“The Square And The Tower” by Niall Ferguson [Book Review]

“The Square and the Tower,” the latest offering by Niall Ferguson, hits you with an almost mystical premise: that networks have permeated history’s most decisive moments. The fact that human beings are social animals is not the revelation, but rather how great historical events can be reanalyzed in terms of Ferguson’s new framework. This new lens that Ferguson offers us is in terms of NETWORKS versus HIERARCHIES, and it’s so eloquent one is naturally tempted to think: “why didn’t I think of that?”

STAR RATINGS:

NIALL FERGUSON BOOK STATS:

• Published 2018
• 563 total pages
• 431 pages of text
• 60 chapters
• List of 50 illustrations
• Two 4-page color picture insets
• 1 short Appendix section
• 1 massive References section
• 1 massive Bibliography
• 1 Index section
• Hardcover available

MIND BLOWN! COOL THINGS I LEARNED:

• The concepts of HIERARCHIES and NETWORKS are opposing patterns
• “Weak” networks are stronger than “strong” networks
• When conquering hierarchies, networks are able to invade them
• The role of networks in reanalyzing history needed to be brought forth

NIALL FERGUSON BOOK REVIEW:

“The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, From the Freemasons to Facebook” by Niall Ferguson is a study in brilliant contrasts. On the one hand the book meets the ‘Occam’s Razor’ standard of being eloquent, on the other hand it overindulges in loquacious explanation. It’s a great book, it’s just way to wide of a scope for me as a reader to appreciate the finer intricacies of his theory – too much macro-, not enough micro-analysis.

This book could have been distilled into an abstract or short treatise on the subject of social networks. Point of fact, the first few chapters are brilliant in and of themselves; those chapters, constituting the first part of the book (10 chapters in all, yet only 55 pages!), form the core of his theoretical framework. The remaining 376 pages exhaustingly takes on ALL of human history from “prehistoric hominids” (p.59) to the election of Donald Trump, bitcoin, and the EU, even attempting to traverse the future. Yikes.

Those 376 pages, or 85% of the book, are rookie-level ambitious in my opinion. It dilutes Ferguson’s credibility to try and include everything at the expense of everything! As an economist he should very well understand the QUALITY vs. QUANTITY conundrum and the concept of ‘equilibrium.’ Perhaps I’m not in his target audience.

All Niall Ferguson would have needed to do would have been to provide fewer examples, tearing each of those apart with his proven erudition and sagacity and framing those examples as indispensable to his theory. Look, he is a world-renown author who I look up to which is why writing this is giving me acid reflux. In the same vein, I’ve had a few graduate professors who I thought the stars of and ended up emulating in my career who, on an average day in class, might offer up life-changing theories in Linguistics only to waste the next 80 minutes pontificating about it. Someone get me some Prilosec, here it comes again.

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SIDE NOTE: Books I’ve read and loved by Niall Ferguson: “The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000″ and “The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World.”

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The irony of his ‘chuck it all in’ approach is that reading “The Square and the Tower” is like trolling through a busy Twitter feed, it’s all too much all too fast! Everything just bleeds together. It’s like blazing down the freeway at 150 miles an hour, you can’t really appreciate the scenery. “Hey, dude, was that a mountain we just passed?”

In all fairness to this book review, when Niall Ferguson makes a point it’s REALLY, REALLY good! For example, in his treatment of the Spanish in South America in the 16th and 17th centuries he offers us a great reanalysis of events as networks destroying hierarchies:

“…in South America fusion was the order of the day. . . This was typical of the way the first generation of conquistadors established a new ‘multicultural family web’ designed to legitimize their own position atop the hierarchical system the had taken over. . . The European ‘conquerors’ not only took over existing systems of administration and land management; they fused genetically with indigenous societies.”

Ferguson 2018: 79

If I can accuse Niall Ferguson of one more thing, it’s writing great titles! His books have consistently been incredible eye-catching, brain-manipulating marketing masterpieces. This book is no exception. What I also really love about “The Square and the Tower” is it is loaded with great graphics and illustrations – there are 51 illustrations and 27 plates! They are networked really well throughout the book.

Esteemed author Niall Ferguson’s latest work is a thin thread held together by his convincing ability to tell a story. The underlying theory of ‘networks’ versus ‘hierarchies’ is brilliant; however, the presentation is a bit too spasmodic for my liking. The ultimate irony of this book, for me, is that it is a metaphoric attempt at fitting a square peg into a round tower; forcing an ideological network into a publishable hierarchy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

• Ferguson, Niall. 2018. The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook. New York: Penguin Press.
• ISBN-13: 978-0735222915
• Amazon Link