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The Politics of the Unstable Balance-of-Power in Machiavelli, Frederick the Great, and Clausewitz: Citizenship as Armed Virtue and the Evolution of Warfare
Abstract
This dissertation examines the relationship between citizenship and the growth of standing national armies in early modern Europe. The works of Niccolo Machiavelli, Frederick the Great, and Carl von Clausewitz are examined in detail to account for the evolution of realist political-military strategy in the balance-of-power state system. My thesis is that the state's recurring efforts to mobilize citizenship--construed as armed virtue--and its development of ever-more violent technologies and strategies of war rendered the balance-of-power unstable. The opening chapter surveys the legacy of realism in the history of international relations theory. Chapter two surveys how the modern state system developed out of the declining Christian Commonwealth of medieval Europe. Each of the three following chapters locates a realist theorist within the historical context in which he wrote and was active as a political-military reformer: Machiavelli and the crisis of the Florentine Republic; Frederick the Great's struggle to form a Prussian Army; and Clausewitz's effort during the Reform Era to respond on a revolutionary scale to the challenge of total Napoleonic warfare. By studying the political context in which secular realism in early modern Europe developed a balance-of-power state system, I show the genesis of political-military strategies that even today prepare for war in order to achieve international peace. My study of mobilized citizenship, military strategy, and the state's preparation for war shows that the balance-of-power is inherently unstable. A state system that arose on the basis of limited and pre-emptive wars can scarcely serve as a worthy model for international relations in the era of total war, indeed, of nuclear war.
Subject Area
International law|European history
Recommended Citation
Klein, Bradley S, "The Politics of the Unstable Balance-of-Power in Machiavelli, Frederick the Great, and Clausewitz: Citizenship as Armed Virtue and the Evolution of Warfare" (1984). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI8418894.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI8418894