Victor Davis Hanson
Professor of Classics
California State University, Fresno
Chris Bray replies: Victor Davis Hanson notes, from high atop his pedestal, that I am a freelance writer, not a historian, and that his book has been "assessed favorably" in publications "in America, Europe, and Asia." This is a familiar tactic, of course, and one most recently used by discredited gun historian Michael Bellesiles against law professor James Lindgren, one of his critics: Who is this amateur to attack a highly respected professional historian?
About those favorable assessments Hanson cites, here's Noel Malcolm in the Sunday Telegraph: "Victor Hanson tends to pile up his arguments like a barrister in court, convinced that the more he has of them, the better; he also tends -- again, like a lawyer -- to pick and choose, seizing whatever will make his point in one aspect of the case and then silently omitting it if it does not fit the text."
That's a pretty consistent theme. The Independent of London compares Hanson to Dr. Strangelove, noting that his book is "mired in self-contradiction," and continuing, "The faults of this book are legion, so there is space to concentrate only on the most egregious." The Sydney Morning Herald agrees: "While his thesis is at least partially correct, the great defect of the book is that Hanson has an a priori argument about the superiority of Western military culture (and the West generally), fitting the evidence to it, rather than distilling the appropriate conclusions from the evidence. His first battle study illustrates this."
As for Hanson's remarkable misreading of my review, let's turn to the text. Hanson writes that I think his book is about "military freedom," and puts that reductionist phrase in direct quotes. Later he writes, "Bray...inserts quotation marks to characterize what I, in fact, did not write." I challenge him to identify where, in my review, the phrase "military freedom" appears. Victor Davis Hanson has inserted quotation marks to characterize what I, in fact, did not write.
I should have been more careful in one place. As Hanson notes, the 19th-century British were not simply "ruled by monarchs."
I stand by my review.
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