The distinction between perfect and imperfect wars, inherited from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, continued to exist in the nineteenth, although under different labels. Perfect wars were the ones that fitted the positivist analysis: conflicts in which one state attempted to force its will upon another, or in which two states reciprocally attempted to impose their respective wills onto one another. As observed above, wars in this proper legal sense were seen as clashes of policy or interest rather than of law. But these fully fledged perfect wars of the positivists constituted, so to speak, only the showy surface of interstate violence. Beneath that surface was another type of armed action by states to which the label ‘measures short of war’ was commonly given. Clausewitz had recognised this distinction in holding that conflicts between states occupied an entire spectrum of degrees of violence. At the one extreme, he placed the ‘pure’ type of war, ‘a death struggle for total existence’.