Victor Davis Hanson (born September 5, 1953) is an American classicist, military historian, and conservative political commentator. He is a commentator on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the National Review and the Washington Times.

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 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.

Early life and education 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, after whom he was named, was killed in the Battle of Okinawa.

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.

Academic career

Hanson noted autobiographically that he was "a full-time orchard and vineyard grower from 1980-1984, before joining the nearby CSU" (California State University, Fresno) in 1984, to launch a classical studies program there. 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 was named distinguished alumnus of the year for 2006 at University of California, Santa Cruz. He has been a visiting professor of classics at Stanford University in California (1991–1992) and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California (1992–1993). He was named a Alexander Onassis Fellow (2001), and was awarded the Chester W. Nimitz memorial lectureship in Military History at University of California, Berkeley (2006), and held the visiting Shifrin Chair of Military History at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland (2002–2003).

In 2004, he took early retirement from Cal State Fresno to focus on his political writing and popular history. Hanson has held a series of positions in conservative-leaning institutions and private foundations. He was appointed Fellow in California Studies at the Claremont Institute in 2002.

Hanson was appointed a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, California, a public policy think-tank where he is currently the chairman and principal investigator of the Working Group on the Role of Military History in Contemporary Conflict. He served as a William Simon Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine University, a private Christian institution in California, from 2009–2015, and was awarded in 2015 an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from the law school at Pepperdine. 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." He became a board member of the Bradley Foundation in 2015 and served on the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation board for over a decade.

Writing

Since 2004, Hanson has written a weekly column syndicated by Tribune Content Agency. He also wrote a weekly column for National Review Online from 2001 to 2021. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal (2007) by President George W. Bush, as well as the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism (2002), and the Bradley Prize from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in 2008.

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. Yale University lecturer Donald Kagan stated that "Hanson's work on the role of the small family farmer in the development of democracy is the most important work in Greek history in my lifetime," and that "its significance is hard to exaggerate."

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 it Hansen argues that the ancient Greek poleis created a tradition of citizen soldiers that continues to make Europeans (and countries settled by Europeans) "the most deadly soldiers in the history of civilization."

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. 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.

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

The End of Sparta (Bloomsbury 2011) is a novel about a small community of Thespian farmers who join the great march of Epaminondas (369/370 BC) to the heart of the Peloponnese to destroy Spartan hegemony, free the Messenian helots, and spread democracy in the Peloponnese.

Hanson has edited several collections of essays, including Hoplites (1991), Bonfire of the Humanities (with Bruce Thornton and John Heath, 2001), and Makers of Ancient Strategy (2010), as well as collections of his own articles, including An Autumn of War (2002), Between War and Peace (2004), and The Father of Us All (2010). He has written chapters of the Cambridge History of War, and the Cambridge History of Ancient Warfare.

Carnage and Culture

In Hanson's book Carnage and Culture (Doubleday, 2001), published in Great Britain and the Commonwealth countries as Why the West Has Won, 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. Hanson's emphasis on cultural exception rejects racial explanations for Western military pre-eminence and disagrees with the environmental or geographical determinist explanations such as those put forth by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997).Victor Davis Hanson Decline And Fall: A review of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, National Review Magazine, May 20, 2005

In a 2007 article on the Media Matters for America website, the American military officer Robert L. Bateman criticized Hanson's thesis and argued 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 and argued that the Romans defeated the Carthaginians only 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. Hanson stated that in the Second Punic War, 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 had rebuilt their military capacity, when they ultimately defeated Hannibal in decisive battles. He also said that since the Carthaginians themselves had adopted many "Western" methods of warfare from the Greeks, Hannibal, too, was keen to seek decisive battles.

United States education and classical studies 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 book explores the issue of how classical education has declined in the US and what might be done to restore it to its former prominence. That is important, according to Hanson and Heath, because knowledge of classical Greece and Rome is necessary for a full understanding of Western culture. To begin a discussion along those lines, the authors state, "The answer to why the world is becoming Westernized goes all the way back to the wisdom of the Greeks—reason enough why we must not abandon the study of our heritage."Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath, Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001), p. 28.

The political scientist Francis Fukuyama reviewed Who Killed Homer? favorably in Foreign Affairs and wrote that, "The great thinkers of the Western tradition—from Hobbes, Burke, and Hegel to Weber and Nietzsche (who was trained as a classical philologist)—were so thoroughly steeped in Greek thought that they scarcely needed to refer back to original texts for quotations. This tradition has come under fire from two camps, one postmodernist that seeks to deconstruct the classics on the grounds of gender, race, and class, and the other pragmatic and career-minded that asks what value the classics have in a computer-driven society. The authors' defense of a traditionalist approach to the classics is worthy."