War is the continuation of policy that demands permanent political organization.

Evidence

But for Croce’s conception to be valid, it would have to be possible to apply it also to war, and hence to explain the fact of standing armies, military academies, officer corps. War in progress too is “passion”, the most intense and febrile of all passions; it is a moment of political life; it is the continuation in other forms of a given policy. It is necessary therefore to explain how passion can become moral “duty”—duty in terms not of political morality but of ethics. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 633

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• XREF: Gramsci restates Clausewitz’s ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means’ — connects to subsequent readings on militarized state power.

Related

• War is the continuation of politics, not its own autonomous sphere. (similarity 0.84)
• Political struggle resembles permanent conquest rather than finite military war. (similarity 0.81)
• Gramsci distinguishes one-off ‘war of manoeuvre’ from long-term ‘war of position’ (similarity 0.79)