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Clausewitz in English: The Reception of Clausewitz in Britain and America 1815–1945. By Christopher Bassford. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. 293 pages. $45.00.

Reviewed by Eliot Cohen

The following review appeared in Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, No.4.

It is displayed here with the permission of Foreign Affairs.

Bassford produces here an able, scholarly examination of someone variously regarded as the most profound thinker on war and as the villainous creator of a theory that has led to immense human suffering. In the course of an illuminating discussion (which actually goes beyond 1945), Bassford says a great deal about Anglo-American strategic thought in the modern period. An admirer of Clausewitz but not an uncritical one, Bassford uses his subject to explore strategic theory in general. The result is an interesting study that has something to say to many audiences, including those concerned with the state of contemporary military thought or intellectual history.

Eliot Cohen

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