Quote:
Originally Posted by mark46th
"I found that I think a little more like Sun Tzu rather than Caluswitz. "
Sun Tzu being Chinese, would be a more straight-forward read. Von Clausewitz, being Prussian, is going to be a little more verbose and full of himself...
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Prussians are actually far more likely to be regarded as taciturn, rather than verbose. Full of themselves ... now that's a different story. Prussians, and Germans in general, do value exactness, so Prussian/German philosophical writing tends to be complex and wordy, designed to capture every possible nuance.
Clausewitz was also writing about a more specific set of circumstances, what he saw as the revolution in military affairs from the 18th to the 19th centuries, from Frederick the Great to Napoleon, as warfare evolved from the set-piece movements of small professional armies across the chessboard of Europe to the concept of a nation in arms. And his writing was primarily aimed at his War Academy students. So a lot of
On War is not only hard to read, but dated.
Sun Tzu's Chinese is more straightforward, but also more vague. His prescriptions come across in many cases as more generic axioms. "As circumstances are favorable, one should modify one's plans". "In war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak." Etc. So despite being some two millennia older, much of it seems less dated, but as a practical matter less useful.
The generic axioms lend themselves to broad interpretations. So you get the
Art of War for sports teams, businessmen, trial lawyers, etc. I remember finding it ironic in the 1990s that businessmen were reading Sun Tzu, while the Army was trotting out business school management theories like TQM.