Donald Kagan
Donald Kagan (May 1, 1932 – August 6, 2021) was an American historian and classicist at Yale University specializing in ancient Greece. He formerly taught in the Department of History at Cornell University. Kagan was considered among the foremost American scholars of Greek history and is notable for his four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War.
Quotes
[edit]- Seeing what Hitler and the Nazis had done, I knew there was real evil in the world, and after that, I couldn’t take pacifists seriously.
- Interview by Bruce Fellman, "Lion in Winter", Yale Alumni Magazine (April 2002)
- The peace does not keep itself, and though it may be intellectually unfashionable to say so, the world needs a policeman.
- Interview by Bruce Fellman, "Lion in Winter", Yale Alumni Magazine (April 2002)
- We are the product of Western civilization, so it’s necessary to understand yourself before you can understand anyone else.
- Interview by Bruce Fellman, "Lion in Winter", Yale Alumni Magazine (April 2002)
- In my judgment, the best history is one that tells a story and combines it with analysis. The natural way for an historian to analyze things includes answering with a tale. The combination of telling an interesting story and answering questions along the way that an intelligent person is interested in hearing about--that's history at its peak, in my opinion.
- Interview by Bruce Cole, "Donald Kagan: Interview", Historians in the News (June 2, 2005)
- A vulgar form of Nihilism, I claim, has a remarkable influence in our educational system today, a system rotting from the head down, so chiefly in universities, but all the way down to elementary schools. The consequences of the victory of such ideas, I believe, would be enormous. If both religion and reason are removed, all that remains is will and power, where the only law is the law of tooth and claw.
- "Introduction to Ancient Greek History", Open Yale Courses, CLCV 205 (Fall 2007)
- Concerns about the decline of liberty in our whole polity is what threatens all of the aspects of it, including democracy.
- Interview by Matthew Kaminski, "'Democracy May Have Had Its Day'", The Wall Street Journal (April 26, 2013)
Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (2013)
[edit]- Princeton University Press
- Unlike any prior civilization, the culture of the Greek polis combined citizen militias with the rule of law. That involved having a broad middle class of independent small landowners that met in assemblies where the votes of these nonelite determined laws, and foreign and domestic policy. These smallholders gained in status as population growth in the ninth and eighth centuries forced an agricultural revolution. Labor-intensive farming of marginal lands came to replace the Dark Age pastoral economy. This required a growth in private landownership, which motivated georgoi to assume the risks involved in cultivating land that was unproductive using traditional farming techniques. These farmers created the ritual of hoplite warfare to decide disputes in a manner that did not contradict their agrarian agenda. The georgoi and their agrarian ideology became the driving force behind the hoplite revolution during the early seventh century.
- Introduction, p. xvi
- The development of hoplite warfare took place in this context of novel agrarianism, which promoted a particular type of moral excellence.
- Ch. 1, p. 34; co-authored with Gregory F. Viggiano
