ferguson
Detail from “The Effects of Good Government in the Country”, a fresco by Ambrogio Lorenzetti

This article is a preview from the Winter 2018 edition of New Humanist

The Square and the Tower: Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power (Penguin) by Niall Ferguson

History seems simple to people outside the discipline: it is about the past. Historians go to archives to find out information; they reach back into the times before ours and pull out facts, like a fisherman sitting beside a lake baits their hook and waits. These facts add up to the story of what happened. But for many historians, this isn’t how it feels. Historians look at the past through the lens of the present. They look at the last 50 or 500 years, and see hundreds of different stories. Around those stories are all the gaps that we might never fill. When you see history like this, historians aren’t catching facts like fish, but are instead teasing apart the past as if they were unravelling a tapestry.

This interpretation of history as just one story out of all the possible stories that could be told makes some people uncomfortable. Some historians feel more comfortable pretending that the past can be uncovered or quantified. For those who want to believe that their history is dispassionate and objective, these ideas about competing narratives and blurry, messy stories are disquieting. Archival research starts to look like a fool’s game: why root through boxes of papers if you won’t uncover the truth? These researchers might look wistfully instead towards the hard sciences: research that builds on facts, methodologies that can be repeated, hypotheses that can be tested and proven.

Niall Ferguson, the historian and prominent conservative political commentator, does just this in his newest book. He looks to mathematics to borrow the ways of presenting data that network analysis offers. He argues that there are two ways of thinking about how the world is organised: the Square and the Tower. Ferguson takes these analogical images from mediaeval Siena and uses them to frame his book around the idea of hierarchies versus networks. Everything, the book implies, can be sorted into one of these two types of organisation. Societies, organisations, infrastructures, nations, empires, political ideologies and religions are either hierarchical – tightly controlled and organised from the top down – or networked, in which it is connectedness, not power, which really determines an individual’s importance. Ferguson comes out early in favour of the latter. “By choice,” he says, “I am more of a networks guy.”

The book contains 60 chapters, many running only to a few pages. It provides, therefore, a somewhat breathless romp through several hundred years of history – intended, presumably, to demonstrate the extent to which this model applies across time and space. Of course, networks and hierarchies exist in history, often simultaneously, often within the same nation or organisation. But moving between case studies so quickly feels like sleight of hand; there is the sense that the reader is given glimpses of ideas before their attention is slickly directed elsewhere.

Ferguson makes some broad claims at the beginning, shaping the reader’s interpretation of what follows. But many of these arguments are actually descriptive assertions. The word “network” does not appear in any of Shakespeare’s plays, apparently; it is unclear what inferences the reader is supposed to draw from this fact (was there no network at the court of Denmark? Are the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream sadly isolated?) Until 1880, books published in English were more likely to contain “hierarchy” than “network”, and here is a Google Books graph to prove it; what that says about the actual existence of these concepts prior to that date is again unclear.

Early in the book, Ferguson argues that historians have long paid too much attention to hierarchies and not enough to networks; he thinks that this is because networks lack “readily accessible archives”. If this were true, it would be a central criticism of the discipline. But it is only true if you discount huge swathes of historical scholarship. Social history, at its heart, focuses on the networks and connections between ordinary people rather than the hierarchies of power and politics; gender history has always prioritised interpersonal connections; imperial history focuses increasingly on the multiple overlapping linkages between metropole and periphery. These fields use creative approaches to sources that move away from those found in the “readily accessible archives” of governments and diplomats. Ferguson briefly acknowledges the existence of prosopography, which historians have used to trace the connections between people and ideas for decades, but dismisses it as “collective biography”. In the same paragraph, he rejects the work of “social(ist) historians” as simply narrating “rising and falling classes”. This is odd, given social historians’ enthusiasm for using social science methodology and quantitative methods in their research.

Where Ferguson’s approach differs from these other forms of history is in his exhaustive and somewhat exhausting embrace of network studies. The book contains a number of diagrams depicting various networks, such as the Bloomsbury group (arranged by sexual connections, rather than intellectual associations), the men and institutions involved in the development of the steam engine, the Chinese Communist Party, and jihadis, as they are linked on Twitter. At first glance, these images are convincing: the proof of Ferguson’s theories. But on second look, many are unusable – lacking key labels that would enable the reader to understand, for example, the strength of the connections between different nodes, or reproduced so small that the material cannot be legibly read.

At key moments, Ferguson drops his approach as a clinical analyst and reaches instead for moral judgement. A chapter on the “ring of five”, the Cambridge spy network of Philby and Burgess, is inflected with disgust about the behaviour of these men (elsewhere he writes that, while Oxford aspired to be “muscular, martial, imperial and heterosexual”, Cambridge instead embraced the “effete, pacifist, liberal and homosexual”). One of the final chapters, which shifts from the “Arab Spring” to the largely online networks of Islamic radicalism and terrorism, criticises Obama’s assertions that ISIS was morally “nothing to do with Islam” and describes jihadi fighters as “losers”. All historical writing is subjective by its nature, but it is striking where Ferguson chooses to explicitly deploy his subjectivities. By contrast, he writes that the British empire was run by a network club of “gentlemanly amateurs”, and its “scale” and “durability” were due to the “light touch” of its central authority. How people living under British imperialism perceived this “light touch” is not explored.

The chapter which represents Ferguson’s original research most clearly is the exploration of networks around the US politician Henry Kissinger. The research is interesting enough – looking at memoirs by contemporaneous politicians to see who is mentioned and how often – but the diagrams stretch the definition of network. One shows, for example, how often Kissinger wrote about different figures; Kissinger is a central node and each figure is attached only to him. It is questionable how this adds to the existing scholarship; the fact that Kissinger mentioned Nixon more than any other figure does not seem to be a particularly ground-breaking conclusion. But providing the argument in the form of diagrams, backed up by research focused on the quantitative, will no doubt be attractive to people who wish to believe that this history is objective.

In the final pages of the book, Ferguson provides his judgement on networks versus hierarchies: “unless one wishes to reap one revolutionary whirlwind after another, it is better to impose some kind of hierarchical order on the world and give it some legitimacy”. Coming at the end of a paean to the durability of networks, compared to the often rigid hierarchies unable to adapt, this is a surprising end point. But the invocation of “legitimacy” is important here, coming from an author who describes himself at the beginning of the book as “just not a very hierarchical person”. Hierarchies, after all, are hard to perceive if you’re at the top. A history of networks written from a different perspective might look very different indeed.