Clausewitz: His Life and Work. By Donald Stoker [Naval War College at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey]. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, ISBN: 0199357943. Stoker notes that those discussing Clausewitz's legacy as a theorist today have largely forgotten what was most important to him: being a soldier. He also notes that, while Clausewitz certainly spilled his share of ink, he also spilled blood—his own and the enemy's. He experienced the mass warfare of his age and knew what it was like to be wounded, to be a prisoner, to have friends killed and wounded, to suffer hunger and thirst, and to have the heat and cold try to kill him after the enemy's best efforts had failed. The pursuit of success on the field of battle, Stoker shows, is what drove Clausewitz. He also considers the continuing relevance of Clausewitz's work today.
    A quibble: Almost all of what we know of Clausewitz's personal frustrations was transmitted by his wife and editor, Marie, who magnified them in her own grief and frustration over his untimely death and what she, not her husband, felt to be insufficient recognition of his genius and service to Prussia. In what is probably an effort to appear balanced, Stoker gets a bit carried away in his criticisms of Clausewitz's perfectly normal career ambitions and efforts to get ahead professionally. This reflects a long tradition of efforts to psychoanalyze Clausewitz. That tradition continues forward despite the efforts of writers like Peter Paret and Vanya Bellinger to expose the shaky foundation on which it rests.

Clausewitz in His Time: Essays in the Cultural and Intellectual History of Thinking About War. By Peter Paret. Berghahn, 2014. ISBN-10: 1782385819. ISBN-13: 978-1782385813. 134pp.Far from being a detached theorist, Carl von Clausewitz was as intensely aware of the cultural and intellectual currents of his time as he was engaged in its political and military conflicts. The society in which he lived and the people with whom he served affected the analytic method he developed in his writing and the conclusions he reached. The essays in this volume examine Clausewitz in comparison with teachers, friends, and opponents, a perspective enriched by significant documents which have been previously ignored. They deepen our knowledge of Clausewitz's life and how he enlarged his understanding of warfare from its mechanisms and the interaction of its elements to its apparently permanent place in the relation between states.

Reconsidering the American Way of War. By Antulio J. Echevarria. Georgetown University Press, 2014. ISBN 1626160678, 9781626160675) challenges several longstanding notions about the American way of war. It examines American military practice (strategic and operational) from the War of Independence to the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan to determine what patterns, if any, exist in the way Americans have used military force. It finds that American uses of force were driven more by political considerations than military ones and that the amount of force employed was rarely either overwhelming or decisive. To borrow from Clausewitz, the American way of war was as much an extension of US policy by other means, as it was the continuation of US politics by those means. Reconsidering the American Way of War also finds that most conceptions of American strategic culture are little more than elusive fictions—the notion of strategic culture cannot be reconciled with either change over time or change in time.

Clausewitz's Timeless Trinity: A Framework for Modern War. By Colin M. Fleming [U. Ediburgh, UK]. Ashgate (Military Strategy and Operational Art), 2013. ISBN-10: 140944287X, ISBN-13: 978-1409442875. Innovatively applying the Clausewitzian Trinity of 'passion, chance, and reason' to the experience of real war, Fleming explores the depth and validity of the concept against the conflicts of former Yugoslavia - wars thought to epitomise a post-Clausewitzian age. In doing so it demonstrates the timeless message of the Trinity, but also ties the Trinitarian idea back into Clausewitz's political argument.Intended to build on the existing corpus of scholarship, this book differs from the existing literature in two ways. By applying the Trinity to the wars of former Yugoslavia 1991-1995, it explores war at its micro-foundations, assessing the complex cause-and-effect nexus of reciprocity produced by actions between belligerents embroiled in dynamic competition perpetuated by their own interaction.

War, Clausewitz and the Trinity. By Thomas Waldman. Ashgate, 2013. ISBN 9781409451396. Today, the ideas of Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) are employed almost ubiquitously in strategic studies, military history and defence literatures, but often in a manner which distorts their true meaning. In this book, Waldman explores Clausewitz's central theoretical device for understanding war—the 'remarkable trinity' of politics, chance and passion. By situating the great Prussian in historical context, he presents a conception truer to Clausewitz's intention. Publisher's page: UK — US.

Clausewitz, The State and War. Editors Andreas Herberg-Rothe, Jan Willem Honig, and Daniel Moran. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2011. ISBN 978-3-515-09912-7. Clausewitz’s understanding of war was shaped by his understanding of the state, which he regarded as the central institution of modern life. His achievements as a theorist of war in turn clarify one of the state’s essential activities: the use of force to defend and advance its interests and values, and those of the society it governs. These diverse essays take Clausewitz’s ideas about the state as the starting point for analyzing the central issue posed by his work: the relationship between war in all its manifestations, and politics in all its forms. The modern state was the starting point for Clausewitz’s understanding of politics, but did not unduly confine his outlook, nor cause him to suppose that only states make war. Similarly, while it is the wars of states that provided most of the historical evidence on which his theoretical work rests, the implications of that work can be seen to encompass political violence in all its forms.

Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Hew Strachan and Andreas Herberg-Rothe (Oxford University Press, September 2007). ISBN: 0199232024. This is the proceedings of the March 2005 Oxford University conference on Clausewitz in the 21st Century. This is a stellar, multidisciplinary collection of essays that defines the current state of the art in Clausewitz studies. Kindle edition.
 
See discussion by Andreas Herberg-Rothe and Tony Echevarria; Review by James Woudhuysen in Spiked.

Clausewitz's On War: A Biography (Books That Changed the World). By Hew Strachan (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006). ISBN: 0871139561. In this biography on On War (not of its author), Strachan, one of the world's foremost military historians, offers some answers to many of the problems posed by Clausewitz's writings. He explains how and why On War was written, elucidates what Clausewitz meant, offers insight into the impact it has had on conflict, and evaluates its continued significance in our world today.

Clausewitz and Contemporary War. By Antulio J. Echevarria (Oxford University Press, 2007). ISBN: 0199231915. Tony Echevarria lays out Clausewitz's methodology and uses that as a basis for understanding his contributions. He addresses Clausewitz's theories concerning the nature of war, the relationship between war and politics, the major principles of strategy he examined, and their relationship to current debates over the nature of contemporary conflict. Kindle edition

Clausewitz's Puzzle: The Political Theory of War. By Andreas Herberg-Rothe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). ISBN: 0199202699. Herberg-Rothe argues that Clausewitz developed a wide-ranging political theory of war by reflecting on the success, the limitations, and the failure of Napoleon's method of waging war, a theory, which is still relevant in light of contemporary conflict. The book lays down the foundation of a general theory of war by concentrating on Clausewitz's historical analyses of war campaigns.

See reviews in English and German of the German edition. See the publication announcement from OUP. See listings in Amazon.UK, Oxford University Press and in Oxford Scholarship OnLine, and this discussion on Sonshi.com.

State of Doom: Bernard Brodie, the Bomb, and the Birth of the Bipolar World. By Barry Scott Zellen (Continuum, 2011). ISBN: 1441124624. This book examines Bernard Brodie's strategic and philosophical response to the nuclear age, embedding his work within the classical theories of Carl von Clausewitz. Zellen is a Researcher at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, USA, where he is Research Director of the Arctic Security Project. The managing editor of Culture and Conflict Review and Strategic Insights journals, he has published several books, including On Thin Ice: The Inuit, the State and the Challenge of Arctic Sovereignty (Lexington Books, 2009) and Arctic Doom, Arctic Boom: The Geopolitics of Climate Change in the Arctic (Praeger, 2009).

Clausewitz and America: Strategic Thought and Practice from Vietnam to Iraq. By Stuart Kinross. (Routledge, 2008). ISBN: 041556963X. While many reviewers seem to regard Kinross's book as a long-overdue attack on Clausewitz, Kinross's actual views are a great deal more sophisticated than that view would imply.

Buy the best translation—recommended for serious readers. The Book of War (The Modern Library, February 2000). ISBN: 0375754776. Clausewitz and Sun Tzu in one book. The translation of Clausewitz's On War is the 1943 version done by German literary scholar O.J. Matthijs Jolles at the University of Chicago during World War II—not today's standard translation, but certainly the most accurate. One remaining error is the Germanic (but incorrect) spelling Clausewitz's first name with a 'K'—almost certainly the publisher's decision, not the translator's. With an interesting introduction by contemporary military guru Ralph Peters. The version of Sun Tzu included is also excellent—this is the modern translation by Roger Ames, based on complete ancient texts found by archaeologists.

On War, by Carl von Clausewitz, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Alfred A. Knopf, 1976/84). ISBN: 0679420436. This is the Everyman's Library edition, a very fine edition of the Howard/Paret translation. It is superior in some ways to the standard Princeton version, despite the H/P translation's fundamental weaknesses. However, the pagination is different, making it a bit more difficult to locate specific quotations, etc. If you're serious about reading Clausewitz in detail, read the much more accurate translation by O.J. Mattjis Jolles. See this discussion of the various English translations of Clausewitz's Vom Kriege.

Buy the standard English translation of Clausewitz's On War, by Michael Howard and Peter Paret  (Princeton University Press, 1976/84). ISBN: 0691018545 (paperback). Kindle edition. This quite readable translation appeared at the close of the Vietnam War and has become the modern standard. However, if you're serious about reading Clausewitz in detail, read the much more accurate translation by O.J. Mattjis Jolles—See it listed above or to the far left of this column. For background, see this discussion of the various English translations of Clausewitz's Vom Kriege.

Clausewitz and the State, 2nd edition. By Peter Paret (Princeton University Press, 2007). ISBN: 0691131309. The new edition of this classic 1976 work—the best biography of Clausewitz available in English—includes a preface that allows Paret to recount the past thirty years of discussion on Clausewitz and respond to critics. A companion volume to Clausewitz's On War, this book is indispensable to anyone interested in Clausewitz, his theories, and their proper historical context.

Clausewitz in English: The Reception of Clausewitz in Britain and America, 1815-1945, by Christopher Bassford (Oxford University Press, 1994). ISBN: 0195083830. Explores what soldiers, academics, and others in the English-speaking world were saying about Clausewitz between 1815 and the 1990s—and, more intriguingly, why. Not always a pretty tale. Buy a used version of this classic—the publisher's price is an outrage. And the full text is on-line free HERE.

"[A] startlingly worthwhile book.... Bassford tells a great story of dutiful struggle and pigheadedness, of petty revenge and epiphany, and, ultimately, of how Anglophone armies that read Clausewitz reluctantly beat the hell out of a German-speaking military that willfully read him wrong." (Ralph Peters)

On Waterloo: Clausewitz, Wellington, and the Campaign of 1815. Ed./trans. Christopher Bassford, Daniel Moran, and Gregory W. Pedlow (Clausewitz.com, 2010). ISBN: 1453701508. This book is built around a new and complete translation of Clausewitz's study "The Campaign of 1815: Strategic Overview," first published as Der Feldzug von 1815 in Frankreich (Berlin, 1835). It is vol. 8 of Clausewitz's collected works (Hinterlassene Werke des Generals Carl von Clausewitz über Krieg und Kriegführung). This study was written late in Clausewitz's life, after most of On War had already been drafted. Thus it reflects Clausewitz's most mature thinking but, unlike many of his earlier historical studies, its findings have not been incorporated into Clausewitz's magnum opus. Thus most readers will find it new material. The book also includes the responses of Wellington and his circle, as well as analytical essays by the editors. See reviews in The Journal of Military History and War in History.

Decoding Clausewitz: A New Approach to On War (University Press of Kansas, 2008). By Jon Tetsuro Sumida. ISBN: 9780700616169; (paperback 0700618198 Sumida contends that Clausewitz's central value lies in his method of reenacting the psychological difficulties of high command in order to promote the powers of intuition that he believed were essential to effective strategic decision-making. Sumida also correctly notes Clausewitz's argument that the defense is a stronger form of war than the offense and goes on to argue that this is in fact his primary strategic proposition. This concept, Sumida maintains, must be understood in order to make sense of Clausewitz's positions on absolute and real war, guerrilla warfare, and the relationship of war and policy/politics. Here is the Preface and Table of Contents. Here is the preface to the (revised) paperback edition (2011). See here.

Azar Gat, The Origins of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2001). Gat continues both to have some good ideas and to take all of his own ideas rather more seriously than either the nature of reality or the actual evidence can justify. ISBN: 0199247625.

Historical and Political Writings, by Carl von Clausewitz, trans. Peter Paret and Daniel Moran (Princeton University Press, 1992). ISBN: 0691031924. This companion volume to On War brings together some of Clausewitz's political writings and a selection of his historical works. This material reveals Clausewitz as an exceptionally independent observer both of the past and of his own times, distinguished by an unideological pragmatism and a keen sense of the possibilities and shortcomings of state power. Contents.