earlier conception advocating the more extreme reaches of the forms that Napoleonic warfare had actually achieved. That conception, however, was clearly rejected by the mature Clausewitz. Many analysts have assumed that the powerful description of ideal war in Book I must refer to the same concept, but in fact the two concepts are radically different and, in many respects, opposed. Clausewitz never seems to have resolved whether absolute war was supposed to reflect an achievable form or was instead an ideal to aim at, but just out of reach. Ideal war resolved that confusion by being blatantly unachievable in most of its aspects and reflecting an unrealistic idea of war that should not be pursued in real life. See also Carl von Clausewitz On War Total war Perpetual war References Clausewitz, Carl von, On War, Book One, Chapter 1, and Book VIII, Chapters 2–6. The standard translation today (though not the most accurate version) is Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed./trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976, revised 1984). Many unsophisticated writers reference the Penguin Classics version, dated 1968. This severe abridgement, a Vietnam War-era treatment (its hostility is aimed primarily at "neo-Clausewitzian" Henry Kissinger, not Clausewitz himself) is based on the archaic 1873 Graham translation. The most accurate translation, not currently the standard simply because the copyright-holder has failed to promote it, is Karl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. O.J. Matthijs Jolles (New York: Random House, 1943). All of the English translators, however, produced serious misrepresentations of Clausewitz's own thoughts, in part simply because of the differing historical character of the periods in which they worked. Bassford, Christopher, "Clausewitz’s Categories of War and the Supersession of ‘Absolute War,’" ClausewitzStudies.org, 2016, http://www.clausewitzstudies.org/mobile/Bassford-Supersession5.pdf#zoom=100. Military doctrines