I've never actually read either book but I was wondering if anybody could outline the major differences between the contents of both books.
It seems like when one is brought up, the other one is usually brought up for comparison. Opinions seem to be extremely polarized in terms of which book is better.
So I'm not asking which book would be better if I suddenly decided to raise an army and prosecute a war. I'm just interested in the differences between the books.
I'm not going to write a long, definitive post, but I'll try and give off the top of my head some of the differences. Certainly, they were written in entirely different contexts, places, and styles. Often, they are used as an East-West compare-contrast motif (even if most of Sun Tzu's maxims have been universally adopted). As far as I know though (and I may be wrong) while Sun Tzu focuses a great deal on tactics and battle and the psychology of battlefield command, Clauswits makes a larger argument for the utility of war in international relations, marking it as "politics by means of violence".