Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson (born September 5, 1953) is an American classicist, military historian, and conservative political commentator.

He has been a commentator on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Review, The Washington Times, and other media outlets.

He is a professor emeritus of Classics at California State University, Fresno, the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in classics and military history at the Hoover Institution, and visiting professor at Hillsdale College.

Hanson received a B.A. in classics and general Cowell College honors from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1975, and his PhD in classics from Stanford University in 1980.

Hanson's Warfare and Agriculture (Giardini 1983), his PhD thesis, argued that Greek warfare could not be understood apart from agrarian life in general, and suggested that the modern assumption that agriculture was irrevocably harmed during classical wars was vastly overestimated.

In 1985 he was hired at California State University, Fresno to launch a classical studies program.

The Western Way of War (Alfred Knopf 1989) explored the combatants' experiences of ancient Greek battle and detailed the Hellenic foundations of later Western military practice.

In 1991, Hanson was awarded the American Philological Association's Excellence in Teaching Award, given annually to the nation's top undergraduate teachers of Greek and Latin.

He has been a visiting professor of classics at Stanford University in California (1991–92), a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California (1992–93), awarded an Alexander Onassis traveling fellowship to Greece (1999), as well as Nimitz Fellow at University of California, Berkeley (2006), and held the visiting Shifrin Chair of Military History at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland (2002–03).

Hanson has edited several collections of essays, including (Hoplites, Routledge 1991), Bonfire of the Humanities (with B. Thornton and J. Heath, ISI 2001), and Makers of Ancient Strategy (Princeton 2010), as well as a number of his own collected articles, such as An Autumn of War [2002 Anchor], Between War and Peace [Anchor 2004], and The Father of Us All [Bloomsbury 2010].

He has written chapters for works such as the Cambridge History of War, and the Cambridge History of Ancient Warfare.

The Other Greeks (The Free Press 1995) argued that the emergence of a unique middling agrarian class explains the ascendance of the Greek city-state, and its singular values of consensual government, sanctity of private property, civic militarism and individualism.

In Fields Without Dreams (The Free Press 1996, winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award) and The Land Was Everything (The Free Press 2000, a Los Angeles Times notable book of the year), Hanson lamented the decline of family farming and rural communities, and the loss of agrarian voices in American democracy.

Hanson's emphasis on cultural exception rejects racial explanations for Western military preeminence and disagrees as well with environmental or geographical determinist explanations such as those put forth by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997).

Hanson co-authored the book Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom with John Heath in 1998.

The Soul of Battle (The Free Press 1999) traced the careers of Epaminondas, the Theban liberator, William Tecumseh Sherman, and George S. Patton, in arguing that democratic warfare's strengths are best illustrated in short, intense and spirited marches to promote consensual rule, but bog down otherwise during long occupations or more conventional static battle.

Hanson wrote the 2001 book Carnage and Culture (Doubleday), published in Great Britain and the Commonwealth countries as Why the West Has Won, in which he argued that the military dominance of Western civilization, beginning with the ancient Greeks, results from certain fundamental aspects of Western culture, such as consensual government, a tradition of self-critique, secular rationalism, religious tolerance, individual freedom, free expression, free markets, and individualism.

He was appointed Fellow in California Studies at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think-tank in California, in 2002.

Hanson was appointed Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, another conservative think-tank in California.

In Mexifornia (Encounter 2003)—a personal memoir about growing up in rural California and an account of immigration from Mexico—Hanson predicted that illegal immigration would soon reach crisis proportions, unless legal, measured, and diverse immigration was restored, as well as the traditional melting-pot values of integration, assimilation, and intermarriage.

Ripples of Battle (Doubleday 2003) chronicled how the cauldron of battle affects combatants' later literary and artistic work, as its larger influence ripples for generations, affecting art, literature, culture, and government.

In 2004 he took early retirement in order to focus on his political writing and popular history.

Hanson has held a series of positions in ideologically-oriented institutions and private foundations.

He gave the Wriston Lecture in 2004 for the Manhattan Institute whose mission is to "develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility".

Since 2004, Hanson has written a weekly column syndicated by Tribune Content Agency, as well as a weekly column for National Review Online since 2001.

In A War Like No Other (Random House 2005, a New York Times notable book of the year), a history of the Peloponnesian War, Hanson offered an alternative history, arranged by methods of fighting—triremes, hoplites, cavalry, sieges, etc.—in concluding that the conflict marked a brutal watershed event for the Greek city-states.

He was named distinguished alumnus of the year for 2006 at University of California, Santa Cruz.

Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and was a presidential appointee in 2007–2008 on the American Battle Monuments Commission.

Hanson grew up in Selma, California in the San Joaquin Valley, and has worked there most of his life.

He is of Swedish and Welsh ancestry, and his father's cousin, for whom he was named, was killed in the Battle of Okinawa.

He was awarded the National Humanities Medal (2007) by President George W. Bush, as well as the Eric Breindel Prize for opinion journalism (2002), and the Bradley Prize from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in 2008.

American military officer Robert L. Bateman, in a 2007 article on the Media Matters for America website, criticized Hanson's thesis, arguing that Hanson's point about Western armies preferring to seek out a decisive battle of annihilation is rebutted by the Second Punic War, in which Roman attempts to annihilate the Carthaginians instead led to the Carthaginians annihilating the Romans at the Battle of Cannae.

Bateman argued that Hanson was wrong about Western armies' common preferences in seeking out a battle of annihilation, arguing that the Romans only defeated the Carthaginians via the Fabian strategy of keeping their armies in being and not engaging Hannibal in battle.

In a response published on his personal website, Hanson argued that Bateman had misunderstood and misrepresented his thesis.

Regarding the Second Punic War he said that the Romans initially sought out decisive battles, but were reluctantly forced to resort to a Fabian strategy after several defeats at the hands of a tactical genius, until they were able to rebuild their military capacity, at which point they did ultimately defeat Hannibal in decisive battles.

He also said that the Carthaginians themselves had adopted many 'Western' methods of warfare from the Greeks, which is why Hannibal was keen to seek decisive battles too.

He was often the William Simon visiting professor at the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine University, a private Christian institution in California (2009–15), and was awarded in 2015 an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from the graduate school at Pepperdine.

The End of Sparta (Bloomsbury 2011) is a novel about a small community of Thespian farmers who join the great march of Epaminondas (369/70 BC) into the heart of the Peloponnese to destroy Spartan hegemony, free the Messenian helots, and spread democracy in the Peloponnese.

The Savior Generals (Bloomsbury 2013) followed the careers of five great generals (Themistocles, Belisaurius, Sherman, Ridgway, Petraeus) arguing that rare qualities in leadership emerge during hopeless predicaments that only rare individuals can salvage.

He has been a board member of the Bradley Foundation since 2015, and served on the HF Guggenheim Foundation board for over a decade.