REVIEW ESSAY

Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (New York: Doubleday, 2001). 492pp.

The book 'Carnage and Culture' is an excellent primer on conflicts. I highly recommend this book, in particular for it's analysis of 'what the past can teach us'. As I interpret it, for VDH the study of History is not only an end in itself, but can teach us much about the challenges we face today. CARNAGE AND CULTURE: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power User Review - Kirkus. A fascinating study of the way Western values have translated into Western military victories against non-Western cultures. Hanson (The Soul of Battle, 1999) meticulously analyzes nine epic battles. Read full review.

Christopher Bassford, National War College (NDU), 2002

was really prepared to dislikethis book. At first glance, Hanson’s emphasis on culture looked suspiciouslylike the faux-anthropological nonsense John Keegan spouted in his AHistory of Warfare.*1 Also, I have found Hanson’sintense political partisanship in the popular press to be annoying, andthis is certainly an ideological tract in many respects. But, it turnsout, I do like the book a great deal, despite what many reviewers willno doubt see as its objectionably pro-Western chauvinism.

Partly that’s because I’m feeling pretty chauvinistic myself these days.But mostly I like the book because Hanson has forthrightly stated an argumentthat very much needed stating—not only to the general public (Hanson’sexplicit target) but to the historical profession itself. This is thethesis that Western military forces, since the classical Greeks but notbefore, have more-or-less consistently proven superior to non-Westernforces on land and sea because of certain cultural features—the occasionalCarrhae- or Little Bighorn-style disaster notwithstanding. That thesisis not really new, but this certainly is a timely moment to put it backon the table. Western culture has some unique qualities, with deep rootsand continuing importance, that have consistently made it militarily andpolitically superior to what Hanson darkly calls “the Other” over mostof the last 2500 years. After all, even in its moments of greatest weakness—duringthe post-Mycenaen and post-Roman dark ages—the Western core has neverbeen conquered by outsiders. “In the long history of military practice,it is almost a truism that the chief military worry of a Western armyfor the past 2,500 years was another Western army.” (p5) Isandhlwana palesto insignificance in comparison to Verdun.

In some respects, this is an old-fashioned “Great Battles of World History”sort of book, with chapters on Salamis (480 BC), Gaugamela (331 BC), Cannae(216 BC), Poitiers (732), Tenochtitlán (1520-21), Lepanto (1571),Rorke’s Drift (1871), Midway (1942), and Tet (1968). But these commendablybrutal and unbowdlerized battle and campaign studies are merely vehiclesfor Hanson’s larger argument, so that is what I will focus on here. Hansonis brave enough to include as major elements in his study Western reverseslike Cannae and Isandhlwana. The inclusion of Cannae is a bit of a problem,however, since it is not at all clear that heavily Hellenized Carthagewas not itself part of the West. It might have been worthwhile to includeas well some major calamity that is less ambiguous in the context of thisbook, such as Manzikert, Mohacs, the Fall of Singapore, or Dien Bien Phu(though, to be fair, the latter two involve substantially Westernizedfoes as well). The cultural features Hanson credits include Western ideasof group and individual freedom; a fixation on decisive battle emphasizingthe shock collision of professional or semi-professional heavy infantry;“civic militarism” and the citizen-soldier ideal; a particularly Westernstyle of discipline, based not on fear of authority or on the heroic idealof individual bravery, but on a determination not to break formation andendanger one’s fellow citizens/soldiers; technological progressivenessand the market economics that helps it flourish; the dominance of rationalism(vice religion or superstition) in practical decision making; and traditionspermitting dissent, self-critique, and auditing of operations by elementsoutside the military and political leadership directly involved.

Perhaps the most important of these cultural features is the conceptof the free, self-sufficient citizen soldier first typified by the Greekhoplite—a notion that ultimately underlies many of the others. This concept,despite the de facto disappearance of such individuals from the commonsoldiery in certain periods, continued to have psychological power overthe behavior of Western troops and their leaders. In any case, the relevantcultural attitudes remained a reality among the officer classes, who enjoyeda relationship of near- or quasi-equality with their highest politicaland military commanders. That relationship was entirely alien to thatof, say, Chinese, Aztec, Zulu, or Ottoman subordinates with their masters. Certainly it is difficult to imagine an Ottoman commander—legally a slave—snappingat his Sultan with words like those Seydlitz used to Frederick the Greatat Zorndorf: “Tell the king that after the battle, my head is his to dowith as he pleases; in the meantime, allow me to use it in his service!”(My example, not Hanson’s.) That is so in part because of the slave systemHanson decries, but also because, even if an Ottoman commander had saidsuch a thing and survived, the Ottoman historical tradition would notlikely have recorded it—and certainly not in the approving way the Westerntradition does. Even Alexander the Great, well on the way to making himselfinto an oriental-style living god, had to put up with continual carpingand criticism from his subordinates. The same could be said for Napoleon,Eisenhower, and even Hitler.

I think Hanson makes an error, or at least misses the point, by talkingexcessively about the “lethality” of the Western approach to war. Primitivewarfare is extremely lethal, as anthropologist Lawrence Keeley has demonstratedpretty conclusively, though the body count gets racked up in innumerablesmall-scale ambushes and massacres rather than on formal battlefields.*2 Plenty of non-Western peoples—if not most—have been given to large-scalebutchery, on the battlefield and off. It is hard to think of any militaryforce more “lethal” than the Mongols. Aztec warfare was also extremelylethal, though primarily to POWs rather than to armed soldiers still inthe field. Rather, it is the decisiveness of Western warfare that is prominent,though not entirely unique. Now, “decisive battle” is a tricky phrase.Most military historians use it to mean “a really big battle,” or perhaps“a battle exciting enough to justify your buying my book about it.” Morejustifiably, it is sometimes used to describe a battle that ends in undisputedtactical victory by one side or the other. But it really means a battlethe outcome of which actually decides something of real importance—i.e.,a major political issue. Ideally, a “decisive battle” leads directly topeace (e.g., Appomattox in 1865), though in practice it may simplyresolve some intermediate issue. For instance, in 1704 Marlborough’s victoryat Blenheim was decisive in that it shut down one major theater of theWar of the Spanish Succession and effectively drove a major belligerent—Bavaria—outof the war, even though the larger struggle went on for years. Westerners,because they traditionally draw a sharp, legalistic distinction betweenwar and peace, habitually seek such decisions in hopes of getting thewar over with and getting on with normal life. Many other societies, however,see a permanent state of hostilities as normal. Their rulers are thereforenot inclined to take big chances in pursuit of a swift conclusion to hostilities—especiallyif the usual result of a decisive loss is the loser’s extermination.

One of Hanson’s strengths, on the other hand, though it is merely a tactic,lies in making it very clear that he is focused exclusively on the superiorityof the Western approach to warmaking, rather than attempting to make anymore general argument for the West’s cultural or ethical superiority.Indeed, Hanson's story is essentially an amoral paean to the political,military, and economic virtues of a decentralized, ruggedly individualistic,but brutal and brutally self-interested class of landowner on the modelof the Greek citizen-soldier/landowner/slaveowner. (A class more comparableto the Prussian Junker or Old South plantation-owner than to the enterprisingurban entrepreneur that epitomizes the ideal, involved citizen of themodern democracies.) This approach, while certainly grounded in historicaltruth, is wildly anachronistic today—hardly the self-validating modelmany delusional neo-cons (mostly feckless urbanites and Vietnam-era draftdodgers) seem to think it is. Hanson strives to separate the issues, butunreluctantly concedes that the same factors that account for the West’smilitary dominance contribute to a higher level of admirability in theseother spheres as well. Nonetheless, the broader argument is right. TheWest dominates the world on many levels because it is rich, creative,and free—not the other way around. The same factors that account for Westernmilitary superiority apply as well to Western successes in fields likebusiness and science.

Hanson asks some interesting questions whether these factors still applyand will continue to shape warfare in the future. Hanson’s fears for themilitary future of the West fall into two very different categories. Onthe one hand, he sees the world being increasingly Westernized. If thatmeans it will be democratized, this may mean an end to war. But such hopeshave always been dashed in the past. There is therefore a danger thatfuture wars might always be of the most dangerous kind—i.e., intramuralclashes between Western forces. 'We may well be all Westerners in themillennium to come, and that could be a very dangerous thing indeed.'The other category of Hanson’s concern might be interpreted in evolutionaryterms as a fear of democratic hyperdevelopment. That is, we may be seeingdemocratic ideas developing in American culture in such an extreme formthat they undercut rather than energize our military capacity. One ofthe great strengths of the classical Mediterranean democracies was thatsuffrage was limited to voters with a strong personal stake in the realismof policy—as property owners they were used to making decisions that impactedon their own fortunes, and as soldiers they knew that the state’s militarypolicies placed their own lives and property on the line. In subsequentWestern societies, there have usually been comparable limitations placedon political suffrage. Today, however, most American voters—and especiallymembers of the press—are economically dependent on others’ decisions andknow absolutely nothing of military realities. They are thus utterly unsuitedto the exercise of any kind of leadership in foreign affairs and war.Increasingly unmilitary Western societies may lose the edge they onceenjoyed, and warfare will degenerate into the bloody but indecisive messthat characterizes much of the non-Western world. For good or bad, itcertainly looks like we will get a chance to see how these fears playout in the world crisis brought into the open by the events of 11 September2001.

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One wishes, however, that Hanson had explored more deeply the complex historicalimplications of his thesis. Why did Western superiority on the battlefieldnot result in European world conquest much earlier? After all, his listof empowering cultural ideals accounts in some part for the internal politicaldivisions among the classical Greeks and later the Swiss that preventedtheir creation of empires despite their overwhelming (and very similar)military superiority over their neighbors. For centuries, both made theirprincipal marks on world history by fighting promiscuously as mere mercenariesin the service of less capable societies. Indeed, Hanson’s ideas couldbe used to help explain the habitual disunity of the West as a whole,which has been a key factor in world history. But Hanson is unaccountablydismissive of the argument—prominent in the works of writers like WilliamMcNeil and Paul Kennedy*3—that it was the very fragmentationof the West that created and preserved the socio-politico-economic-militarydynamo he praises. Despite what Western “culture” might have told them,Western rulers were just as inclined as their oriental counterparts totax any profitable innovation to death. Western political fragmentationand political opportunism gave innovators multiple chances to find shelterand favor, and to prove the competitive value of their work to the state.A near-total collapse of Western civilization concluded the one periodin which the West was unified—a point Hanson seems entirely to miss (p16).

It also follows that, if Hanson is right that the cultural features hehas identified gave Western forces a general superiority over non-Westernforces, then those Western societies that more strongly demonstrated thesefeatures would presumably have an advantage over less representative Westernsocieties. But it seems at first reflection that the most impressive modernWestern militaries have belonged to those societies that were the leastdemocratic. When we think of the Western army par excellance, we thinkof the armies of Prussia and of Second- and Third-Reich Germany.Although I think this dilemma is easily resolved, I would have liked tosee Hanson wrestle with it. Of course, he’s already bitten off a prettysubstantial chunk of history to chew on, so maybe that would have beena bite too far for this one book.

But surely it is not enough simply to credit Western victories to thesuperiority of Western culture. One must ask, How did Western culturecome to be so superior? And here Hanson runs into trouble. He acknowledgesin more than one place that there is a wealth of factors at work in shapingthe course of history, yet he takes every opportunity to denigrate non-culturalexplanations for various facets of the problem he has tackled. I’ve mentionedMcNeill’s fragmentation thesis and Hanson’s rejection of it. For anotherexample, although his thinking and writing has obviously been affectedin significant ways by Jared Diamond’s fascinating Guns, Germs, andSteel: The Fates of Human Societies,*4 Hanson repeatedlygoes out of his way to make broad and simplistic attacks on what he callsits “natural” or “biological” determinism. (e.g., pp15-19)

Hanson seems actually to have read Diamond’s work fairly closely. Buthe rejects Diamond’s thesis for essentially emotional reasons: Hanson’stribal chauvinism runs deeper even than his formidable intellect. Forinstance, Hanson tells us that the Aztecs’ culture was obviously defectivebecause they had ample access to the same Mexican iron ore and sulfurthat Cortez’s men used to restore their stocks of firearms and gunpowder,yet failed to develop those resources into weapons equal to those of theconquistadors. This is absurd, of course. After all, 18th century Americanssat on top of uranium deposits—their failure to turn these into atomicbombs reflects no fundamental cultural failure, but merely their technologicalprogress to date. The Aztecs had not reached even the technological levelthat the Greeks had possessed before they undertook the cultural innovationsHanson lauds, yet in many respects they accomplished far more with theirlow technology than the Greeks had with their’s even as late as 500 BC.And Diamond’s thesis provides some truly compelling explanations why technologicalprogress came easier in Eurasia than outside it—reasons that Hanson dumbsdown to the point of inanity.

Typical of Hanson’s thin skin on comparative issues is his undisguisedoutrage (pp15-16) over Diamond’s defense of what he describes as the equalor possibly even superior mental equipment of the average low-tech NewGuinean aborigine. (p.20 in Diamond) In reality, of course, Diamond’scomments on that subject were driven by the same concern that drives Hansonhimself to repeatedly stress the bravery, ingenuity, and intelligenceof his Aztecs and Zulus. That is, he was blowing smoke in the well-foundedfear that politically correct reviewers would automatically accuse himof racism simply because of his acknowledgement of the superiority ofthe Western achievement. This momentary digression by Diamond has nothingto do with his fundamental argument. Indeed, one might find it very surprisingif the typical New Guinean native could survive in the outback with thelow levels of situational awareness and high level of general befuddlementthat characterize most modern Westerners in the altogether more user-friendlyenvironments that their societies—but not they themselves, as individuals—havecreated. But this argument need have no genetic component—the environmentalexplanation (encompassing both physical and cultural aspects) suffices.In any case, we shouldn’t let this kind of chaff distract us from realissues.

Since Hanson, like Diamond, has pointedly rejected the notion that thereis something inherently—that is to say, racially or genetically—superiorabout Westerners, there must be some circumstantial explanation for theWest’s unique cultural evolution and its consequent competitive advantages.Now, that explanation may turn on environmental factors or on chance,or, much more likely, on some combination thereof. Unfortunately, Hanson’ssneering rejection of what he calls Diamond’s “natural determinism” essentiallyamounts to an argument that Western culture achieved superiority because.. well, because it just did. Hanson is too bright a fellow to leaveit at that, of course, and in fact his practical explanations echo andare perfectly compatible with Diamond’s. For example, Hanson explainsthe prevalence of the heavy infantry model thusly: “Europe .. from theBalkans to the British isles, was largely a continent of good farmlandand valleys, cut off by mountains and rivers, that was ideal for the operationsof heavy infantrymen: flat ground for decisive charges of cumbersome footsoldiers, with nearby hills and mountains to prevent mounted flank attack.”(p159) Speaking as someone who has actually participated in infantry operationsin Europe, I feel comfortable saying this is both pretty simplistic andprobably a valid factor. But it clearly is the same kind of determinism—inthis case, topographical determinism—that Hanson decries when practicedby others.

In fact, we can get a lot more mileage out of reconciling Hanson’s thesiswith those he dismisses than we do from his narrow insistence on the single(and ultimately unexplained) cultural factor. If we were to overtly stitchHanson’s and Diamond’s theses together, with some help from Robert Drews’work on the late bronze age,*5 McNeill’s on therise of the West, and nonlinearists’ ideas on culture as an evolutionaryenvironment, it would go somewhat as follows.

Until the advent of the archaic or classical Greek polis, nothing particularlydistinguished Western proto-states from their larger and more powerfulcounterparts in the Near East, Egypt, and China. Mycenaen Greece was essentiallyan off-shoot of Anatolian civilization, the ethnic “Greeks” being createdby the merger of chariot-borne Indo-European-speaking conquerors withthe Aegean area’s indigenous population. The West did share in the generaltechnological advantages offered by Eurasian geography, flora, and fauna.The initial spread of Homo Sapiens across Eurasia had not coincidedwith or led to the extermination of potential draft animals, as it hadin the Americas and elsewhere. The east-west axes of communications acrossEurasia meant that animals and plants domesticated in any one area couldspread easily and widely through a large band of roughly similar climaticattributes, whereas in the Americas the North-South axes meant that localdomesticates tended strongly to remain localized. The sheer size and relativeease of movement across Eurasia meant that there were more people, inmore communities, with access to a wider variety of potentially domesticableplants and animals, and thus more opportunity for the creation and spreadof ideas and advances (and diseases: Diamond does of wonderful job ofshowing the connections between human diseases and the domestication ofanimals). After all, most of the key elements of the Greeks’ diet andtechnology (including their crucial writing system, mathematics, and architecture)originated elsewhere in Eurasia.

However, while the megalithic cultures of western Europe had been roughlyon a par with early experiments in advanced culture elsewhere, the peripheralposition and broken nature of the terrain in Europe retarded the growthof large political entities and thus of certain cultural developmentsthat flowed therefrom. Europe’s riverine system was not conducive to thedevelopment of any large river-valley civilization like those of the Nile,Tigris-Euphrates, Indus, or Yellow River—with all the political implicationsof those regions’ hydrographics.

The crucible for the creation of a distinctive Western civilization wasthe period 1200-448 B.C. In a relatively brief spasm of violence c.1200B.C., Mycenaen society was decapitated by large-scale raids, by as-yetunidentified raiders who came (probably from the west and north) by ship,fought with devastating effect on foot against the chariot armies of thelate bronze age, and did not stick around to replace the fallen kings.There was no large-scale, permanent influx of foreign barbarians. Althoughthe raids were destructive, they focused fairly narrowly on the rich palacecomplexes. The royal class, its theocrats, its small and specialized chariotwarrior elite, and its tiny coterie of literate scribes vanished in theflames. But with the disappearance of the palaces, their concentrationsof wealth, and their diplomacy-driven trade in luxury goods, further large-scale,long-distance raids into the area became economically unrewarding. Thesurvivors, who were numerous and included most of the middling classesof rural landowners and town-dwellers, reorganized themselves on a verylocal basis and evidently could not—or elected not to—replace the missingelites. With the weaknesses of chariot warfare exposed, these societieswere forced by circumstances to rely on locally recruited infantry forcesfor defense against residual raiders and each other. They naturally soughtto maximize the number of fighters economically capable of equipping themselvesfor combat, and those proto-citizen soldiers naturally extracted a politicalprice for their services—i.e., a voice in the running of the localpolis. The need to equip masses of troops drove the development of ironweaponry, which, while inferior to bronze in most respects, had the virtueof being relatively plentiful and cheap.

Objectively, these circumstances must have applied to all the post-palatial,early iron-age societies in the eastern Mediterranean area. The earlyHebrews clearly relied on a mass infantry and were hostile to the institutionof kingship. But geographical considerations, particularly the fragmentedlandscape of Greece and the relative isolation of the Greeks from thetraditional centers of power in the Near East, meant that the Greek poleishad time to mature politically and militarily before they were forcedto contend with a powerful Near Eastern empire like Persia. Israel, incontrast, was constantly under assault from without, forced to unite underkings for self-defense, and successively conquered by Assyrians, Babylonians,and Persians centuries before Greece came under serious external assault.Further, the Greeks had ready access to the sea and a tradition of seafaring.It was proto-capitalist Greek mercantilism, rather than the needs of anarrow palace elite, that led to the rebirth of both literacy and tradein Greece, and it was the sea that permitted the Greeks to spread theircolonies and their political model throughout the central Mediterranean.The constant but limited warfare among the archaic Greek city-states honedtheir military skills and led them to maximize their military manpower,but did not cause a lot of destruction in Greece proper. This warfare,combined with the Greeks’ recognition of clear boundaries between warand peace, meant that at any given time many city-states had surplus warriorsin need of employment. Greek mercenaries, like their late-medieval Swisscounterparts, became ubiquitous—with veterans bringing back valuable intelligenceof the wider world.

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Thus were the core of Western civilization and its military arm forged.There are certainly elements of geographical determinism here, but theseelements were powerfully shaped by unique historical contingencies. Hansonis very clear in understanding that the survival of this experiment viavictory at Salamis in 480 BC was a very close call, a matter of contingency.The advantages granted to the Greeks by their political and military culturewere very nearly counterbalanced by the disadvantages of their disunityand dithering. But success in the struggle with Persia infused the Greekswith a confidence that led them to self-consciously pursue the uniqueaspects they had come to recognize in their own culture, exploring theirmeaning in brilliant political experimentation and philosophizing. TheGreeks even engaged in a certain political evangelism, which the Italians(Etruscans, Latins, and others) and Phoenicians certainly picked up on.Thus, even as the Greeks themselves exhausted their energies in new andmore destructive internal struggles, and then diluted their culture intrying to digest Alexander’s huge eastern conquests, the Latins, Etruscans,and Carthaginians continued evolving the new Western model.

Of Carnage And Culture

The ways in which various Mediterranean peoples defined themselves—amatter of culture—was driven by historical contingencies and had a lotto do with how they adapted to their political and military niches. TheHebrews had come from disparate origins. (The word hapiru originallymeant something like “vagrant” or “landless scum,” but in the late bronzeage also took on connotations of “mercenary footsoldier.”) However, Israel’sculture created a myth of a singular origin and the Jews became a closedethnicity. The Greeks had a sense both of the complexity of their originsand of being a unique nation, but rigid local particularisms kept themdivided. The Romans, like the Hebrews, had eclectic origins, but theywere evidently pretty comfortable with that fact: Their national myths,political institutions, and ready ability to assimilate new peoples intothe Roman community reflected this eclecticism. Ultimately, in significantpart because of this flexible sense of identity, Rome was able to reworkthe Greek city-state model and make it function on the scale of a truenation-state—so successfully that it outgrew the feasible scale of eithercity-state or nation-state and grew into an empire encompassing the entireWestern world.

Alas, universal empire—despite the manifest virtues of Western cultureand the Pax Romanum—was a dead end for the West. The Roman Republic’scultural and political institutions were unable to withstand the concentrationof wealth and the attendant power that its conquests had put into thehands of a small class of politicians like Marius and Sulla, Caesar andCrassus. After many destructive civil wars, Augustus “restored” the Republic—genuinelypreserving many of its local institutions, but fatally centralizing keypolitical, economic, and military functions. Roman civilization lost thevital evolutionary qualities of variation and adaptability. The momentumprovided to the Empire by deeply engrained traditions of local autonomynonetheless carried the West forward for a few more centuries.

Eventually, however, the concentration of real power among an ever-narrowingand self-similar class left the Empire tottering on too tiny a leadershipbase—that is, the layer of free individuals accustomed to making decisionsfor themselves. Left without avenues to political influence, capable individualswho during the late Republic or early Empire might have become local bureaucratsor military officers instead retreated into preoccupations like thoseoffered by the mystery religions. These at least offered them some scopefor self-expression, but left local society with a leadership steepedin priestly but not military or economic skills. (Ironically, this permitteda version of Rome to survive, in a very real but radically different form,down to the present day—in the guise of the Catholic Church.) Rome’s longslide into collapse was characterized by a multitude of local failures—social,political, economic, and military. Its decision-makers were too few andtoo far away to understand and act effectively on those disparate problems.The late Empire was simply overwhelmed by too many crises—internal politicaland economic crises, external military threats, and possibly environmentalchanges—occurring all at once.

Carnage And Culture Pdf

The late Roman armies ran short of manpower, not because of a declinein absolute numbers (though that seems to have happened to a significantdegree as well, perhaps because of the concomitant economic collapse), but becauseof a decline in the numbers able to understand and practice military disciplineas it had been understood by the free men of the classical republics.There was an even greater decline in the class able to inspire, mobilize,and lead them. The urban cultures that had provided the wellspring ofWestern politics and culture became irrelevant to the late Roman leadership.Rome itself was abandoned as the political capital of the West well beforeit fell to barbarian armies, and power gravitated into the hands of asmall, dispersed, landed, rural elite.

The imperial leadership recognized its dilemma, of course, promptingthe Emperors repeatedly to divide the Empire into what modern Americanswould call CINCdoms. Unfortunately, this was no substitute for genuinedecentralization. In any case, late Roman political culture could nottolerate the existence of more than one true power center, and the Empire’sdeclining strength was wasted in recurrent efforts to forcibly reunitewhat desperate Roman strategists had intentionally sundered. The survivingeastern half of the Empire eventually came up with the much more flexible(and controllable) Theme system of strategic decentralization,but far too late to save the West.

And then there was the problem of lead plumbing, of course, which wemust reluctantly leave for discussion at another time and place.

Fortunately, the influx of a free barbarian warrior class, at least partiallyadapted to Roman methods, helped to redress the manpower problems of thelate Roman world. This led to victories like the one Hanson describesat Poitiers in 732 AD, preserving the West from the Muslim conquests thatwould ultimately lead much of the rest of Eurasia and Africa into an evolutionary cul de sac. The disintegration of the Empire in the West and theevolution of feudalism began to recreate local elites, as did the rebirthof independent cities. Feudalism by itself could have led in any numberof directions, but the Greco-Roman intellectual heritage was sufficientlystrong that the military, and then economic, recovery of the West ledto renewed progress along distinctively Western lines. The geographicand now linguistic fragmentation of Europe continued to promote politicalfragmentation, but the memory of the Roman political achievement meantthat the new Europe would not be limited to the small scale of the classicalcity-state. From the early renaissance forward (actually, starting fromthe somewhat abortive Carolingian renaissance), European states soughtwith varying visions to recreate the Roman model of the citizen soldier—thiswas Machiavelli’s dream. The soldiers of the French Revolution and ofthe Third Reich (very different experiments aimed at harnessing the talentsand initiative of the people to the service of the state) all marchedbehind reproductions of the legionary eagles.

The failure of any Western state to achieve hegemony, however, and thenthe break-up of medieval Christian unity, meant that the Roman mistakeof political unification did not recur to stifle the reemerging Westerndynamo. Horrified by the descent into anarchy and barbarism occasionedby the religious wars, and especially after the Peace of Westphalia endedthe fratricidal Thirty Years’ War in 1648, Europeans sought order in thecreation of a set of strongly centralized but limited states. These stateswere defined by their determination to maintain a monopoly on the legitimateexercise of violence (which is, in fact, Weber’s definition of the state).They put a substantial stop to large-scale internal violence, especiallyviolence fostered by religious sectarians, mercenary freebooters, andthe local nobility. Through a system of royal courts and inspectorates,they offered the rule of law instead. Increasingly under the culturalor intellectual sway of the “age of reason” and then of the Enlightenment,rulers sought to operate on principles of legitimacy and of rational self-interest.Frederick the Great—an “enlightened despot,” abolisher of capital punishment(except for treason) and the self-styled “first servant of the state”—wasas much a cultural figure and economic manager as he was a military leader.

These developments were driven by the brutal experience of the religiouswars, which forced Western civilization to recognize that Europe’s politicaland religious fragmentation could not be overcome by any one player. Accordingly,Europe’s ruling classes came to accept the permanent existence of a multilateralbalance-of-power system among the independent states. The new system waskept in balance by constantly shifting alliances and limited wars foughtto redress perceived or potential shifts in that balance. The orderlydispersal of military, political, and economic power fueled the growthof local and national elites everywhere in Europe. With the new limitedwarfare of the post-Westphalian era, Western Europe entered upon a periodin which constant small-scale internal scuffling led to continuous militaryimprovement, with all its bureaucratic, financial, and technological accessories.The relative absence of serious attempts to overthrow the European system,however, allowed Westerners to focus their burgeoning energies outwards.Substantial European domination of the world followed. When theEuropeans eventually did make energetic attempts to resolve the internaltensions created by their balance-of-power system, especially the effortsof 1914-18 and 1939-45, they cost continental Europe its hegemony butthrew world power into the hands of other Western or heavily Westernizedstates. The follow-on struggle was between the American-dominated Westernalliance and the deviant Marxist Westernism of the Soviet Bloc. It waswon decisively by the side that more truly reflected the Western culturaltradition, as much if not more by its economic and cultural supremacythan by its military skills.

Thus cultural factors were crucial to the consistency, direction, anddrive of Western political-military evolution. The unique Western literarytradition helped transmit that culture across serious disruptions likethe collapse of Rome. But the environmental, geographic, and topographicalfactors described by Diamond and even by Hanson himself were equally crucial,at least until the point where the cultural dynamics of the West becameso overwhelmingly powerful in their own right that no other culture couldreally compete. And the unique ways in which these factors combined werealways moderated by contingency—the precise manner in which Mycenaen societywas decapitated, the delay in the East’s assault on the embryonic West,the key battles that could have gone either way.

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The approach I’ve taken above demonstrates the utility of combining Hanson’sthesis with other ideas he rejected. He regards these ideas as competitorsto his own, but they are in reality quite different in nature and entirelycomplementary. Thus Hanson makes a great contribution in giving the West’sunique culture its due, but the value of this contribution is seriouslyundermined by his sneers at other factors and at the thinkers who havesought to explore them. The real world is a multicausal place.

Not that the book is without other serious flaws. Some of these are stylisticor even syntactical—the book abounds with sloppy phrases like “all enemiesof Rome usually died….” (p385). The reader is subjected to strange malapropisms, e.g., “abrogate” when the author evidently means “delegate” (p321),“special compensation” instead of “special dispensation” (p314), and “resides”instead of “recedes” (p327). The general reader who is Hanson’s targetmay be frustrated by the occasional untranslated quotation from foreignsources. The section on Vietnam is betrayed by the clash between Hanson’sbalanced intellect and his bitter partisan stance in America's present-dayCulture Wars: He argues furiously that the war was lost by a disloyalpress and a small, vocal, misguided, ultra-liberal minority—but then statesquite clearly that gross political and strategic mistakes by main-streamAmerican leaders lost it first. Navitel crack windows ce. More broadly, the book is full of redundanciescaused by its near stream-of-consciousness organization, as Hanson repeatedlysweeps back and forth over the events. It is nonetheless pretty easy reading—theinherent drama of the events Hanson describes will probably carry mostreaders past these oddities.

Hanson also makes odd errors when he wanders outside his areas of expertise.For example, he misrepresents the Roman corvus as a derrick forupending enemy ships (a trick reportedly used by Archimedes against the Romans when they besieged Syracuse), rather than describing it correctly as a shipbornebridge that locked an opposing vessel in place and facilitated boardingby naval infantry (p231). This is unfortunate, since a correct understandingwould have reinforced his points not only about Western inventiveness,but about heavy infantry and shock tactics as well. Nor does he graspthe difference between the artilleryman’s canister and grapeshot (p225).There are many references to “landed infantry” that puzzled me: I knowwhat a “landed aristocracy” is, but what is landed infantry? Marines ashore?No, that can’t be it. I thought at first that it referred to an infantrymanned by the landowning classes, but that interpretation does not seemto stand up to Hanson’s actual usage of the term. He seems not to graspthe agricultural importance of the pre-Aswan-dam Nile flooding that annuallyrenewed Egypt’s fertility (pp17-18). His understanding of Japan is shallow,so his treatment—while noting some of post-Meiji Japan’s key failures—failsentirely to account for its unique successes in adapting to the Westernchallenge. I suspect that many of his specific examples of Western virtuecan be replicated or overmatched by anecdotes familiar to specialistsin various non-Western areas. Game gamehouse full crack. For instance, Cortez’s “innovative” useof warships built in friendly territory, disassembled, and reassembledin the lake surrounding Tenochtitlán, was merely a small-scalevariation on Mehmet the Conqueror’s (recent and quite well known in theWest) movement of a much larger Ottoman fleet overland during the siegeof Constantinople in 1453. Nonetheless, I believe the overall thesis willwithstand serious scrutiny, if only because the immense achievements ofthe West are so inescapably manifest in the world today (at least, toeveryone but college professors).

Of course, any of us who want to write ambitious, sweeping, synthetichistorical studies like this one have such gaps in personal knowledgeand inevitably make such errors in our drafts. But that’s what editorsand colleagues are there to save us from, if we would only take the troubleto use them. Editorial problems like the ones I describe typically occurwhen one relies too heavily on one’s close relatives and students to proofreadone’s work (as Hanson evidently did), or when an author is in too biga hurry to add to his or her list of publications. The latter tendencyis not infrequent among academic military historians, who often feel besiegedin their politically correct departments and look to a thick Vita as armor. Of course, it might also be accounted for by simple greed, sincemilitary history is the one species of history that actually makes money—anotherreason military historians are sometimes unpopular on campus.

But these editorial gripes serve mostly to fill up the space availablefor this review essay, to demonstrate my lofty scholarly balance, andto gratify my own delusions of omnipotence. The book overall is a goodread and the positive points it makes are well worth making. My more seriouscomplaint is about capable, ambitious historians’ unfortunate tendencyto insist on the primacy of their own narrow, idiosyncratic solutions,rather than trying to integrate their fundamental and valuable ideas withthose of other thinkers and disciplines. Single-factor analyses are wrongby definition. I prefer to think that we scholars are engaged in a collectiveeffort to make sense of the universe we live in, not in a dog-eat-dog competitionto see who can leave the biggest individual imprint on the meme pool.

Christopher Bassford
National War College
2002

Endnotes

*1. John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York,Knopf, 1993).

*2. Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization: TheMyth of the Peaceful Savage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

*3. William H. McNeil, The Pursuit of Power: Technology,Armed Force and Society Since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1984 ed.); Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers:Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York:Vintage Books, 1987).

*4. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fatesof Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997).

Carnage And Culture

*5. Robert Drews, The End of the Bronze Age: Changesin Warfare and the Catastrophe of ca.1200 B.C. (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1993).