The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...

Funny Shaped Abridgements (2025-12-15)

Quote of a photograph of a vintage set of Carl Von Clausewitz's major works from Sophia Rare Books courtesy of a referral from ClausewitzStudies.org, accessed 24 december 2024.

Thanks to the combination of my day job and my research work, I often have to look up older sources, including many books commonly referred to as "classics" and translated from the original language, typically french or german, unless the "classic" is much older, in which case some variant of latin is more likely. However, this also means that sometimes I end up having to spend time sorting out which of the readily available translations for such sources I can't read in the original have a reasonably good and up to date translation. This can be frustrating, because "classic" is little more than a marketing term, which means it is basically impossible to avoid a visit to the nearest university library or applying some interlibrary loan-fu with the local public library. (That public libraries at least in canada, even in large cities have bluntly abandoned maintaining decent reference book collections is a whole different issue.) This is very much the case even for books regarded as "classics" and focussed upon military matters. In fact, maybe the jumped up editions of older military books are among the best examples of what a mess the treatment of such older works, especially the translated ones, are in. At this point even Karl Marx' Das Kapital is getting a new translation with no abridgement, not least because there is a resurgence of interest in his critique of political economy. There is a similar resurgence of interest in Carl Von Clausewitz's work typically referred to as On War in english, and also in his book on the final campaign against Napoleon, albeit for quite different reason. Finding myself needing to examine On War myself, and already jaded by my experience of abridgements of longer works in english, I wanted to see a full edition, preferably of a recent, accurate translation. "Recent" could mean as even early as the mid to late nineteenth century, depending on the original language. This sounds like it should be simple to arrange, which is of course a giant wailing siren of a warning that it is no such thing.

Since Clausewitz's work, like Marx' is about highly politicized activity, finding an edition not excessively burdened by somebody else's politics than the author's is already difficult. Finding an abridged edition of this type is all but impossible, because the abridgement itself is inevitably political. From what I have learned on my brief foray into this area of bibliography, On War was published at first in a three volume edition, or even in five volumes, depending on what shorter works if any were appended to it. This is not usually done today, and there are not many single volume editions today. According to ClausewitzStudies.org there are practically speaking only two of them. That is certainly what I have found. What they do not mention, perhaps because the anticipated audience for the site is more a bit more academic than average, is anything about the non-academic press or mass market oriented editions. Of these the usual standby presses to go to are (like it or not) the conglomerate of penguin-randomhouse and oxford university press. The former typically has a lightly revised version of just about any older non-fiction work of the broad "classic" type via the old pelican imprint. The old pelicans usually have a new cover to line the book up with the new penguin jackets and that's about it, although there are exceptions of course. The oxford classics imprint is notable for the press' investment in updated ancillary essays, which it does more often than penguin-randomhouse. Either way, their editions may not be the best, but they are typically passable and affordable, therefore often available in bookstores and included in medium to large-sized public library systems. However, some bright spark decided not to clearly mark that their editions of On War are abridgements, not on the front cover, and not in the marketing blurbs provided on their sites or bookstore catalogues. That bright spark probably should be sent to do something less visible until they are a more substantial ember.

Due to stubbornness and curiosity, I found myself wondering about those abridgements. Not to read, in all honesty. In fact, if anyone who happens to read this far in the thoughtpiece is wondering whether I would recommend reading any abridgement of a non-fiction work my answer is ABSOLUTELY NOT. Even the best intended and most evenhanded abridgement can't help but be misleading. For the fiction case, I have read a fondly remembered for the somewhat incongruous persian-style illustrations and now impossible to find cleverly abridged version of The Arabian Nights for adolescent readers. Alas for the charm of such abridgements because as any adult who has looked at a more faithful translation knows, the level of bowdlerization to achieve this effect means the result seriously misrepresents the original text.

It is simple to see the full text of On War online between project gutenberg and of course the ClausewitzStudies site in both english and german. But, abridgements are not all the same. They are made to meet the presumed interests of the market of the time. I knew the two popular abridgements would likely overlap a great deal, and where they differed would reveal much about the time they were published. In the case of the penguin and oxford abridgements, this was overdetermined. Penguin-randomhouse is literally still reprinting a version from 1968, and does indeed use the J.J. Graham translation. Oxford produced its abridgement from the more recent, 1976 translation by Michael Howard and Peter Paret with princeton university press, and published it in 2007. Anatol Rapaport's introduction to the penguin abridgement explains he was "guided by an intention to offer the contemporary general reader and to the student of international relations those portions... which relate most directly to our own time." In the oxford abridgement Beatrice Heuser "selects the central books in which Clausewitz's views on the nature of theory and war are developed." Rapaport was a psychologist, mathematician, and anti-war activist. He passed away in 2007, after a storied career. Heuser is a historian, political scientist, and professor of strategic studies at king's college in london. As is evidently overdetermined, Rapaport and Heuser did select different portions of On War to include, but what they both selected is at least as interesting.

There is no need to read too deeply into On War to notice either, in part due to the assistance of ClausewitzStudies.org, which provides a full table of contents with the subsection titles. There are eight books, six complete and two extant as sketches Clausewitz was unable to complete before his death. Courtesy of ClausewitzStudies.org, the basic, but full list of titles and chapters is provided in the box below. It won't expand or stay expanded unless the pointer is run over it. It is quite revealing just to consider the titles of the eight books though, which are:

Rapaport's abridgement includes all of Books 1 to 3, Book 4 except for its chapter on Night Fighting, and parts 1 to 6 of Book 8. Evidently he deemed the potential readers more interested in theory than such practical considerations as who actually does the fighting, defence, or attack. Heuser also includes all of Books 1 and 2, but then switches to selections: parts 1 to 5, 11, 13, 14, and 16 of Book 3; parts 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, and 26 of Book 6; parts 1 to 7, 15, 16, 21, and 22 of Book 7; and parts 1 to 8 from Book 8. Heuser expects the reader to be interested at least a bit in defence and attack, but still not very much in who actually does the fighting and how the different types of forces may be expected to interact. Now, obviously I am no military historian nor does my own research run adjacent to the field. Yet it still seems quite strange to me that both abridgements take as given that much of the practical information would be of no interest to a general reader. Then again, maybe this is because Clausewitz wrote before aerial bombardment was a reality for at least british anglophone audiences, and anglophone audiences in general have typically not lived in places where armed forces are expected to move through en masse, potentially needing temporary shelter and to get food and water. In that case, all right. It would not be so relevant to know things like how far the military forces may be expected to move in a day, the number of their camp followers, or how far ahead their scouts may be. Nor would they necessarily need to read about how such forces will set up their camps or what they will do or won't should they set up a defensive line, artillery forces, or ammunition dumps.

Let us all be so lucky, anglophones or not.

Previous Thought Pieces