Kantian Critique’?

While doing my PhD on this subject, a chapter in Berenhorst’s Reflections greatly perplexed me. Though I had the impression that it was a centrepiece in his argument, I never felt at ease with it since – unlike other passages – it seemed to contain no forthright argument. Only in retrospect and after having devoted years of study in this field, have I finally realized its ingenuity and its significance for Bülow’s later writings. In the chapter entitled ‘Der Marschall von Sachsen’, ²⁰ Berenhorst turned to two of the most famous war theorists of the eighteenth century: Maurice de Saxe (1696-1750) and Jacques François de Chastenet de Puységur (1656-1743).

He begins by quoting passages in which they deplore the eighteenth century’s state of war theory. They both agreed as to why there had been only limited success with regard to establishing theories on war. Both argued that the conduct of war was not yet based on undisputable principles but on customs. Berenhorst ingeniously utilized these passages in order to expose a typical pattern of eighteenth century enlightenment, which can either be described as empirical or sceptical.

On the one hand, scientific rigorism demanded that any sound theory must not base its ascriptions of ‘cause and effect’ on customs. Customs are merely based on sensual impressions and are, therefore, always in danger of misinterpreting mere coincidences as principles. Such a basis makes it impossible to achieve true certainty. On the other hand, scientific rigorism was based on exactly these sensual impressions, that is, on the credo that evidence is exclusively empirical. This is where the problem lies: the empiricist believes that humans can only gather knowledge through their senses. This clashes completely with the other fundamental belief that safe knowledge can never be based on sensual impressions but instead only on principles which are not dependent on historical circumstance or coincidence but on mathematical certainty. Mathematical certainty, however, is nothing one can inadvertently bump into in the real world. It is not an object of experience but is something based on axioms. From the perspective of mathematical rigorism, empirical evidence could at best replace old irrational customs with new but irrational customs. Whatever path one chooses, that is, wherever this process of reflection stops, the over-all-message could either be labelled ‘sceptical’ or ‘empirical’.

Both, Maurice de Saxe and Puységur, suggested a return to the Roman military system rather than staying with the prevailing customs. But what would make this ancient system ‘intrinsically more necessary’ than those of the eighteenth century?

Berenhorst’s criticism initiated the still prevalent misinterpretation of his Reflections as being generally sceptical and overtly denying the possibility of any theory of war. Not surprisingly, Hans Rothfels presented him as a kind of ‘David Hume’ within the military. ²¹ This would suggest that there was no fundamental difference between Berenhorst and such older authorities as Maurice de Saxe and Puységur except for the fact that he turned their moderate scepticism, widespread in the military theory of the eighteenth century, ²² into a somewhat stricter variety. I will attempt to demonstrate that this scepticist-interpretation of Berenhorst is fundamentally wrong, for only then can we truly understand the impact Berenhorst had on Bülow.

What Berenhorst had tried to accomplish in quoting Maurice de Saxe and Puységur was to show that their solutions remained fundamentally ‘pragmatic’ as both had not yet realized that they had unconsciously continued to confuse two distinct elements which constitute true scientific knowledge: (1) the a priori conditions of knowledge and (2) the empirical phenomena which would – if at all possible – allow for proper application of said conditions. Prior to Kant’s transcendental philosophy, this subtle distinction had been scarcely realized but constantly confused, thus leading to scepticism.

After quoting Maurice de Saxe and Puységur with respect to their doubts on the state of war theory and their belief that the ancients are the paragon for the true military system of the future, Berenhorst turns his attention to their opinions on the influence of the invention of gun powder. Was it indeed possible to introduce an ancient military system into a time in which cannons and guns dominated the battlefields and killed people from long distances?

Whereas Maurice de Saxe maintained that guns still had but little effect, Puységur admitted that the use of gun powder had only changed the distances between the armies but not the fundamental principles regarding the conduct of operations. Berenhorst was able to use this in visualizing a fundamental problem. He paraphrased Puységur as follows:

To be fair, I have to say, that the actual assertion made by the honorable marshal is that gun powder only changed the spacing and, due to its great strength, increased the distances – nothing more. ²³

Then comes Berenhorst’s reproach in his distinctively serious, irony-laden style:

Certainly: nothing more! but it is precisely the distances and the impact of the projectiles that form the foundation of the whole system. [. . .] for – from the moment at which the only talk is of guns – the tactics will become a science whose most difficult task and whose sole purpose will be overcoming, winning or simply contesting those distances. With the complete alteration of these distances, as well as with the strengthening and proliferation of those means which prevent traversal, the whole science itself must, as a consequence, be totally altered. ²⁴

Distances determine the sphere beyond which the mutual destruction of armies becomes a reality. This sphere has been altered considerably since the invention of gun powder:

Before the invention of gun powder the true fight began at the moment when opponents were upon one another and now – oh how things have changed! – that point marks its end. ²⁵

Still, what was it that gave Berenhorst the impression that Puységur was fundamentally ‘wrong’ in saying that only the distances had changed? Why were mere distances so important to Berenhorst?

Bülow would consider Berenhorst one of the most important war theorists of all times. What prompted Bülow to do so? It was because of the emphasis Berenhorst placed on the maintenance of distances.

In his first chapter ‘The Greeks and Romans’ (‘Griechen und Römer’), Berenhorst emphasized that ancient armies had received their inner cohesion through the single soldier’s well-founded fear of breaking away from his own battle formation and, thus, of losing the cover which it provided him. He argued that this precondition for the inner cohesion of ancient battle formations became lost with the evolution of heavy firearms. With the invention of cannons, the deep battle formation with its many ranks in close succession turned from offering mutual cover for each individual soldier into the optimal target for maximum destruction. The more the troops remained in concentrated groups, the more they served as the perfect target for the ever increasing effectiveness of gun and artillery fire. The seemingly inherent cohesion of the ancient battle formations dissolved – ‘No system of tactics is any longer possible without taking into regard heavy artillery [. . .]’. ²⁶

What had been a precondition for cohesion had morphed into an eventual cause for the total dismemberment of all future armies. In an effort to reduce losses and increase fire power, the consequence throughout the eighteenth century was to continually reduce the number of ranks and to extend the front-line instead. This resulted in increasingly ‘long, thin, floating battalions’ ²⁷ and also in huge ‘extensions and enlargements with regard to space and numbers’. ²⁸ This – according to Berenhorst – marked the birth of a new phenomenon, namely the Prussian manoeuvre exercises ( Manövrirkunst):

Instead of the exercise-revues of his predecessors he [King Frederick II] introduced encampments in which the scientific execution of more sophisticated doctrines was put to the test using small armies [. . .]. The science of war added thereby a new theory to its repertoire: the Art of Maneuver as preparation for praxis. The deployment in a straight line – alignment – between two viewpoints became a chief subject [. . .]. ²⁹

And Berenhorst continues,

Columns were pushed together in dense formations not to break through [the enemy’s battle formation] but to be able to unfold [. . .] – to deploy – one’s battle line rapidly, i.e., to ‘re’-form the columns into lines [. . .] and then to advance great distances across all kinds of different terrain under extremely difficult conditions without if at all possible shoving, stumbling, hesitating or wavering in their resolve. ³⁰

The most counter-intuitive observation of Berenhorst was that the evolution of conflict was progressing towards a constant, ongoing detachment of operations from the enemy’s actual presence. It was under these historical conditions that Berenhorst grasped a true cognitive challenge, which – as he realized – concerned not just his lifetime alone but which allowed a glance at the very foundations of war in general; in other words, this was namely an opportunity to consider war as an essentially dynamic phenomenon, that is, without any physical contact.

In Berenhorst’s eyes, the development of his time had led to the more general question of how to interact with ‘an adversarial army whose extent is still harder to be overlooked by one’s scope of view than the extent of one’s own’, that is, how to interact with a far off opponent ‘other than by mere conjecture’. ³¹

Bülow would later – in very similar fashion – describe the advancement of modern armies as an ‘undulating motion’ (‘undulatorische Bewegung’) spread over miles. ³² Berenhorst’s influence on Bülow is strikingly manifested through very similar passages in his later books, which, somewhat shockingly, anticipate scenes of war in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:

I have to mention that the descriptions of battles [‘Treffen’] have become ever more opaque, since it is truly difficult to describe with any clarity a chaotic and higgledy-piggledy phenomenon such as a battle at the afterglow of the eighteenth century and the dawn of the nineteenth. A battle [nowadays] stretches over as many as perhaps six different positions, covering several degrees of latitude and longitude with a line of fire and smoke, being conducted at perhaps sixteen different localities simultaneously. This is why it is now seldom named after a locality but almost exclusively after the day on which it has taken place. In contrast to times past one no longer speaks of the Battle of Kolin but the Battle of July 22^nd etc. The use of place names as labels has been completely replaced by the use of labels of time. ³³

The effects of gun powder – forcing armies into ‘long, thin, floating battalions’ – made something perceptible, which led Berenhorst to a whole new discovery: our precarious cognitive conditions in war:

[. . .] fighting acquired something entirely aethereal in principle [. . .]. ³⁴

In Berenhorst’s eyes the maintenance of distances turned out to signify something that would guide him and Bülow far beyond traditional war theory; it revealed to both of them that war had to be treated as a dynamic phenomenon.

What crystallized in Berenhorst’s Reflections was that in Europe huge armies were ‘crawling about’ cultivated land. ³⁵ Since these armies were dependent on immense amounts of resources, they quickly disintegrated whenever they happened to move beyond a distance which could still be overcome in maintaining their well-being. Whenever they happened to surpass these distances and come into contact with one another, a process of irreversible dissolution set in:

But as soon as an actual encounter happens, when volcanoes erupt, explosions rage against explosions, and one formation negates another and finally destroys it, then he [i.e., the author himself] knows no remedy and leaves it up to the dogmatist to find one, in order to escape the precarious but certainly shameful results which mere slaughtering in barbarian fashion bestows. ³⁶

According to Berenhorst, the collision of armies seemed to thwart the possibility of a science of war. How could this assumption be true? What was so decisive about the distances between armies that would justify Berenhorst’s critique of Puységur and lead him to the seemingly absurd idea of considering battles an obstacle rather than the actual object of a proper war theory? This is the point at which we have to turn to Berenhorst’s reference to Newtonian dynamics. In view of the mutual destruction on modern battlefields, Berenhorst came to the following conclusion:

To still want to consider applying dynamic rules under such circumstances is the most empty of all dreams. ³⁷

We will see that Berenhorst did not deny the possibility of a dynamistic explanation of social processes at all. On the contrary, he considered the maintenance of distances to be an essential precondition for their ensuing discovery – to gain deeper insight into Berenhorst’s subtle argument and thereby understand what he had in mind, it is necessary to turn to Newton and eventually to Kant.

Today, it is common knowledge that the planets and moons draw regular ellipses around their respective central bodies and that in doing so they neither exceed nor undercut certain distances. For Sir Isaac Newton this proved to be essential in his uncovering of universal gravitation between all masses in space. It was Kant, in the wake of Newton, who would eventually realize that scientific knowledge was not so much about directly observing phenomena but rather about finding the right position within these phenomena, thus making it possible to interpret them as dynamic equilibria. ³⁸ It was this insight which helped Berenhorst and Bülow to focus their attention directly on the distances between armies and not on battles as had been done before. To be able to grasp this rather epistemological analogy with Newtonian Science, we must quickly address those aspects of Newton’s argument, which are crucial in comprehending Berenhorst’s ‘Kantian Critique’.

What had emerged from Newton’s dynamics was that each satellite and its respective central body within the solar system attract each other via the force of mutual gravitation. It is only the satellite’s momentum, which keeps both bodies from colliding. Every satellite in our solar system needs its own very specific momentum to continue in its elliptical motion around its central body, that is, to maintain dynamic equilibrium and thus to prevent its disintegration. If the momentum was increased or decreased even a little, the state of equilibrium would cease. Gravitation alone would cause a collision of all masses. The momenta, thus, proved indispensable for the maintenance of the state of equilibrium, that is, that the ‘centre of the system of the world is at rest’, ³⁹ which alone had enabled Newton to argue for the existence of universal gravitation. From a scientific perspective, this did not so much prove the deliberation of a creator but rather and most notably revealed the precarious conditions under which mathematical principles are applied to empirical phenomena. Their application, as described in Newton’s theory, depends on arbitrary historical circumstances, for example, the aforementioned momenta of the planets and moons. As Newton reminds his readers,

They [the planets and comets] will indeed persevere in their orbits by the laws of gravity, but they certainly could not originally have acquired the regular position of the orbits by these laws. ⁴⁰

So what Newton had achieved was a model, which allowed for discovering and estimating what might be called quite a precarious situation with respect to the conditions of human knowledge. His dynamic theory allowed for predicting very precisely under what conditions the solar system would face disintegration and, thus, demonstrated how slim the basis for human knowledge actually was. Conditions of knowledge proved to be nothing more than precarious conditions of equilibria. Human knowledge was limited to discovering the right perspective in order to empirically prove the a priori conditions for stable systems. In other words, humans are thus able to designate the real world boundary conditions which prevent the disintegration of respective systems but nothing more!

The Newtonian ‘Hypothesis 1’ ( ‘The centre of the system of the world is at rest’), that is, the assumption that phenomena are only comprehensible if they constitute an equilibrium, is what Kant and through his work then Berenhorst would grasp as the true a priori not only for knowledge in general but also for war theory in particular. The decisive question remained: Are we able to identify the a priori conditions of equilibria empirically? And this was Berenhorst’s ingenious critique of Puységur and Maurice de Saxe. Before Puységur could state that in modern war ‘only the distances had changed’, the epistemic question needed to be addressed as to whether we had yet identified the right frame of reference. Was the centre of the system of war at rest? This alone would permit its dynamic forces and boundary conditions to be identified.

This was the starting point which would turn traditional war theory upside-down. With this approach, Berenhorst knew from the outset of his endeavour what he needed, or rather what he had to identify in war if the study of it should ever be turned into a science. What theoretical elements are needed to identify dynamic equilibria and how do we identify them in war?

The Newtonian idea of a dynamic force is change in motion without physical contact – a central concept which Berenhorst and Bülow would eventually introduce to modern war theory. But how exactly had Newton achieved knowledge about the properties of a system which showed no physical interaction in the first place?

Newton’s first law of motion states that if a body is at rest or is moving at a constant speed in a straight line, it remains at rest or keeps moving in a straight line at constant speed unless it is acted upon by an external force.

Bernard Cohen commented on the function of Newton’s first law of motion as follows:

[. . .] Newton’s first law [. . .] was a condition for the existence of certain insensible forces [. . .]. The most significant such force for Newton was the centripetal force acting on the moon and planets, which he eventually would identify with gravity; we are aware of such a force only because the moon and planets do not exhibit the uniform rectilinear motion [. . .]. That is, our awareness of such a force is based on the first law and the observed fact that the planets do not follow a uniform rectilinear path. ⁴¹

Bernard Cohen calls Newton’s use of an inertial system as a theoretical tool a ‘theory of rational mechanics’, which had but little to do with physical interaction. Mechanics had been transcended and now served as a touchstone for the successful implementation of the a priori properties of any equilibrium. It was Kant who spelled out in detail what implications the Newtonian paragon had for natural science. Any equilibrium – be it what it may – demands certain indispensable conditions for its synthetic construction. Kant’s transcendental philosophy implied that these conditions exist a priori but that they must be identified within the empirical phenomena a posteriori:

Nevertheless, we are plainly in possession of a pure natural science, which propounds laws of nature a priori and with such necessity, as is required for apodictic propositions. [. . .] [. . .] such as the proposition: that substance perseveres and resists, that everything which happens is at any given time determined by some cause according to constant laws etc. These are truly universal laws of nature and they exist entirely a priori. ⁴²

This transcendence of Newtonian dynamics is indispensable in comprehending Berenhorst’s and Bülow’s revolutionary idea to decode war as a system of non-physical interactions of socio-inertial masses.

With this in mind, it becomes increasingly clear what Berenhorst meant by calling his Reflections a ‘Kantian critique’. From the onset Berenhorst knew exactly what a science of war needed. It required phenomena that followed some kind of repetitive pattern suggesting some kind of equilibrium and within it some inertial substance, which, like the Newtonian concept of inertial mass, serve as the basic building block for the synthetic implementation of the a priori conditions of an equilibrium.

The Newtonian and Kantian achievements made perfectly clear that a dynamistic theory of war was never to be achieved by studying battles. On the contrary, it had to start with a hypothesis that there was an equilibrium on the basis of some inertial system! It was this insight which revolutionized war theory forever.

What was needed was a system in which some inertial principle could be identified which ‘perseveres and resists’ and therefore would allow for measuring socio-dynamic forces. This is what places us in a position to properly understand Berenhorst’s critique. Just as Newton would not have been able to prove universal gravity if the planets and moons had left their orbits, Berenhorst argued that a war theory was not possible if it were solely about destruction:

It also seems to contradict the concepts of a moral creator of things, if one would believe that He had imbued in humankind the capacity of contemplation as in the case of mathematics and astronomy, in an effort to found a fully valid system called tactics to be utilized in the art of slaughtering of thousands against thousands [. . .]. ⁴³

This was not a moralistic critique. It was rather the result of his application of the Newtonian method. If a dynamic theory of war was ever to be achieved, the destructive collision of armies could not possibly help to achieve it. The very moment armies start to destroy each other, war loses its epistemic objects, just as the solar system would if its ellipses disintegrated and its bodies demolished one another. It is at this juncture at which Berenhorst makes his Kantian (and ultimately Newtonian) perspective most explicit. The discovery of dynamics requires very specific conditions for equilibria! It was, thus, not a moralistic approach at all but rather an epistemic critique, which had never been addressed before in war theory. Battles, according to Berenhorst, proved to be ‘an inherent defect a priori (please excuse my use of the awkward word) of this art as a science’: ⁴⁴

This object [of battles] embodies an abuse of its natural features; but an abuse can never be transformed into a proper theory. ⁴⁵

From an epistemological point of view, distances were not a mere derivate; they were the essence of a science of war. Just as in case of the Newtonian Solar System, the maintenance of certain distances in war proved to be a precondition for maintaining the very objects any quest for dynamic forces could be build on. In short, if war was supposed to turn into a dynamic science – as had astronomy with Newton – it would not be about winning battles but rather about the conditions that would prove them redundant. With Berenhorst’s dynamistic approach, war theory and peace studies began to fuse and to become one and the same!

As it becomes more and more apparent, Berenhorst’s allusion to the change in the battle order and the distances following the invention of gun powder was simply his cognitive access into a much deeper, epistemological discovery. By hinting at the change of distances, he left the pragmatic approach to war behind and opened a whole new field of thought. Distances proved essential just as they had in Newton’s discoveries and, in actual fact, this had been true for war not only since the invention of gun powder.

The findings of the ancient Greek historian Polybius (ca. 200-120 BC) must be considered an essential precondition for Berenhorst as they were his main source in his Reflections for the evaluation of ancient war theory. In the first-half of the eighteenth century, Puységur and Maurice de Saxe had declared that the practice of war had to return to the ancients. Whereas – according to Berenhorst – Maurice de Saxe had grossly underestimated the new impact of gun powder, Puységur had implied that the greater spatial extent of modern battles was nothing but a derivative. Berenhorst was the first to realize that epistemologically these distances were at the core of war dynamics and Polybius’ findings made it possible for him to prove it.

Polybius was one of the chief sources and the most inspiring war theorist of antiquity for intellectuals of the eighteenth century. The famous French military theorist, Jean Charles de Folard (1669-1752), published his influential Commentaires sur l’Histoire de Polybe in 1735 and these were published, again, in German in 1759/1760. Both, Berenhorst and Bülow were well acquainted with Folard’s commentary and with Polybius. One prominent example of Polybius’ scientific method is his analysis of the repeated military success of the Romans during their entanglements with the Macedonian kings.

Using the battle at Cynoscephalae (197 BC) as an example, Polybius argued that the equipment of the Macedonian and the Roman troops would provide an explanation. The Roman Legion which used short swords and an accordingly flexible battle formation was in rough terrain fit to overpower the inflexible Macedonian Phalanx with its huge, unwieldy lances. Most notably, Polybius did not state that the Roman system was any better. Instead, he observed that the proper maintenance of either system required different surroundings and in different surroundings different distances from each other:

Polybius, 18, 30: [. . .] Therefore it may readily be understood that, as I said before, it is impossible to confront a charge of the phalanx, so long as it retains its proper formation and strength.

18, 31: Why is it then that the Romans conquer? And what is it that brings disaster on those who employ the phalanx? Why, just because war is full of uncertainties both as to time and place; whereas there is but one time and one kind of ground in which a phalanx can fully work. If, then, there were anything to compel the enemy to accommodate himself to the time and place of the phalanx, when about to fight a general engagement, it would be but natural to expect that those who employed the phalanx would always carry off the victory. But if the enemy finds it possible, and even easy, to avoid its attack, what becomes of its formidable character? Again, no one denies that for its employment it is indispensable to have a country flat, bare, and without such impediments as ditches, cavities, depressions, steep banks, or beds of rivers: for all such obstacles are sufficient to hinder and dislocate this particular formation. And that it is, I may say, impossible, or at any rate exceedingly rare to find a piece of country of twenty stades, or sometimes of even greater extent, without any such obstacles, every one will also admit. However, let us suppose that such a district has been found. If the enemy decline to come down into it, but traverse the country sacking the towns and territories of the allies, what use will the phalanx be? For if it remains on the ground suited to itself, it will not only fail to benefit its friends, but will be incapable even of preserving itself; for the carriage of provisions will be easily stopped by the enemy, seeing that they are in undisputed possession of the country: while if it quits its proper ground, from the wish to strike a blow, it will be an easy prey to the enemy. ⁴⁶

As statements in their own works suggest Berenhorst and Bülow were very aware of Polybius’ famous analysis. They refer to the patterns of interaction between the Greek resp. Macedonian Phalanx and the Roman Legion and give preference to the latter, since the Phalanx ‘had relied too much on only one particular type of weapons and on one particular type of ground’. ⁴⁷ Polybius’ model accurately reflects what would happen, if one party were to advance onto the terrain of the other. Whereas, the Romans were not able to withstand the Macedonians in a level habitat, the Macedonians had to be far away from the Romans when the terrain was intersected and rough. Whenever it was only possible for one of the two opponents to maintain the conditions necessary for its existence, for example, only for the Macedonians or only for the Romans, the party not able to do so, disintegrated as was the case with the Macedonians at Cynoskephalae and Pydna.

Polybius’ scientific method entailed constructing an invisible frame of reference which would later give Berenhorst and Bülow, a first glance at the existence of dynamic interactions which force armies into certain distances. Polybius’ evaluation of different tactical systems can be compared to balancing two weights attached to a beam. The beam mediates between these weights, thus, given that these weights are at the appropriate distance from their common suspension, they force each other into equilibrium. If, though, one of the bodies is shifted along the beam the former equilibrium ceases. In case of the two tactical systems, that is, Phalanx and Legion, the mutual balance is maintained as long as none of the respective parties exposes oneself to the other in the wrong terrain, since this would make one of the armies disintegrate (Figure 1). The comparison to a mechanical scale is more than a vague metaphor. It will help to understand the transformation of war theory from its merely tactical level to dynamics as eventually undertaken by Berenhorst and Bülow. Berenhorst quotes Polybius at various instances and he discovered something in Polybius’ writings, which Polybius could not possibly have encountered before, since the Newtonian paragon had not yet appeared. Looking at Polybius’ discoveries Berenhorst realized that, in fact, war was not about battles, but rather about very fragile, fluctuating social bodies, which slither through more or less hostile habitats maintaining crucial distances in order to sustain their conditions of existence!

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure I.

According to Polybius’ theory on the reciprocal relation between Legion and Phalanx, the Legion is unable to advance into the plain just as the Phalanx is unable to advance into the uneven terrain. Both would loose their respective optimal ‘habitat’. The result of this mutual relation is an equilibrium.

Ancient war theory had indeed offered a first glimpse at the fact that armies do interact in ways which follow dynamic patterns. Berenhorst ventured beyond Polybius’ view, in that he radicalized it and came to the conclusion that battle did not offer the dynamistic macro-level he was looking for. The doctrine that armies are created for battling contradicted the doctrine that war had its ultimate purpose in self-preservation – Polybius in fact had shown that war, to a great extent, was about upholding distances. This stood in stark contrast to what soldiers do in battles: kill each other. Where does the answer lie?

Just like mechanics in Newtonian physics, Berenhorst considered battles as being only a derivative. They depend on yet unknown boundary conditions. The battles for themselves did not provide the agents with the needed frame of reference. Where was the macro-system to be found which precedes and thus directs these collisions and would properly explain why people kill each other, even though war did ultimately build on self-preservation?

Berenhorst had raised the crucial questions with regard to a future war theory. Still, he was unable to find an answer, which would have satisfied him and his cautious optimism that war was but a derivative phenomenon and, hence, subordinate to peace.

Adam Heinrich Dietrich von Bülow (1763-1807)

It was Bülow, a former Prussian officer and enthusiast for the ideals of the American Revolution, who was able to take up Berenhorst’s epistemic approach and continue with it on an equally high level of abstraction. The historian Karl Ludwig von Woltmann (1770-1817), who knew Bülow personally, describes the relationship between these two theorists. Whereas Berenhorst’s Kantian approach had intended to prove ‘that the art of war only fails so often in praxis because it is deficient in its theory’, it was this impulse which ‘electrified Bülow’s brain’ and inspired him to continue on this path in an effort to discover the epistemic foundations of a dynamistic theory of social conflict, which Berenhorst had only surmised,

He [Bülow] came up with the fortunate idea that the deficiency of war theory [der theoretischen Kriegskunst] had to be ascribed to military philosophy [Militär-Philosophie] which, so far, had been too superficial and in its levels of abstraction had not yet climbed to the height to which the mind of man could rise. ⁴⁸

How did Bülow continue Berenhorst’s quest for the ‘dynamic rules’ of war? It was the Newtonian credo ‘active power cannot subsist without substance’, ⁴⁹ which had revolutionized modern physics 100 years earlier which would prompt Bülow to search now for some analogue, that is, some inertial principle behind the phenomena of war as a precondition for the measurement of its active forces.

The paradox of a dynamic theory without a passive principle, which had preoccupied physics, had 100 years later, by 1800, ultimately reached social theory as well. How could a dynamic theory of war be possible, if it was not ultimately stabilized by something that had to be definable by its propensity to sustain itself and, thereby, offer the epistemologically indispensible counter bearing for any dynamic forces? That such a passive principle would look decidedly different than in Newtonian physics was self-evident to Bülow. It was up to social science to discover its unique properties. This was something new for war theory. Bülow realized that this fundamental question had underlain Berenhorst’s ingenious transposition of the Newtonian outlook – what was Bülow’s answer?

What Bülow proposed as the basic building block for a theory of social dynamics seems trivial, namely ‘that humans eat’ ⁵⁰ and that ‘whenever one has nothing to eat, one ceases to exist’. ⁵¹ But as in the case of Newtonian physics, the most important fact about these trivialities was not that they were trivial but that they were just as undisputable! As the construction of Newton’s vis inertiae had allowed for measuring yet unknown forces, Bülow’s ‘Theory of Subsistence’ would, too, turn the perception of social conflicts upside-down. It was this Newtonian approach which would – for the first time – dare to define war not as a system based on violence but, to the contrary, as a system based on the sole purpose of ‘saving [oneself] from the paralyzing contacts with the enemy’. ⁵²

In his Campaign of 1800. Viewed from a Military and Political Standpoint ( Feldzug von 1800, militärisch-politisch betrachtet) – one of his most important books and one which would influence Prussian discourse on war theory for decades ⁵³ – Bülow claimed that he had finally found the analogue which Berenhorst had looked for; he called it ‘the principle of a Base of Operations’, which is perhaps his best known contribution to modern military terminology. The subtle theoretical back-story to this concept has yet fallen into oblivion. Bülow emphatically designated it the ‘all-guiding principle’ ⁵⁴ (‘allleitendes Principium’) of war theory:

This central concept, this fundamental principle of all of war science, can only be disputed by those who have misunderstood it. ⁵⁵

In his Campaign of 1800, he reacted to Berenhorst’s Reflections, which he considered ‘as equally comprehensive as they are astutely penetrating’ ⁵⁶ and he conceded,

Chance is most dependable, is mightiest with respect to battles; one cannot calculate their outcome. ⁵⁷

This is the point at which Bülow – just as Berenhorst before him – turns to the significance of distances as the chief indicator for the existence of a yet to be discovered dynamic system. Bülow was certain that he had solved the riddle. In countering Berenhorst’s doubts he proposed the following objections:

However, due to the great extent [of modern armies], sooner or later the masses, i.e., the greater or lesser quantity of war materials, which are constituted by both, men as well as their material demands [‘sowohl Menschen als Dinge’], will determine the outcome, in so far as the military existence [‘das kriegerische Daseyn’] of men is based on things. This makes it possible to calculate the outcome. Furthermore, the greater the extent [of the masses], the lesser space there is to maneuver. As the history of war shows chance prevails during maneuvers. Least of all chance plays a part when estimating the product of the masses. War is becoming more and more an arithmetic problem solvable by algebraic formulas. War is becoming increasingly mechanical and, like the force of attraction of the planetary bodies, the prevailing military vortex of an army can be calculated with certainty since it is determined by natural boundaries and perhaps increases and decreases according to the inverse square of the distance. ⁵⁸

In this complex passage, Bülow was referring to the achievements in his 1799 masterpiece Spirit of the Modern System of War (Geist des neuern Kriegssystems), in which he had started to decode war according to Berenhorst’s ‘Kantian Critique’. What did Bülow mean by referring to ‘the great extent’ of modern armies, which would provide the referential system for a theory of war dynamics?

According to Bülow, it was not some unconditioned and undisputable fact that armies must collide and disintegrate. In fact in the eighteenth century, most of the time and even during wars, armies undulated along borders or within certain areas without interacting physically. This is not because they were tactically deficient but because they were retained and stabilized by their huge resources in the rear. Bülow was very aware that this was some particularity of eighteenth century Europe and did not coincide with the conduct of war as pursued, for instance, by the Tartars. Bülow’s dynamistic perspective helped him to realize that, what he called ‘the modern [i.e. European] System of War’, was in no way superior to any other except that it provided him (like the solar system had done for Newton) with just the right historical boundary conditions to decode the universal laws of war dynamics. As Bülow himself suggested, the example of the Tartar’s conduct of war would not have provided him with similar information. As their system was much less dependent on war materials than the European war system, they had seldom established the same stable equilibria as Bülow needed for proving the dynamic forces in war. ⁵⁹ What this means will transpire later on.

For Bülow, armies are only organs of larger social entities. They are instruments for acquiring a neighbour’s resources, whenever the subsistence of their own social body has become unbalanced. This acquisition process is subsequently kept in check by the costs it generates.

Bülow constructed his model based on what he called a ‘Theory of Subsistence’. Humans have a subsistence which is continual and which they can only void at the expense of their very own existence. This provided his war dynamics with the needed inertial system, that is, his concept of social mass which has to be considered a natural a priori constant for all social processes. It was Bülow’s fundamental analogy to Newton’s famous: ‘No force can subsist without substance’. But what did Bülow’s inertial system have to do with social forces? If a deficiency in available resources occurs, this shortage generates a social impulse which affects human subsistence in general, since it forces those in need to poach the resources of others. In other words, a need for compensation generates a force from a distance which compels those whose resources are being tapped to counteract proportionately. This counteraction is, for logical reasons, not directed against the foe’s advancing army but, again, primarily interested only in compensation, that is, in the foe’s resources. In Bülow’s model, armies do not interact solely through their physical properties. Their interaction starts at a distance. Pressure and counter-pressure are generated through their resources and their mutual need of resources.

It becomes obvious from the outset of this ‘Theory of Subsistence’ that Newton’s law of interaction here has been transformed into one not of physical masses but of subsisting social masses interacting mutually on the basis of deficits in their inner subsistence. Deficits cause a curvature, so to speak, in the social space and generate social motion. The most important discovery in Bülow’s analogy to Newton was that the object of mutual attraction was not the annihilation of the enemy’s forces but merely the acquisition of the counterpart’s resources and at best without any physical encounters. In Newtonian dynamics, collisions had proven to be merely a derivative and not an innate property of bodies. ‘Heaviness’ only in the rarest cases results in a collision. The reason for this is that all heavenly bodies are inert due to their mass and in the first instance uphold and continue in their moment of inertia. Bülow’s two fundamental analogues, thus, were (1) the innate dependence of all social bodies on a source of subsistence and (2) the constant maintenance of a social body over time. These were his analogues to (1) Newtonian inertial mass and (2) its concrete momenta. States gravitate towards one another by sending armies out, not to annihilate each other but to eradicate their subsistence deficits! The moment they are in danger of losing their sources of subsistence, centrifugal force takes over and maintains a state of balance (Figure 2). Just as in the realm of physics this ‘centrifugal force’ is not an actual force but only the result of preserving one’s most basic requisite, one’s existence as an inertial body. What Bülow did was to create an ingenious analogue to inertial mass and its momenta, which had 100 years earlier allowed Newton to decode the System of the World as a dynamic system in equilibrium.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Bülow’s dynamic model follows the basic requirements of Newton’s idea of a dynamic theory. The subsistence functions as social vis inertiae. It forces armies to remain in constant contact with their base of operations through their line of operations. An army should never become cut off its subsistence which functions as its conditio sine qua non. The attraction of the opponent’s resources, i.e. his base of operations, causes the advancement of one’s army. Nevertheless, this attraction only sets in whenever there is lack of subsistence within the system. The maintenance of one’s own subsistence and the need to compensate any losses by striving for the opponent’s resources constitutes a mutual system of non-physical interactions. Just as in case of Physics, the collision of masses only occurs within this dynamical system, that is, on a micro-level, whenever the equilibrium is surpassed. If for instance, an army of party B advances beyond this mutual equilibrium it gets physically cut off and caught in its rear (see micro-level).

In this macro-model battles no longer play an essential role. War is a dynamic phenomenon, which is steered by the pressure and counter-pressure of masses seeking to maintain their subsistence. In most cases, this would cause a mutual attraction but without any physical contact since armies only gravitate towards the enemy’s resources. They will, however, stop and retreat whenever the expected losses threaten to undermine the constant maintenance of their own subsistence. This alone, that is, the safeguarding of subsistence, defines the object of any operation in the first place. To repeat, armies do not attract each other; instead, they maintain a momentum which prevents them from clashing:

Hence, it is, for example, a fixed principle that armies normally receive their subsistence from the rear or at most from only one of their flanks since their supply magazines always lie in these directions. To push the enemy back it is, therefore, most expedient to carry out operations in exactly these two directions. ⁶⁰

The more one army advances into foreign territory, the more its own line of operation becomes enveloped by the opponent’s sources of subsistence, and, thus, the more endangered it becomes of being cut off from its own supplies. This was Bülow’s most famous concept which helped to visualize the dynamic balances of war. In this context, he coined a term which would eventually be used all over the world: ‘the base of operations’. To advance beyond the invisible, that is, the dynamic balance constituted the danger of being cut off from one’s own subsistence and would defeat the original purpose. Hereby, one would commit a mistake based on objective criteria. Like Newton, Bülow had indeed created a dynamic system by incorporating a principle of socio-inertial mass into his perspective of social phenomena, making them decodable as balances.

Like Newton with regard to his theory of mutual attraction, Bülow was also not able to give a guarantee for the sustainability of such equilibria. He was, however, as in the case of Newton’s discovery, for the first time, able to explicate the criteria for keeping it sustainable and, thus, to identify its confining limits on the basis of a universal frame of reference called the ‘Theory of Subsistence’. Ferdinand von Meerheimb, a military historian, wrote in 1861,

[. . .] in his positive endeavor to develop a general theory of war he had no precursor [. . .]. There had been scattered rules and instructions – extracted from historical instances or deduced from the nature of war itself –, and beginning with the first rules for drill by Prince Maurice of Orange, there had been textbooks for the training of soldiers. Yet a system of war, from which all sorts of military actions could be deduced based on a few universal principles, was something that neither Puysegur in his Art de la guerre nor Frederick II in his ‘Instructions for My Officers’ had attempted to provide. ⁶¹

At a much earlier point in time Bülow’s English translator, Charles Malorti de Martemont, had grasped the dynamistic analogy to the Newtonian system. He understood Bülow’s ingenious notion of interpreting the mutual threat of subsistence as the ‘momentum’ which together with mutual attraction constitutes the foundations of socio-dynamic equilibria. This is reflected in the following introduction by Malorti from 1806:

The general and vague object of conquering the enemy [. . .] was abandoned for that of conquering him in a particular point[. . .] and stopping judiciously in the midst of triumphs, not so much on an estimate respecting the enemy, over whom a superiority might be still maintained, as respecting the victorious army, in order that its forces might not be exhausted. ⁶²

Bülow’s theory would perhaps be most spectacularly confirmed in the legendary victory of the Russians over Napoleon’s Grand Armée in 1812. Two Prussian theorists and dedicated followers of Bülow’s theory, Karl Ludwig von Phull (1757-1826) and Ludwig von Wolzogen (1773-1845), had entered into Russian service only a few years before this darkest chapter of the Napoleonic Wars. They established a plan chiefly based on Bülow’s dynamics and on his insight that war was neither constituted by battles nor by human decisions but by invisible and yet objectively identifiable conditions of equilibria constituted of the innate property of subsistence-dependency. What Phull and Wolzogen planned was to have the Russian army retreat far into the hinterland. Their calculus was that Napoleon – unacquainted with this dynamistic model – would overstep the invisible equilibrium. In doing so, he would bring on his own demise of thus being trapped and outflanked by the Russian base of operations. His army did indeed perish as it was almost totally destroyed by a gigantic pincer movement. Bülow had provided these theorists with the tools enabling them to calculate this movement in advance. ⁶³

Among the very small number of people who would acknowledge Bülow’s achievements was William Hay:

[Bülow’s Spirit of the Modern System of War] treats of the military tactics in vogue during the eighteenth century, commencing with ‘the base of operations’, as that upon which all the rest depends, and from thence diverging into the various details of the modern system of war. [. . .] then he sums up all with a sketch of what he thinks must eventually be the political division of Europe. His anticipations have certainly been most singularly verified. Italy, one united kingdom, with Venetia given up to her by Austria, and the north of Germany compacted into a strong empire, are now actual facts. Who could have foreseen these things half-a-dozen years ago? And yet this Prussian officer, sixty years ago, with nothing but the map of Europe before him, came to the conclusion, that this was what it must come to, when certainly at the time nothing seemed more improbable. ⁶⁴

William Hay had correctly grasped the revolutionary idea of Bülow’s dynamistic approach; Hay reedited parts of Bülow’s Spirit of the Modern System of War in 1867 renaming it Pacatus Orbis. The Settlement of Europe.

The great novelty in Bülow’s theory was that conflicts should not be considered a means of investing resources in the destruction of a foe but, on the contrary, as a means of keeping as many resources as possible from being lost!

Through this intuitive notion, the perception of socio-dynamic processes would suddenly be turned upside-down. Bülow called battle a mere ‘ultimatum’ and war ‘a mere means for the achievement of diplomatic purposes’ (‘nur ein Mittel zur Erreichung diplomatischer Zwecke’) – this represents an ingenious re-framing of conflicts using his new dynamistic approach as a basis. It is so very striking, indeed, that Clausewitz would eventually re-coin it in his definition of war as ‘simply a continuation of politics with other means’ (‘eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln’) and then pass it on as his own discovery. ⁶⁵

Just as the phenomenon of colliding physical bodies – viewed in isolation – provides nothing with respect to its explanation, battles, too, have to be reframed and understood as part of a macro-system of inertial bodies communicating through mutual attraction. Surely, these systems can disintegrate, but in contrast to what Carl von Clausewitz would later believe, this disintegration does not provide the actual object for a dynamistic science of war, let alone of its purpose or ‘nature’! Indeed, Carl von Clausewitz would become famous for depicting Bülow’s achievements as a great absurdity, ensuring Clausewitz’ considerable fame throughout the twentieth century. He postulated that war was about the destruction of balances. ⁶⁶ What Clausewitz misunderstood throughout his life was that the chief object of any science is first and foremost to identify a referential system. What Clausewitz called a ‘total concept of war’ (‘Total-Begriff des Krieges’) ⁶⁷ and would consider his greatest scientific achievement should instead be considered a methodological misconception – or in Berenhorst’s marked words ‘an inherent defect a priori’. Clausewitz, nevertheless, continued to believe that he had disproven Bülow. In short, he viewed his own methodical mistakes in the treatment of dynamic phenomena as a new discovery in their own right. Against this background, it takes no wonder that even after the disastrous starvation of about 500.000 human beings under Napoleon’s guidance in 1812/1813, Clausewitz would still consider Napoleon’s invasion into Russia the result of an ingenious impulse and worthy of a try.

Only after two World Wars, research had felt the urgent need to consider Clausewitz as a theorist of limited war. This was primarily due to the disaster of his earlier interpretations and was in line with Ludwig Beck’s desperate attempts to disprove Ludendorff’s notorious thesis of ‘Total War’ by appealing to the more moderate passages in On War during his time of resistance against the NS-regime. ⁶⁸ Ever since, researchers have tried to solve the ‘Clausewitz puzzle’, ⁶⁹ that is, to give a rather more modern twist to a famous work which defines the ‘main battle’ as a ‘purpose in itself’ and which is notorious for its ‘combat-centric perspective on war’. ⁷⁰ Indeed, Clausewitz had tried to integrate Bülow’s more pacifistic approach – even though with only limited success. ⁷¹ Recently, Sibylle Scheipers has convincingly argued that Clausewitz’s attempts to find a reconciliation of passion and reason in his theory of war have led him to an intense ‘“dialogue” with the German aesthetic discourse around 1800’, more particularly with the aesthetics of Kant and Schiller. This may give a further clue to explain the deep trench between the dynamistic approach of Berenhorst and Bülow on the one hand and Clausewitz on the other hand. As Scheipers points out, Clausewitz saw no fundamental contradiction in the idea of making violence an object of Kantian aesthetics. However, this is far from Berenhorst’s and Bülow’s approach. Berenhorst’s application of Kant had received all its cogency from the fact that destruction could never be integrated in any rational system whatsoever, be it physical or moral. Since, according to Kant, the aesthetic can only be a ‘symbol’ for a rational system, it would not be applicable to destruction. The Kantian Berenhorst had argued,

It also seems to contradict the concepts of a moral creator of things, if one would believe that He had imbued in humankind the capacity of contemplation as in the case of mathematics and astronomy, in an effort to found a fully valid system called tactics to be utilized in the art of slaughtering of thousands against thousands [. . .]. ⁷²

***

The great and yet hardly noticed scientific revolution in war theory, to which I have dedicated this article, had fundamentally conveyed a pacifistic subtext: It was the Newtonian and Kantian discovery that theorizing on real world phenomena always implied implementing the a priori conditions of human knowledge by identifying an equilibrium. This approach was applied by Berenhorst and Bülow to the realm of war theory. They did so by claiming that any theory of war could not possibly have mutual annihilation as its ultimate objective. In order to obtain true knowledge, the observer needs to investigate the historically originated real world phenomena as to where the a priori conditions of an equilibrium are to be found. For a theory of socio-dynamics, this implies that a theory of war cannot possibly be about destroying balances but – on the contrary – it has to be about the maintenance of a precarious and constantly endangered equilibrium. This we unveil historically and – once decomposed – can never be recovered again. With this analogy in mind, Bülow once wrote that a power within a ‘political system’

cannot be destroyed without unsettling all the others, just as a planet [cannot] be ripped out of its position without shattering the system. ⁷³

In his Campaign of 1805. Viewed from a Military and Political Standpoint (Feldzug von 1805, militärisch-politisch betrachtet), Bülow summed up his theory with the following interesting notion:

If a duel is to be considered as something insipid, then a political duel must be viewed as the most absonous of all ineptitudes. I thought that the age of chivalry had ended with Don Quijote.

Bülow held the view that neither conducting battles nor annihilating one’s opponent could possibly define a dynamistic theory of war. Rather, it was about preserving needed resources; moreover, this should be done, if at all possible, without any physical contact. Clausewitz, in contrast, returned to the old – pre-dynamistic – approach. By repudiating Bülow’s dynamics, he devised a radicalized mechanistic concept of social conflicts, explicitly defining war as ‘nothing more than an expanded duel’ (‘nichts als ein erweiterter Zweikampf’). ⁷⁴ In an essay addressed to August Neidhardt von Gneisenau (1760-1831), Clausewitz defined the ‘primordial purpose’ (‘Urbestimmung’) of any armed conflict as follows:

The armed forces for war are equipped so that they can annihilate those who oppose them and thereby gain the freedom to decree at will conditions which must be adhered to by the adversarial government. ⁷⁵

Clausewitz attempted to explain clashes of social bodies as an innate necessity he called ‘will’. It is no wonder that this simplistic approach led him to see parallels with a duel. ⁷⁶ Clausewitz’s thoughts were decidedly one-dimensional, since they reduced the ultimate and undisputed purpose of human interaction to mechanical annihilation:

Since insufficient efforts made in war cannot only lead to failure but can also result in positive damage, both sides try to surpass each other and hereby a reciprocal process [Wechselwirkung] begins.

This [interaction] could lead to the ultimate exertion, if only such thing could be defined. ⁷⁷

Long before Clausewitz would create his militaristic doctrine of a ‘total-concept of war’ without limits, Kant had, with creepy humour, outlined where such theoretical vacuum would end by naming his most famous pacifistic book Perpetual Peace – it was the name of a pub located next to a graveyard. For Kant, future was still open: humanity had to choose between two sorts of ‘Perpetual Peace’, be it a gigantic graveyard or a dynamic equilibrium.

The latter will only be attained if humans learn to guide themselves according to the a priori conditions of equilibria which have to be unveiled in the real world.

In his Idea for a Universal History (1784) Kant had explicitly described his concept as an urgently needed science and uttered his hope that one day a ‘Newton’ might arise with such a discovery. In following Kant’s ‘guideline’, Berenhorst and Bülow delivered evidence that the first building block for the analysis of such dynamistic systems lay in what Bülow would eventually describe as the ‘Theory of Subsistence’ or ‘Principle of a Base of Operations’. In explicit reference to Kant, he considered his theory as the proper referential system to reify Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’. It was on the basis of Bülow’s concept of a social ‘inertial mass’ that, for the first time in war theory, somebody was able to provide a model which made it possible to illustrate the existence of a force of mutual attraction. This force creates – and this only superficially appears to be a paradox – balances between social entities based on their respective masses and momenta. The fact that human affairs, just as the wondrous motions of the planets, can be visualized within an inertial frame of reference allows humans to become better moral beings. This framework allows them to abstain from mutual annihilation on the basis of objective criteria while, at the same time, not abandoning their own interests.

Bülow wrote in a footnote to the second edition of his Spirit of the Modern System of War:

One has attributed my perpetual peace, which I wanted to deduce from the Spirit of the Modern System of War, to my good-heartedness [. . .]. One has done me too much honor. Not for a moment did I think of morality, of good-heartedness, of good will toward mankind, which may be labeled with the word benevolence. My acquaintance with the current generation in Europe gives me reason to expect quite the opposite. – What I did was simply posit that each and every state would feature an equal desire to keep possession of its own property and resources. If this were the case, then, undoubtedly, whenever Europe became divided up amongst various great powers, the balance of power and a certain stability would result from such widespread political virtue. ⁷⁸

Berenhorst and Bülow are, more or less, forgotten and seldom studied. Carl von Clausewitz and his ‘philosophy of war’ came out on top. He, together with his work On War, became both prophet and bible for nationalistic militarism in Germany and eventually all over the world. Finding explanations for this phenomenon lie within the realm of our responsibilities. One explanation for Clausewitz’ success was that his most important counter-balance, Dietrich von Bülow, who was a confirmed pacifist and the most famous German war theorist prior to Clausewitz, ‘suffered from’ an Achilles’ heel: Bülow had produced a war theory without battles, which seemed to indicate that, in the end, he had wandered off into fairyland.