Peter Paret (April 13, 1924 – September 11, 2020) was a German-born American cultural and intellectual historian, whose two principal areas of research were war and the interaction of art and politics from 18th to 20th century Europe.
Paret's mother, who began to study medicine after her marriage, came from a Jewish family well known for the past two centuries in manufacturing (weaving looms, steel cables), finance, publishing, and scholarship.
In the following year, his mother married the psychoanalyst and educational reformer Siegfried Bernfeld and with her husband and children moved to France, and in August 1937 to the United States, where they settled in San Francisco.
[3] Paret entered the University of California, Berkeley, in January 1942, was drafted the following year, and served in combat intelligence and operations sections of an infantry battalion in the New Guinea and Philippine campaigns and in Korea.
In 1946, at the age of 21, he was discharged with the rank of Staff Sergeant, reentered UC Berkeley as a sophomore, and graduated in 1949,[1] after which he returned to Europe to reconnect with his father and other relatives.
He wrote his dissertation on the Prussian Reform era under Michael Howard, became an early member of the Institute for Strategic Studies, served as Resident Tutor in the Delegacy of Extra-Mural Studies of Oxford University, and in the last year before receiving his degree, began to publish articles on contemporary military thought as well as on recent history, having found important documents in the British archives, including a lost register of a Gestapo prison established after the attempt on Hitler's life on July 20, 1944.
After receiving his Ph.D., in 1960,[1] Paret returned to the United States as Research Associate at the Center of International Studies, Princeton University, where he spent two years.
With John W. Shy, who was then a finishing graduate student at Princeton, he wrote his first book, Guerrillas in the 1960s (New York, 1961), a short work analyzing the nature of irregular warfare and the difficulties it posed to modern, industrialized societies, which was reprinted several times, and came out in an expanded edition the following year.
[1] During these years at an innovative, rapidly expanding campus, which he later characterized as the happiest in his academic career, he published a study of the modern French theory of political-military warfare, French Revolutionary Warfare from Indochina to Algeria (New York, 1966), and an expanded version of his dissertation, Yorck and the Era of Prussian Reform (Princeton, 1966), a work combining ideological analysis with the study of operational and tactical doctrine, and prepared the context for his growing interest in the ideas and life of Clausewitz, who as a young officer was an active member of the Prussian reform movement.
For example, an article, expansion of a lecture he gave at Princeton University in March 2019, which develops a new concept of Clausewitz's biography, appeared in the January 2020 issue of The Journal of Military History.
[5] Paret was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Member of the American Philosophical Society, which has awarded him its Thomas Jefferson Medal, an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics, and an Honorary Member of the German Clausewitz Society, which in 2020 awarded him its Silver Pin of Honor.