The Square and the Tower by Niall Ferguson
A brilliant recasting of the turning points in world history, including the one we're living through, as a collision between old power hierarchies and new social networks.
“Captivating and compelling.” —The New York Times
"Niall Ferguson has again written a brilliant book...In 400 pages you will have restocked your mind. Do it." —The Wall Street Journal
“The Square and the Tower, in addition to being provocative history, may prove to be a bellwether work of the Internet Age.” —Christian Science Monitor
Most history is hierarchical: it's about emperors, presidents, prime ministers and field marshals. It's about states, armies and corporations. It's about orders from on high. Even history "from below" is often about trade unions and workers' parties. But what if that's simply because hierarchical institutions create the archives that historians rely on? What if we are missing the informal, less well documented social networks that are the true sources of power and drivers of change?
The 21st century has been hailed as the Age of Networks. However, in The Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson argues that networks have always been with us, from the structure of the brain to the food chain, from the family tree to freemasonry. Throughout history, hierarchies housed in high towers have claimed to rule, but often real power has resided in the networks in the town square below. For it is networks that tend to innovate. And it is through networks that revolutionary ideas can contagiously spread. Just because conspiracy theorists like to fantasize about such networks doesn't mean they are not real.
From the cults of ancient Rome to the dynasties of the Renaissance, from the founding fathers to Facebook, The Square and the Tower tells the story of the rise, fall and rise of networks, and shows how network theory--concepts such as clustering, degrees of separation, weak ties, contagions and phase transitions--can transform our understanding of both the past and the present.
Just as The Ascent of Money put Wall Street into historical perspective, so The Square and the Tower does the same for Silicon Valley. And it offers a bold prediction about which hierarchies will withstand this latest wave of network disruption--and which will be toppled.
The Square and the Tower is the rare book that is a must read, not only for armchair intellectuals like myself, but also for academics, politicians, CEOs and those in any kind of position of responsibility. I say this not because the book is always correct, or even on point, but because several of the ideas emphasized in this book are important enough that they should be considered, debated upon and ultimately deemed useful or falsified by the intelligentsia.
Essentially, the core idea in this book is that the role and influence of social networks throughout history has been downplayed by historians because of their reliance on state archives which tend to stress the role of hierarchies. Because of this, the rise in the power of social networks spawned by the computer age is mistakenly thought to be an entirely new phenomenon. In fact, argues Ferguson, the struggle between networks and hierarchies is at least as old as human history.
To marshal support for this argument Ferguson begins the book with a summary of network theory. He then retells the story of modernity from this perspective leading up to an ultimate chapter considering the future of human civilization. You certainly cannot say that Ferguson aims too small.
There are some unresolved tensions in this narrative. Some of the chapters rely on real applications of network theory while some are more anecdotal. This is because the idea of what is a social network seems to grow more and more
expansive. Eventually, Ferguson writes that hierarchies themselves are a type of social network. Of course, he is right in a sense, but this tends to blunt the paradigm of a dichotomy between networks and hierarchies. In addition, if every relationship between human beings is a social network then network theory does explain all of human history. But isn’t this basically then a tautology?
Ferguson also goes on many tangents. For example, his vociferous arguments that the culture of Islam is a key element of Arab terrorism versus seeing terrorists as fanatics from any religion does not seem to really be central to the book’s themes.
Nevertheless, Ferguson has either achieved a landmark accomplishment in the telling of history, with important consequences for our current societies, or he has overstressed the importance of networks in modern history. That is a question for professional historians to decide. To become acquainted with this perspective, to see new technologies and new forms of communication through this lens, is something all persons with some share of responsibility for society should at least consider. And, I might add, the book is fun and insightful reading for armchair intellectuals as well.
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October 7, 2017
Format: Paperback
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” state Marx and Engels in ‘The Communist Manifesto’. According to Niall Ferguson’s latest book - ‘The Square and the Tower. Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power’ – the history of all hitherto existing society is rather the history of the tension between networks and hierarchies; a fact hitherto largely ignored by historians because networks characteristically “do not leave an orderly paper trail”, although a subsidiary factor is that the study of networks such as the Illuminati, the Freemasons, the Rothschild family and the Bilderberg Group has been widely discredited by the ravings of conspiracy theorists.
According to Ferguson there have been two periods in which networks empowered by new technology, enabling ideas to spread virally, have been massively disruptive of established hierarchical structures, namely, the late fifteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, powered by the printing press, and from the 1970s to the present day, powered by the personal computer and the internet.
There is obviously much to be said for this point of view. As Ferguson says, “Without Gutenberg, Luther might well have become just another heretic whom the Church burned at the stake, like Jan Hus”, although doesn’t this mean that it would be better to paraphrase Marx and Engels to read that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of new technologies? There’s also the fact that Luther would almost certainly have burnt at the stake had it not been for the protection which he received from the Saxon princes, Frederick the Wise (1483-1525) and his brother John the Constant (1468-1532). Ferguson does not mention this fact, although he does refer to the crucial role of the princes of the Schmalkaldic League (formed in 1531) in consolidating Protestant gains. As German princes can obviously be taken both to embody hierarchy within their realms and to constitute a network when they form a league, this suggests another problem with Ferguson’s thesis, namely, that whereas towers and squares are clearly sharply delineated the concepts they symbolise for Ferguson are often anything but.
This is not to say that ‘The Square and the Tower’ is a bad book. On the contrary, like anything written by Ferguson it is brimming with bright ideas expressed with great flair. Ferguson - like David Cannadine - is living proof that it is possible to write prolifically, persuasively and profoundly for a popular audience. But whilst this book provides many insights and makes one consider the past in a new light I do not think its prism is sufficiently luminous to win many long-term converts.
This is a wide-ranging work that references the Illuminati, the Taiping Rebellion, Pizarro's conquest of the Incas, the novels of John Buchan, and Queen Victoria, to give only a few examples. Basically Ferguson maintains that we are currently in a period of dramatic rapid change caused by technological innovation unequaled since the late 1400s and early 1500s, when Gutenberg's printing press upended the medieval world. Perhaps the most important chapters come at the end, where Ferguson analyzes the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US election.
Ferguson writes clearly, aiming at the general readership without sacrificing scholarship. I especially appreciated his analyses of the 2008 financial crisis and its continuing repercussions. The Square And The Tower (a reference to the center of the medieval city of Siena in Italy) will certainly not be the only attempt to reckon with our contemporary world's place in history, but it will definitely be considered one of the more thought-provoking and provocative.
Does the world need another book about networks? It absolutely does. Though it's by now a cliche that everything is connected, the available literature seems to cluster around the extremes of either pop-scientific treatment (the most insightful example: Barabasi's 2002 book "Linked"), or uninformed Silicon Valley technobabble (which typically appears to assume that there was no recorded human history between the bronze age and the advent of the iPhone). A book that actually uses human history as a "big data" exercise of tracing the impact of networks vs. hierarchies would be highly welcome.
That is what "The Square and the Tower" promises to be, but alas it doesn't quite get there. Its shortcoming is that it doesn't attempt much generalizing analysis. So it's a whirlwind tour through a millennium of history, describing networks and hierarchies that have left some kind of impact. That's good stuff: from the Illuminati, to Keynes' secret society at Cambridge, to Stalin's terror regime, to Henry Kissinger's personal diplomatic network, to the conquistadores in the New World; all of those stories are meticulously researched (and footnoted) and engagingly described.
But I'm never quite sure what I'm supposed to take away from it. The book certainly puts today's so seemingly unique viral networks into perspective: a single U.S. presidential election influenced by fake news on Facebook is nothing against what happened after Martin Luther let his theses loose on the new communications infrastructure of his day, the printing press. But it gets murky and hard to generalize beyond that: for example, the book describes how extremely viral Lenin's 1917 revolution was, and it later makes similar claims of virality for the Arab Spring - but what are we to make of the fact that the Arab Spring had a lot more viral technology underpinning it, and yet it basically failed? That networks are powerful, or that they are not? And when are they one or the other? Too much of the book simply reads along the lines of "hey, look at this network over here!", without connecting it to a conclusion, or even to other observations in the course of the book. For example, the telegraph network in the 19th century certainly was a network that might tell us a thing or two about the impact of novel network technology in our civilization, but there isn't much to the story, except that it was mostly owned by one guy (which makes it a network, or a hierarchy?), who made a lot of money with it. The Germans attempted to win World War I by inciting jihad and rallying Muslims under Ottoman rule to revolt, and that failed because they talked to the wrong guys who weren't networked, whereas Lawrence of Arabia had a better network, and it worked for him. Stalin ran a brutal hierarchy, while the Nazis ran on "polycratic chaos", but what is the so what. When the book does make an attempt to synthesize, it jumps to pretty random conclusions: for example, the 2008 financial crisis supposedly broke out because "Lehman was the node with the highest betweenness centrality" (a favorite term) and therefore catastrophic when it failed; and Lehman's CEO Dick Fuld wasn't particularly well-liked or connected on Wall Street and that's why he wasn't bailed out. Both of these are naive conclusions that few in finance would accept (research on the financial crisis today views Lehman as a symptom, not a cause of the crisis).
I walked away thinking: lots of great stories in here, lots of great examples of both networks and hierarchies, and certainly very little technobabble about how a connected world will save us all - I wish someone would connect all these dots to make more sense of it all.
Niall Ferguson's Sqaure and Tower refer to hierarchical power structures versus more flat networks. He selects the timeframe of centuries and the span of all civilizations for his scope. He focuses primarily on the 15th-16th century and the time of the printing press and contrasts it with our current facebook/ google era. His thesis is the more subtle power of the flat networks, versus the conventional hierarchies. He shows the importance of weak links that connect people, as well the great reach that having a connected web provides. The most interesting sections of the book are when he shows the enormous and the enormity of the power of tyrants like Stalin and Hitler and how they built interconnected networks driven by terror and fear. The resulting destruction and depravity are already well known.
It is well worth reading for its grand scope and unique perspective. Power structures and relationships are something every person can identify with but Ferguson brings unique insights and an unprecedented level of depth. It is also eye-opening in the sense of showing how powerful the current networks are and by demonstrating through the past the awesome potential of any power structure to both enhance but also destroy societies. It is frightening to think of this in relation to the common mantras of today that imply government bureaucrats can solve all of society's ills.
Ferguson brilliantly gets us out of our comfort zone. If you aren't insulted (or at least disagree with) by something he writes somewhere along the way, you probably didn't pay attention.
He shakes us up, telling us that history is relevant, that the issues we are facing today aren't new. He scoffs at those drawing parallels to the 1930s, making an eloquent argument that parallels to the invention to the printing press might be more appropriate. Hierarchical structures were disrupted by networks then and now; back then, those disruptions led to the Dark Ages. He makes a chilling argument that anarchy and chaos are the natural consequence of today's social media revolution unless, well, read the book.
Ferguson doesn't have all the answers, but he asks important questions each one of us, as well as our policy makers, should reflect on. For example, when faced with cyber warfare, what are the implications of playing defense? offense? shaming? And how do we build resilient networks?
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