Clausewitz Upside Down? Politics and War in the “Hidden Dialogue” between Raymond Aron and Michel Foucault

Abstract

This article reconstructs the “hidden dialogue” between Raymond Aron and Michel Foucault around the Clausewitzian formula and its inversion, showing how both thinkers, in the early 1970s, used the paradigm of war to analyse politics, though reaching opposite conclusions. While Aron rejected any collapse between war and politics in the name of legitimacy and “true realism,” Foucault explored war as a grid of intelligibility for power, elaborating a polemocritical model shaped—yet ultimately constrained—by a silent confrontation with Carl Schmitt. Their divergent paths illuminate two heterodox forms of political realism.