Carl von Clausewitz and the Invention of the Conservative Nation-State: Retrieving Instrumental Reflexivity in the Strategic Tradition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The necessity to innovate and profoundly reform the State was a shared concern for statesmen and strategists during the tumultuous period associated with Napoleonic warfare. The article revisits the 1807 ‘revolution from above’ orchestrated by a few Prussian officers who sought to prepare their antiquated State to face Napoleon’s Grande Armée. A contextualist historical approach uncovers how the instrumental use of reflexivity is a core component of Clausewitz’s strategic legacy. This study suggests that a revisionist reading of Clausewitz’s legacy is characterised by a highly disruptive and dangerously subversive cognitive practice: instrumental reflexivity. This approach calls for constantly reworking one’s own ontological lens and diffusing adapted ontologies as essential dimensions of war making. These practices are critical for widening the 'art of the possible' in military affairs and for radical innovations in state reforms. The article concludes by outlining the difficult relation between military institutions and reflexive military thinkers as their subversive intellectual legacies tend to be systematically suppressed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".