Guns, Germs, and Steel
Hanson is the author of the 2001 book "Carnage and Culture" (Doubleday), published in Great Britain and the Commonwealth countries as "Why the West Has Won", in which 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 preeminence and disagrees as well with environmental or geographical determinist explanations such as those put forth by Jared Diamond in "Guns, Germs, and Steel" (1997).