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Read the
ON-LINE TEXT OF CLAUSEWITZ'S MAGNUM OPUS,
ON WAR
The first complete English text of On War available on-line.
This version includes a search engine that can
search the entire available text.
or compare the German and English versions.

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See the original German version, Vom Kriege
See an on-line French Translation, Theorie de la grande guerre

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Other On-Line Versions of On War

Marxists.Org	Sonshi.com Version
See also  the Marxists.Org version, which is the same text as Project Gutenberg's, providing only Books 1-4 (of 8).  (Note that our Marxist friends have expropriated graphics from The Clausewitz Homepage, but, of course, this suits our own nefarious purposes.) And the  BookRags version is similar, as was yet another on-line version, put on line by University of Adelaide history professor David Hart.	This is yet another on-line version, put on line by the Sun Tzu enthusiasts of Sonshi.com. It is the same text as Project Gutenberg's, providing only Books 1-4 (of 8). Nice Japanese graphical flourishes!
Marxists.org	Sonshi.com's sole purpose is to be your one reliable Sun Tzu and strategy resource on the Web. However, it also features a heavily abridged version of Clausewitz's On War.

Clausewitz.DE	Library of Liberty
This is a German version of Vom Kriege, posted by  Karl Friedrich Weiland to his Clausewitz website. He's building a new version here, but it was still incomplete as of 15 May 2011.	This is yet another partial on-line version, posted by folks who seem to know very little about Clausewitz. This is an abridgement of the first chapter of F.N. Maude's 1908 Victorian/imperialist editing of the 1873 Graham translation.

The Patton Society homepage has a truncated version of On War at http://www.pattonhq.com/militaryworks/clausewitz.html

See also: Patrick M. Cronin, "Clausewitz Condensed" (1984) posted by the USAF Air War College

See also: From Glyn Hughes' "Squashed Philosophers": The condensed edition of General Carl Von Clausewitz's On War ... in just 9000 words.

Most on-line versions of On War are abridgements (to one degree or another) of the 1873 translation made by Colonel James John Graham. (An exception is Patrick Cronin's "Clausewitz Condensed," which is derived from the more modern Howard/Paret translation but extremely abbreviated.) The original 1873 Graham translation was published in London by N. Trübner. These texts were probably scanned from one of the issues edited by F.N. Maude after 1908, though most appear to have left out Maude's extensive annotations. This is just as well--Maude was a social Darwinist whose comments seriously distorted Clausewitz's message. Unfortunately, they also generally leave out the prefatory material and notes provided by Clausewitz himself, his wife (who edited and published his works after his death), and Graham. For more information on Graham, his translation effort, and other aspects of Clausewitz's translation into English, see Christopher Bassford, Clausewitz in English: The Reception of Clausewitz in Britain and America, 1815-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp.56-59.

This translation, based on a German edition that deviated in some ways (generally minor) from the original, is now quite obsolete. It is honest but also difficult to read (i.e., more difficult than intrinsically necessary). On the other hand, the current standard version is not available on-line, and these sites render us a great service by posting this internet version. The standard version is now Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans./ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976/84). The Howard/Paret translation is based on deeper scholarship and a more authentic German edition but is not always more accurate. It is also complete, contains some useful introductory material, and is much easier to read. It suffers from a poor index, but The Clausewitz Homepage provides a word-and-phrase index that helps make up for this deficiency. The 1943 translation by O.J. Mathijs Jolles is more accurate but not currently the standard translation.

Bibliomania's claims to copyright may be somewhat confusing. They do not own the copyright to this translation, which is in the public domain. They do own their particular HTML presentation, however, and third parties may not reproduce it in exactly this form.

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