Review

History of Warfare

Keegan

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John Keegan is Britain's foremost military historian and author of many incisive studies of war at the sharp end including his ground-breaking Face of Battle. Lecturer in military history at the Royal Military Institution at Sandurst, Keegan has a keen appreciation of the military virtues and might be expected to tow a safe Establishment line. He is, however, profoundly anti-war, as revealed in his History of Warfare, a consummation of his life's work. Far more than a study of military technique, it cuts through the reductionism of Clausewitz's rationalist assertion that war is merely an extension of policy, to argue that warfare is essentially a cultural activity and follows a number of culturally-specific models depending on time and place. The Clausewitzian view, he maintains, is not an objective description of all war but merely reflects the nature of war as practised in Europe since the French Revolution. Keegan is an innate conservative and views irrational traditions as having had a restraining influence on primitive war. The Clausewitzian view, paralleling the reductionism of Marx, was both descriptive and proscriptive, contributing to the wholesale militarisation of European society in the Nineteenth Century and culminating in the holocaust of the First World War.

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