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The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook Hardcover – 16 Jan 2018

by Niall Ferguson (Author)

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The instant New York Times bestseller.

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.

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Product details

Hardcover: 563 pages
Publisher: Penguin Pr (16 January 2018)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0735222916
ISBN-13: 978-0735222915
Product Dimensions: 16.3 x 3.2 x 24.1 cm
Boxed-product Weight: 898 g
Average Customer Review: 1 customer review
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 57,469 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #47 in Books > Computers & Internet > Networking & Cloud Computing > Networks, Protocols & APIs > Networks
- #71 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Other Religions, Practices & Sacred Texts > Freemasonry
- #804 in Books > History > Historical Study & Educational Resources > Social History

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Review

"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, Ferguson manages both to tell a good story and provide important insight into the specific qualities that power successful networks." --The New York Times

"Remarkably interesting . . . 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. . . . 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

"Niall Ferguson has again written a brilliant book. . . . 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." --The Wall Street Journal

"Ferguson reminds us the social network didn't spring fully formed from the mind of Mark Zuckerberg; rather, it's a persistent force in human affairs offering a novel lens on past and perplexing present."--San Francisco Chronicle

"A wide-ranging and provocative tour through the history of human connectivity, pre- and post-high tech. Ferguson also ladles out illuminating doses of networking theory and analysis of the threat that growing political and economic complexity poses to established hierarchies and institutions." --Inc.com

"An engaging, provocative history of networks (and their relationships to hierarchies) from ancient times to the invention of the printing press to the pervasiveness of the personal computer. Breathtaking in its scale and scope, The Square and the Tower applies insights of network theory to (among other subjects) Portugal's foothold in Macau, the "conquest" of the Incas, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, World War I, Stalin's Terror, World War II, the fall of the Soviet Union, the founding of the European Union and the Great Recession of 2008-09."--Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"An enthralling 'reboot' of history from a novel perspective, spanning antiquity to the present day. . . . Like the best historians, [Ferguson] always pauses to learn from the past and anticipate the future. If only for this reason, [THE SQUARE AND THE TOWER] is well worth a read."--Science

"[Ferguson's] 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." --Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Ferguson has written a provocative and intellectually challenging work that should promote consideration and debate among academics and laypersons." --Booklist

"Renowned economic historian Ferguson draws on insights from network theory to examine disruptions across time. . . . Refreshingly evenhanded. . . . Ferguson offers a novel way of examining data . . . highly intriguing." --Kirkus

"In his sweeping, stimulating and enlightening The Square and the Tower, noted historian Niall Ferguson draws from a wide range of sources to trace the crucial role that different kinds of human networks have played throughout history... Ferguson's superb, thought-provoking book brings these events vividly to life and will help readers view history from a unique perspective." --BookPage

"Niall Ferguson's The Square and the Tower brilliantly illuminates the great power struggle between networks and hierarchies that is raging around the world today. As a software engineer steeped in the theory and practice of networks, I was deeply impressed by this book's insights. Silicon Valley needed a history lesson and Ferguson has provided it." --Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet, the parent company of Google

About the Author

Niall Ferguson is one of the world's most renowned historians. He is the author of Paper and Iron, The House of Rothschild, The Pity of War, The Cash Nexus, Empire, Colossus, The War of the World, The Ascent of Money, High Financier, Civilization, The Great Degeneration, Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist, and The Square and the Tower. He is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. His many awards include the Benjamin Franklin Prize for Public Service (2010), the Hayek Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2012) and the Ludwig Erhard Prize for Economic Journalism (2013).

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Ralph Monley

Interesting as ever, but not one of his best

6 August 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

This is an interesting thesis, contrasting networks and hierarchies through history. He illustrates his points well, but I did not find this as riveting as some of his earlier books, like the Ascent of Money.

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Aran Joseph Canes

A Landmark Retelling of Modern History

18 January 2018 - Published on Amazon.com

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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.

69 people found this helpful.

John Plowright

Only connect

8 October 2017 - Published on Amazon.com

“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.

139 people found this helpful.

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