Peter Paret (edit name/settings)

Peter Paret (April 13, 1924-) is American military, cultural & art historian with a particular interest in German history. Paret was born in Berlin, Germany, the son of Dr. Hans Paret and Suzanne Aimée Cassirer, who divorced in 1932. The mother with her two children left Germany in 1932 to continue her studies with Sigmund Freud, and in 1934 married Siegfried Bernfeld, a prominent Viennese pyschoanalyst and educational reformer. After two-and-a-half years in France and six months in London, they emigrated to the United States in 1937. Paret's father, who was not Jewish, remained in Germany.

During World War II, Paret served in the United States Army between 1943-1946 in New Guinea, the Philippines, and Korea. During the 1950s, Paret worked as a journalist before turning towards writing history. Paret received a BA at the University of California in 1949 and a PhD at the University of London in 1960, where he studied under Michael Howard. Paret was a research associate at Princeton University (1960-1962, and taught at the University of California, Davis (1962-1968, and at Stanford University (1969-1986),as the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History. In 1986 he became the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton(1986-1997). Among his other appointments, he served as a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace (1988-1993). At present Paret is an Emeritus Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. He is also the 2008 Lees Knowles Lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge. His wife Isabel Harris Paret is on the faculty of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick and a child psychoanalyst by whom he has two children, one of whom Paul Paret is a professor of art history at the University of Utah.

Paret belonged to a generation of World War II veterans who used their experience of the war to better understand military history. Paret’s major interests include the relationship between art of a particular era is related to that era's ideology and social context, and the interactions among politics, intellectual trends, and war. Paret is perhaps best known for his extensive work on the life and thought of the theories of the Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz. In 1962, Paret launched the "Clausewitz Project" at Princeton University. One product of this project was his 1979 biography Clausewitz and the State (originally published by Oxford in 1976, with revised editions in 1985 and 2007 published by Princeton University Press). The translation of Vom Kriege into English by Paret and the British military historian Michael Howard (with the advice and commentary of Bernard Brodie) in 1976, reissued in a revised version in 1984 with an extensive index, is generally considered to be the best translation into English and is now treated as a standard work.