Niall Ferguson has again written a brilliant book, this time in defense of traditional top-down principles of governing the wild market and the wilder international order ... Not everyone will agree, but everyone will be charmed and educated ... We see this happening today, with social media and 24-hour news, fake and genuine. But, as Mr. Ferguson shows, it has happened many times before. His short chapters are lucid snapshots of a world history of Towers and Squares, filled with gracefully deployed learning ... The Square and the Tower is always readable, intelligent, original. You can swallow a chapter a night before sleep and your dreams will overflow with scenes of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Napoleon, Kissinger. In 400 pages you will have restocked your mind. Do it.
...goes a long way toward redressing this pervasive lack of perspective to a concept central to the contemporary technological 'revolution': networks ... One does not have to completely buy in to the book’s reframing of key social and political turning points to find the narrative both captivating and compelling. Whether describing the surprisingly ineffective 18th century network of the mysterious Illuminati that continue to be the subject of crank conspiracy theorists or the shockingly effective 20th century network of Cambridge University spies working for the Soviets, Professor Ferguson manages both to tell a good story and provide important insight into the specific qualities that power successful networks ... The important lesson of The Square and the Tower is that the existence of a network, or network effects for that matter, should be the beginning not the end of the analysis. The critical questions relate to the network’s key characteristics and how it interacts with other networks and hierarchies.
The Square and the Tower will not disappoint readers who have come to expect from Ferguson ambition, erudition, originality and expansive historical panoramas. These often come mixed with telling anecdotes, illuminating minutiae, fun facts and even some facile one-liners that, while entertaining, don’t add much to the argument ... Ferguson notes that the book 'brings together theoretical insights from myriad disciplines, ranging from economics to sociology, from neuroscience to organizational behavior.' Unfortunately, it is not clear how he deploys this theoretical arsenal to support his main thesis ... The Square and the Tower, however, also suffers because its main unit of analysis, the social network, is too imprecise a concept to provide a solid foundation from which to launch the book’s epic theorizing ... Nonetheless, the networks-and-hierarchies dichotomy does work as a narrative device that allows a gifted storyteller to take his readers on a fascinating tour of world history.
The book is a history told with the focus on the way networks and hierarchies shaped events. This approach is engaging but not always helpful. It is unclear that we gain much by describing Pizarro’s conquistadors and their allies as a network opposing Atahualpa’s hierarchical Inca society. When it does work, however, it works well ... No book written by a historian of Ferguson’s gifts is likely to disappoint, but The Square and the Tower does have one obvious weakness: it’s not at all clear that the author takes his own premise seriously.
...remarkably interesting ... The Square and the Tower gains in fascination as it tells these kinds of stories, always surprising and always thought-provoking in the places and entities it chooses to pause and examine, everything from the Mafia to the Soviet Union of Stalin ... Ferguson's book ranges with this kind of easy confidence over broad stretches of history, and although there's occasional overreaching, The Square and the Tower does an effective job of laying the groundwork for nothing less than a parallel accounting of power since the Enlightenment ... in addition to being provocative history, may prove to be a bellwether work of the Internet Age.
...sweeping, stimulating and enlightening ... Ferguson’s superb, thought-provoking book brings these events vividly to life and will help readers view history from a unique perspective.
As has been true of Ferguson before — one thinks of his insistence that the West’s ‘edge’ can be explained by six ‘killer apps’ — his hobby horse du jour sometimes rides roughshod over the facts … Ferguson’s fascination with networks isn’t the only hobby horse he rides in this book; his conservative politics similarly tend to shape his view of the facts … There are some interesting nuggets in this book. Ferguson is particularly good when wrestling with the role of networks in shaping current political and economic disparities, and in asking whether we need hierarchies such as nation states to regulate network excesses. But there’s more and better where that came from, and it doesn’t require swallowing cant presented as history.
Ferguson shines most when we are treated to his own intuitive leaps. He has little trouble jumping from, say, the Illuminati, a secret society in 18th century Germany peddling Enlightenment ideas, who sound a bit like the worthy sorts running the BBC Trust, only to end up as fodder for everevolving conspiracy theories about groups who 'really' run the world ... Occasionally, it feels like we have entered arcane byways — niceties of Inca social organisation and the like — where the broader implications are vague. His sharpest insights are often about the role of networks in fomenting and sustaining political power.
Ferguson, a noted conservative, is refreshingly evenhanded. In discussing the viral qualities of conspiracy theory, for instance, it’s clear that he regards conspiracymongers such as Alex Jones as noxious twerps while admitting, 'this may be lunatic, but lunacy that appeals to more than a fringe.' It is also clear that the author admires networkers more than hierarchs such as the current president—who, as he points out, insists, 'characteristically,' that his New York tower has 10 more floors than it really does. By the same token, Ferguson is scornful of hierarchs who use the tools of networkers ineptly, such as the data mavens who botched the Affordable Care Act computer systems. Making profitable use of information science, Ferguson offers a novel way of examining data that will be highly intriguing to students of history and current affairs.
Ferguson’s occasional use of mathematical network-theory charts and jargon doesn’t add much to his analysis; still, his typically bold rethinking of historical currents, painted on the broadest canvas, offers many stimulating insights on the tense interplay between order, oppression, freedom, and anarchy.
