In Chapters 2 and 3 of Battling to the End, René Girard and Benoît Chantre discuss the relationship between the key ideas of Hegel and Clausewitz, both of whom were deeply influenced by Napoleon. While Hegel saw Napoleon as an incarnation of the World-Spirit moving through history, Clausewitz had a more ambivalent view of Napoleon as a figure to be both admired and opposed.
Girard argues that Hegel’s dialectic, moving from thesis to antithesis to synthesis, reflects a misguided optimism about the reconciliation of opposites and the unfolding of history’s rational progress. In contrast, Clausewitz presents a bleaker vision centered on the intrinsic tendency of war to escalate to extremes through reciprocal, imitative violence. For Clausewitz, politics cannot ultimately restrain the violent logic of war itself.
Girard sees Clausewitz as providing an important corrective to Hegel’s idealism. Clausewitz grounds his analysis in the concrete realities of warfare and clearly perceives the powerful role of mimetic rivalry in driving conflict to extremes. Hegel’s notion of a “fight to the death” for recognition is too abstract – real violence is driven by the rivals’ imitative desire to acquire what the other possesses.
This mimetic dynamic creates a situation of “double mediation” where opponents increasingly resemble each other, leading to an uncontrolled escalation. Modern total war, involving the mobilization of entire societies, reflects this dynamic pushed to its limit. The two World Wars, culminating in Auschwitz and Hiroshima, reveal the catastrophic potential when war approaches its absolute concept.
While Hegel located reason within historical conflict itself, as a “cunning” force that would ultimately reconcile oppositions, Clausewitz rejected this optimism. For him, violence has its own irrational logic that political aims cannot finally master or constrain. Hegel believed the identity of all humans would lead to common understanding; Clausewitz saw how that very identity could intensify hostility and war.
Girard argues that modern revolutionary ideologies, from Marxism to fascism, reflect a disastrous Hegelian faith in the necessity of violence to achieve historical progress and human reconciliation. In practice, such “ideological wars” only compounded violence and brought the world to the brink of self-destruction. A Clausewitzian realism is necessary to perceive this.
At the same time, Girard recognizes that Hegel’s philosophy reflects important truths. His dialectical thought is rooted in the Christian vision of history as a path, however conflict-ridden, towards the revelation of human unity in God. Modern notions of equality and democracy also draw upon the Biblical affirmation of human identity. The prophetic tradition looks forward to a Messianic age of peace emerging from the crucible of history’s wars.
However, influenced by thinkers like Hölderlin, Girard believes that Hegel was too confident about the immanent realization of this reconciliation within history itself. The Crucifixion suggests that human violence will always resist and seek to suppress the revelation of its scapegoat mechanism. Auschwitz and the failure of 20th century revolutions confirm this.
Girard thus sees an inescapable apocalyptic dimension within history, as human violence intensifies in resistance to the Gospel’s revelation of its scapegoat foundations. The very identity of humans, without the mediation of ritual and prohibitions to constrain mimetic rivalry, threatens a war of all against all. Hegel’s cunning of reason cannot finally overcome this.
True human reconciliation requires a turn to the Biblical vision beyond the closed cycle of violence. The Old and New Testaments progressively reveal the way out of sacrificial violence through the condemnation of scapegoating and God’s identification with the innocent victim. However, this can only fully occur beyond history, through an apocalyptic divine intervention that breaks the power of human violence once and for all.
In the end, while appreciating Hegel’s intimation of a historical revelation of human unity, Girard sees in Clausewitz the more clear-sighted guide to history’s actual violence. In a world stripped of traditional differences, humanity faces a stark choice: “destroy one another or love one another.” Given the persistent strength of mimetic rivalry, Girard fears that left to itself, humanity will choose self-destruction – an outcome that Christian eschatology also foresees. Only a return to Biblical revelation provides hope.
The dialogue presents a profound meditation on the relationship between identity and violence, drawing on both philosophical and theological sources. Girard’s Clausewitzian realism about the potential for mimetic violence to escalate to extremes provides a challenge to progressive Hegelian views of history. At the same time, Girard remains committed to the Biblical vision of human unity and reconciliation, but sees its realization as requiring a divine apocalyptic intervention from beyond the violence of history itself. The chapter provides a thought-provoking analysis of the dilemmas confronting the modern world in an era of globalization, when humanity seems caught between the promise of unity and the threat of self-destruction.
René Girard and Benoît Chantre continue their discussion of Clausewitz’s thought and its implications for understanding modern violence. They focus on Clausewitz’s concept of the “remarkable trinity” – the interplay between primordial violence, chance, and rationality in war. While this concept appears to correct Clausewitz’s initial definition of war as simply a duel, Girard argues that it in fact confirms the inescapable logic of reciprocal violence that the duel reveals.
Girard sees the “remarkable trinity” as Clausewitz’s attempt to rationalize and control the dynamic of the duel within a political framework. However, this attempt ultimately fails, as the reciprocal logic of violence increasingly escapes rational management. The defensive withdrawal of one party, rather than defusing conflict, actually provokes a more violent attack from the other. Thus offense and defense become two sides of the same cycle of escalation.
At the heart of this cycle is the phenomenon of undifferentiation – the effacement of differences between the antagonists as they become locked in mimetic rivalry. Primitive societies used ritual prohibitions to brake this escalation. The Hebrew Bible and the Gospels definitively unmasked the scapegoat mechanism on which such rituals depended. However, this revelation has also stripped modern societies of the sacrificial safeguards against mimetic violence.
Girard argues that Clausewitz glimpsed this dynamic, as evidenced by his equation of war with commercial exchange. Both reflect a single logic of reciprocity that contains the seeds of violent escalation. Money serves as a kind of sacrificial mechanism to mediate mimetic rivalry. However, this mechanism can break down, transforming trade into outright war. The Cold War arms race and the growing US-China rivalry illustrate this danger.
The loss of the laws of war in the 20th century further reflects this unraveling of traditional restraints on violence. Ideological conflicts have given way to an era of unpredictable, terroristic violence, beyond all political rationality. Carl Schmitt perceived this crisis, but his attempt to legally contain it through a “theory of the partisan” failed in the face of the totalizing tendencies of modern war.
In response to this apocalyptic prospect, Girard rejects both progressivist and cyclical views of history that would relativize the danger of mimetic violence. Hegel’s dialectic, despite its roots in Christian theology, fails to reckon with the reality of the escalation to extremes. Bergson’s “law of twofold frenzy,” while recognizing the duality of mimetic desire, ultimately sees struggle as only a superficial moment in an overall historical advance.
Against such “idealism,” Girard insists on the stark choices facing a globalized humanity increasingly stripped of sacrificial safeguards. Positive imitation and a “return to simplicity” remain possible, but are unlikely given the strength of mimetic rivalry. More probable is the “enframing” of the world by a technological violence beyond all human control. The Cold War’s nuclear brinksmanship already foreshadowed this reality.
Faced with this prospect, Girard argues that only an apocalyptic Christian realism, one that sees the imminence of catastrophe, can shatter humanity’s complacency. The Crucifixion and Resurrection reveal both the human propensity for mimetic violence and the possibility of its overcoming through the love of the scapegoat victim. However, this revelation has paradoxically intensified the modern crisis by unmasking the sacrificial mechanisms that once constrained violence.
The worst thus remains an ever-present possibility – one that Clausewitz’s analysis of war darkly illuminates. However, Girard insists that this very recognition can also awaken humanity’s capacity for responsible action. Imitating Christ’s withdrawal from mimetic rivalry opens up the possibility of a transformation from within the logic of violence itself. The task is to think together violence and reconciliation, to pass from the duel’s negative reciprocity to a “positive undifferentiation” beyond war and peace.
Girard sees in Clausewitz’s unsparing depiction of war’s escalatory dynamic a challenge to both progressivist and reactionary delusions. Only a clear-eyed recognition of this logic, he argues, can open up the possibility of a Christian reversal of violence, however improbable. The destiny of humanity hangs in the balance between mimetic frenzy and the imitation of Christ – a stark choice that the modern age can no longer evade. Girard’s Clausewitzian realism thus forms the prelude to an apocalyptic hope, one chastened of both utopian dreams and sacrificial nostalgia.