Thread by @BretDevereaux

Worth answering 'on main' & cross-posting from The Good Place.

Victor Davis Hanson's work has been reappraised in 2 ways: the quality of his work substantially changed post-1998, but also the arguments of his early work experienced pushback, which he has largely not answered. 1/

Let's start with the early works, by which we mostly mean Warfare and Agriculture (1983; rev. 1998), Western Way of War (1989) and The Other Greeks (1995).

These, especially WWoW, made substantial impacts when they first appeared, set the 'orthodoxy' on hoplites in the 90s. 2/

Large parts of that WWoW model have come under significant scholarly pressure - @Roelkonijn can sing on this, for he is one of the chief critics here.

Critiques range from the mechanics of battle to the social underpinnings of hoplite warfare, and they're very substantial. 3/

They're also basically unanswered.

We'll get to this, but VDH has made basically no effort to answer the substantive critiques of his ideas and few scholars have lined up to do so in his stead, in part because he rendered himself toxic (see below), but not only that. 4/

Not the place to get into the hoplite-debates; for my part, I think some of the WWoW model can be salvaged, but very large parts have to be jettisoned.

I'm not entirely convinced by the opposing ('heterodox') model, associated with Hans van Wees, but the VDH model has to go.5/

My instinct is to look for a synthesis along the lines gestured at by E.L. Wheeler, 'Mad Hatters and March Hares' (2011), but it's hard to see who would do it.

The van Wees crowd is convinced they have the correct model, VDH has no apprentices, the rest of us do Romans.🤷‍♂️ 6/

I should note that factor in the lack of defense for VDH on hoplites: he never took/got a position to take graduate students (I suspect he could have done) and so has no body of apprentices carrying forward (or *testing*) his ideas; the contrast with van Wees is marked. 7/

The result in terms of the 'great hoplite debate' is that the USS VDH has sunk, abandoned by all crew save the captain.
The HMS van Wees sails with a flotilla, but many are still in the water, unwilling to salvage VDH, fully jump on board with van Wees, or build their own boat.8/

That leaves the second part of this equation: even as VDH's early scholarship has undergone reassessment, from which he has not bothered to defend it, he has continued writing.

And while his early work was at least thought provoking, his later stuff is just frankly junk. 9/

You can broadly split it into two groups:
1) The polemics (WKH, Bonfire of the Humanities, Mexifornia, etc.) which are most of his writing, more or less purely political and often very tendentiously argued.
2) The works of military history wildly outside of VDH's specialty. 10/

This latter group is, broadly speaking, a mess, beginning with Carnage and Culture (2001), a deeply flawed book with gaping evidentiary and argument problems which came out at just the right time to make a big impression on all of the wrong people.

Disaster of a book. 11/

I do not think I have yet met a historian who thinks *their* period in Carnage and Culture was well handled.

There are military historians who can handle a broad range of periods, but VDH isn't one; his later, sweeping works have all been poorly received. 12/

The elephant in the room here is his politics - VDH is very MAGA and pro-Trump - and while that shouldn't play a role, it does.

VDH's post-2000 work is junk, but there are things to salvage in his early work..but who's going to do that, given how toxic his politics make him?13/

One thing I would note is that VDH's ideology, sub-surface but relevant in his early work, becomes very clear in his later works: his ideal is the yeoman citizen-soldier-farmer under a farmer's republic, market oriented but culturally insular & largely closed to new entrants. 14/

He views that social structure as the core of what he'd call the western tradition and believes it is both morally & militarily superior.
There is an irony that subsequent work in the field has substantially undermined the idea that the Greek poleis was this sort of society. 15/

VDH really wants hoplite armies composed of free small farmers with small households (and few slaves), where nearly all free men are citizen-hoplites, but it's becoming clear that the hoplite class was smaller as a slice of these societies than this model admits. 16/

Ironically the society notionally closer to his model may have been the Roman Republic, which had a broader smallholder infantry class.

But while VDH loves Roman civic militarism, he pointedly avoids Roman cultural openness and incorporation, despite obvious USA parallels. 17/

Of course, "the best society is a closed society of citizen-warrior-farmers with internal freedom, but a hedge of spears against outsiders" is at least fascism-adjacent, when it isn't just fascism.
VDH also loves charismatic leaders ('Savior Generals').

So there's that.18/

Meanwhile his early work, undefended, has fallen out of favor, frequently for good scholarly reason. /endh and isn't taken remotely seriously by other military historians.

Meanwhile his early work, undefended, has fallen out of favor, frequently for good scholarly reasons. /end