John Keegan's Partial View Of The Nature Of War

John Keegan provides a partial view of military history in an unsuccessful attempt to discredit Clausewitz’s idea that war is an extension of policy or that war is a form of political activity. Keegan argues that many times warfare has not been able to be explained in political terms. The beliefs and practices a society has varied as a result of culture. The concept or idea of war is no different. That is why according to Keegan war can be better explained by anthropology theory than by Clausewitz’s idea of the nature of war. Anthropology theory suggests that war is socially constructed therefore there can be no nature of war. Keegan wrongly criticizes and blames Clausewitz for, what Keegan perceives, dominating the way military history was written, and worse policy formed. Keegan attempts to mislead with historical evidence to disprove Clausewitz’s claim that war is a tool of the state by describing instances that war was something other than political. The evidence Keegan presents, however,

Although both Keegan and Clausewitz write about the subject of warfare, Keegan’s approach is not in line with Clausewitz because anthropology theory explains the why does war happen. Clausewitz’s ideas, instead, explain the nature of war in order to explain how to conduct war. It seems that Keegan’s purpose for the book changes, which makes his initial argument difficult to follow towards the end. He changes from wanting to discredit Clausewitz’s ideas to trying to capture in his book as much as he can on the subject of warfare. Furthermore, he depicts military history using unpopular points of view that he feels were not publicized or readily available to the general educated public because such theoretical contentions remained isolated to specialized groups and/or off the