Victor Davis Hanson

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Victor Davis Hanson (born 1953 in Fowler, California) is a military historian, columnist, political essayist and former classics professor, best known as a scholar of ancient warfare as well as a commentator on modern warfare. He is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism.

Contents 1 Early life, education and today 2 Carnage and Culture 3 Stances 3.1 Iraq War 3.2 American education and classical studies 3.3 Politics 3.4 Influences 4 Works 5 References 6 External links 6.1 Official sites 6.2 Educational institutions and think-tanks 6.3 Opposing views

[edit] Early life, education and today

Hanson grew up on a family farm at Selma, in the San Joaquin Valley of California. His mother was a lawyer and judge, his father an educator and college administrator. Along with his older brother Nils and fraternal twin Alfred, he attended public schools and graduated from Selma High School. At Roosevelt Junior High, he and Alfred were members of the band, Mustard Outhouse. Hanson received his B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz (1975) and his Ph.D. in classics from Stanford University (1980).

Hanson is currently a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Fellow in California Studies at the Claremont Institute. Until recently, he was professor at California State University, Fresno, where he began teaching in 1984, having created the classics program at that institution.

In 1991 Hanson was awarded an American Philological Association's Excellence in Teaching Award, which is awarded to undergraduate teachers of Greek and Latin. He has been a visiting professor of classics at Stanford University (1991–92), National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California (1992–93), as well as holding the visiting Shifrin Chair of Military History at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland (2002–03). He was a visiting professor at Hillsdale College in 2004, 2006, and 2007.^[1]

Hanson writes two weekly columns, one for National Review and one syndicated by Tribune Media Services, and has been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, American Heritage, City Journal, The American Spectator, Policy Review, the Claremont Review of Books, The New Criterion, and The Weekly Standard, among others. In 2006, he started blogging at Pajamas Media. In 2007, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal.

[edit] Carnage and Culture

Hanson is most famous for his 2001 book Carnage and Culture in which he argued that the military dominance of Western Civilization, beginning with the ancient Greeks, is the result of certain fundamental aspects of Western culture. Hanson rejects racial explanations for this military preeminence. He also disagrees with environmental explanations such as put forth by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel.^[2]

According to Hanson, Western values such as political freedom, capitalism, individualism, democracy, scientific inquiry, rationalism, and open debate form an especially lethal combination when applied to warfare. Non-Western societies can win the occasional victory when warring against a society with these Western values, writes Hanson, but the "Western way of war" will prevail in the long run. Hanson emphasizes that Western warfare is not necessarily more (or less) moral than war as practiced by other cultures; his argument is simply that the "Western way of war" is unequalled in its devastation and decisiveness.

Carnage and Culture examines nine battles throughout history, each of which is used to illustrate a particular aspect of Western culture that Hanson believes contributes to the dominance of Western warfare. The battles or campaigns recounted (with themes in parenthesis) are the Battle of Salamis (480 BC; free citizens), the Battle of Gaugamela (331 BC; the decisive battle of annihilation), the Battle of Cannae (216 BC; civic militarism), the Battle of Tours/Poitiers (732; infantry), the Battle of Tenochtitlan (1521; technology and reason), the Battle of Lepanto (1571; capitalism), the Battle of Rorke's Drift (1879; discipline), the Battle of Midway (1942; individualism), and the Tet Offensive (1968; dissent).

Though Carnage and Culture appeared before the September 11, 2001 attacks, its message that the "Western way of war" will ultimately prevail made the book a best-seller in the wake of those events. Immediately after 9/11, Carnage and Culture was re-issued with a new afterword by Hanson in which he explicitly stated that the United States would win the war on terror for the reasons stated in the book.

[edit] Stances

[edit] Iraq War

Hanson believes that the Iraq War is a good and worthwhile undertaking and that it has been, with some reservations, a laudable success. Hanson has referred to himself as a neoconservative, in a recent blog post defending Donald Rumsfeld.^[3] Hanson has pro-democratic and pro-Israel views on the Middle East. He believes that the lack of individual and political freedom in many Middle Eastern nations has retarded economic, technological and cultural progress and is the root cause of radical Islamic terrorism.^[4]

[edit] American education and classical studies

Hanson co-authored the book Who Killed Homer? with John Heath. This book explores the issue of how classical education has declined in America and what might be done to restore it to its former place. This is important, according to Hanson, because knowledge of the classical Greeks and Romans is necessary if we are to fully understand our own culture. Hanson blames the academic classicists themselves for the decline, accusing them of becoming so infected with political correctness and postmodern thinking, not to mention egoism and money-grubbing (grants, visiting professorships, conference-hopping, promotion based on unreadable publications), that they have lost sight of what he feels the classics truly represent.

[edit] Politics

Hanson sees rural values as underpinning successful democracies, whether they be of ancient Athens or the modern United States. He writes that America has remained democratic despite the loss of rural values but the democratic ethos is now very different from in the past.^[5] Although he reports that he is a member of the Democratic Party, he holds conservative or neoconservative views on many issues and has stated that he voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 and 2004 elections.^[6] Feeling that the current Democratic party does not have a morally responsible approach to foreign policy and no longer addresses the concerns of ordinary Americans, Hanson writes: "The Democratic Party reminds me of the Republicans circa 1965 or so—impotent, shrill, no ideas, conspiratorial, reactive, out-of-touch with most Americans, isolationist, and full of embarrassing spokesmen."^[7]

[edit] Influences

Hanson cites the Theban general and statesman Epaminondas, the American generals Sherman and Patton, as well as Winston Churchill as his heroes. In the field of military history, Hanson cites John Keegan as being influential, and shares a mutual admiration with fellow classicist Donald Kagan and the historian Steven Ozment.

Hanson is of Swedish ancestry. He is a practicing Protestant Christian.^[8]

[edit] Works

• Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece. University of California Press, 1983. ISBN 0-520-21025-5
• The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece. Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. ISBN 0-394-57188-6
• Hoplites: The Classical Greek Battle Experience, editor, Routledge, 1991. ISBN 0-415-04148-1
• The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization, Free Press, 1995. ISBN 0-02-913751-9
• Fields Without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Idea, Free Press, 1996. ISBN 0-684-82299-7
• Who Killed Homer?: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom, with John Heath, Free Press, 1998. ISBN 0-684-84453-2
• The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny, Free Press, 1999. ISBN 0-684-84502-4
• The Wars of the Ancient Greeks: And the Invention of Western Military Culture, Cassell, 1999. ISBN 0-304-35222-5
• The Land Was Everything: Letters from an American Farmer, Free Press, 2000. ISBN 0-684-84501-6
• Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age, with John Heath and Bruce S. Thornton, ISI Books, 2001. ISBN 1-882926-54-4
• Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power, Doubleday, 2001. ISBN 0-385-50052-1

  Published in the UK as Why the West Has Won: Carnage and Culture from Salamis to Vietnam, Faber, 2001. ISBN 0-571-20417-1

• An Autumn of War: What America Learned from September 11 and the War on Terrorism, Anchor Books, 2002. ISBN 1-4000-3113-3

  A collection of essays, mostly from National Review, covering events occurring between September 11, 2001 and January 2002

• Mexifornia: A State of Becoming, Encounter Books, 2003. ISBN 1-893554-73-2
• Ripples of Battle: How Wars Fought Long Ago Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think, Doubleday, 2003. ISBN 0-385-50400-4
• Between War and Peace: Lessons from Afghanistan and Iraq, Random House, 2004. ISBN 0-8129-7273-2

  A collection of essays, mostly from National Review, covering events occurring between January 2002 and July 2003

• A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War, Random House, 2005. ISBN 1-4000-6095-8

[edit] References

[edit] External links

[edit] Official sites

• Victor Davis Hanson's Private Papers
• Archive of Hanson's articles at National Review Online
• Hanson's blog at Pajamas Media

[edit] Educational institutions and think-tanks

• Bio from Fresno State News
• Hoover Institution Bio
• Claremont Institute Bio
• The Sage of Fresno by Jonathan Kay, a media fellow at the Hoover Institution
• Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA)

[edit] Opposing views

• Torturing History A review of Carnage And Culture by former soldier Chris Bray, who claims that Hanson rewrites history; see also Hanson's reply
• When Superpowers Lose A review of Carnage and Culture from a socialist perspective