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The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook Kindle Edition
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.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateJanuary 16, 2018
- File size69844 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“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
Product details
- ASIN : B073NPCBL5
- Publisher : Penguin Books; Reprint edition (January 16, 2018)
- Publication date : January 16, 2018
- Language : English
- File size : 69844 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 585 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #320,690 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #22 in Freemasonry (Kindle Store)
- #173 in Freemasonry (Books)
- #405 in Political History (Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, former Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and current senior fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and founder and managing director of advisory firm Greenmantle LLC. The author of 15 books, Ferguson is writing a life of Henry Kissinger, the first volume of which—Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist—was published in 2015 to critical acclaim. The World's Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History. Other titles include Civilization: The West and the Rest, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die and High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg. Ferguson's six-part PBS television series, "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World," based on his best-seller, won an International Emmy for best documentary in 2009. Civilization was also made into a documentary series. Ferguson is a recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Award for Public Service as well as other honors. His most recent book is The Square and the Tower: Networks on Power from the Freemasons to Facebook (2018).
Customer reviews
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book engaging and informative. They appreciate the historical insights and framework provided by the book. The knowledge base is described as helpful and thorough. However, some readers found the schematics difficult to understand and required a lot of effort to complete the book. Opinions differ on the network science, with some finding it sound while others felt it lacked a clear conclusion.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the book engaging and well-written. They appreciate the author's skill in laying out the theme in historical context.
"...Wonderful! Fifty-one pages of linked references (2000?). Tremendous! Forty-three page bibliography (800?) not linked...." Read more
"...That's good stuff: from the Illuminati, to Keynes' secret society at Cambridge, to Stalin's terror regime, to Henry Kissinger's personal diplomatic..." Read more
"...And, I might add, the book is fun and insightful reading for armchair intellectuals as well." Read more
"...Ferguson writes clearly, aiming at the general readership without sacrificing scholarship...." Read more
Customers enjoy the book's historical accuracy. They find it informative and interesting, with surprising insights into history. The book explores about 1000 years of history using hierarchies as a framework. Readers appreciate the original analysis and great stories.
"...It brings together theoretical insights from myriad disciplines, ranging from economics to sociology, from neuroscience to organizational behaviour...." Read more
"...I walked away thinking: lots of great stories in here, lots of great examples of both networks and hierarchies, and certainly very little..." Read more
"Niall Ferguson takes the reader on an incredible journey through history from a "network" perspective...." Read more
"This book approaches history from an interesting perspective, documenting the cause and effect of network theory throughout history and countering..." Read more
Customers find the book provides helpful insights and a thorough narrative on network science. They find the subject fascinating and engaging, with an excellent perspective on the interplay of social networks and hierarchies. The book starts with some theory about networks and touches on a wide range of topics, including great examples of both networks and hierarchies, in a well-balanced manner.
"...together theoretical insights from myriad disciplines, ranging from economics to sociology, from neuroscience to organizational behaviour.’’..." Read more
"...thinking: lots of great stories in here, lots of great examples of both networks and hierarchies, and certainly very little technobabble about how a..." Read more
"...The sheer breadth of topics he touches on is breathtaking...." Read more
"...from an interesting perspective, documenting the cause and effect of network theory throughout history and countering them with the hierarchies that..." Read more
Customers appreciate the book's bibliographical content. They find the bibliography extensive with an exhaustive index, notes, and bibliographic citations. The short, informative chapters are well-received.
"...not linked. Amazing! Twenty-four page exhaustive index (linked). Fantastic!" Read more
"...textbook level the books research, understanding of subject and depth are impressive and almost exhausting...." Read more
"...In less than 450 pages plus extensive Notes and Bibliography Ferguson plows through a roughly chronological, primarily European survey of how..." Read more
"Sweeping theories are interesting. This Book is too long...." Read more
Customers have differing views on the network science. Some find it sound and fascinating, while others say the book lacks a solid conclusion about networks and their place in society. They also mention that the author seems to take an excessively binary view of network structure and discount the ability.
"...The network science is sound, but its purported application is very weakly argued...." Read more
"...sentences and leaves little on the table but it still lacks a solid conclusion about networks and their place in society...." Read more
"...It is a very interesting and fascinating subject, networks...." Read more
"...-- discouraging as these are -- he seems to take an excessively binary view of network structure, and to discount the ability of open networks to..." Read more
Customers find the book difficult to understand. They say it's overly complicated, tedious, and hard to understand the schematics of the networks. It requires a lot of triangulation and perceptive reading. Some readers found the book challenging and easy to put down, while others struggled to complete it.
"...At times I found the reading to be heavy and challenging and that probably affected my ability to grasp the writers point of view but I should be..." Read more
"...Required a lot of triangulation and perceptive reading." Read more
"A ponderous work of often inscrutable logic, hard-to-understand diagrams, and intellectual arrogance more suited to inter-academic correspondence..." Read more
"Book is extremely detailed and it is hard to understand the schematics of the "networks"' Book is probably good as a selective research..." Read more
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on January 24, 2018“Reflexivity is, in effect, a two-way feedback mechanism in which reality helps shape the participants’ thinking and the participants’ thinking helps shape reality.’’ - George Soros.
Which is most important, powerful - networks or hierarchy?
How can one man, George Soros, ‘break the Bank of England’ and the entire British government helpless to stop him?
Ferguson’s book is a masterful analysis (synthesis) of this very question. The answer derives from understanding the difference between - the distributed strength of networks (Soros) vs the concentrated power of organizations (government).
Great!
“It tells the story of the interaction between networks and hierarchies from ancient times until the very recent past. It brings together theoretical insights from myriad disciplines, ranging from economics to sociology, from neuroscience to organizational behaviour.’’
As he says, Ferguson covers a lot of stuff. Easy to follow, but reader (listener) needs serious commitment. Detailed and historical. Comprehensive and profound.
“Its central thesis is that social networks have always been much more important in history than most historians, fixated as they have been on hierarchical organizations such as states, have allowed –but never more so than in two periods. The first ‘networked era’ followed the introduction of the printing press to Europe in the late fifteenth century and lasted until the end of the eighteenth century. The second –our own time –dates from the 1970s, though I argue that the technological revolution we associate with Silicon Valley was more a consequence than a cause of a crisis of hierarchical institutions.’’
Ferguson willing to think against the grain. Confident but not arrogant, offers reasons along with conclusions.
“The intervening period, from the late 1790s until the late 1960s, saw the opposite trend: hierarchical institutions re-established their control and successfully shut down or co-opted networks. The zenith of hierarchically organized power was in fact the mid-twentieth century –the era of totalitarian regimes and total war.’’ (xxv)
Make no mistake, this is no dry, technical, theoretical history lesson. This presents real life, with real people. Ella Fitzgerald, Mark Zukerberg, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, Nathan Rothschild, Frederic Hayek, Ben Bernanke, Julian Assange, Margaret Thatcher, Nelson Mandela, etc., etc., are all here!
PART I Introduction: Networks and Hierarchies
1 Mystery of the Illuminati
2 Our Networked Age
4. Why Hierarchies?
6. Weak Ties and Viral Ideas
10. The Illuminati Illuminated
PART II Emperors and Explorers
11. A Brief History of Hierarchy
12. The First Networked Age
15. Pizarro and the Inca
16. When Gutenberg Met Luther
PART III Letters and Lodges
17. The Economic Consequences of the Reformation
18. Trading Ideas
19. Networks of Enlightenment
20. Networks of Revolution
PART IV The Restoration of Hierarchy
24. The House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha
25. The House of Rothschild
26. Industrial Networks
PART V Knights of the Round Table
28. An Imperial Life
29. Empire
32. The Union of South Africa
PART VI Plagues and Pipers
36. The Plague
37. The Leader Principle
39. The Ring of Five
41. Ella in Reform School
PART VII Own the Jungle
44. The Crisis of Complexity
45. Henry Kissinger’s Network of Power
47. The Fall of the Soviet Empire
48. The Triumph of Davos Man
49. Breaking the Bank of England
PART VIII The Library of Babel
50. 9/ 11/ 2001
52. The Administrative State
53. Web 2.0
PART IX Conclusion: Facing Cyberia
57. Metropolis
58. Network Outage
Last chapter . . .
“And it is no longer a mere possibility that this network can be instrumentalized by corrupt oligarchs or religious fanatics to wage a new and unpredictable kind of war in cyberspace. That war has commenced.’’
Wow!
“Indices of geopolitical risk suggest that conventional and even nuclear war may not be far behind. Nor can it be ruled out that a ‘planetary superorganism’ created by the Dr Strangeloves of artificial intelligence may one day run amok, calculating –not incorrectly –that the human race is by far the biggest threat to the long-run survival of the planet itself and exterminating the lot of us.’’
Well . . .
“ ‘I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place,’ said Evan Williams, one of the co-founders of Twitter in May 2017. ‘I was wrong about that.’”
“Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks’’ or in modern speak - ‘garbage in - garbage out’
“The lesson of history is that trusting in networks to run the world is a recipe for anarchy: at best, power ends up in the hands of the Illuminati, but more likely it ends up in the hands of the Jacobins.’’
This is Robespierre- the original ‘terrorist’.
“Some today are tempted to give at least ‘two cheers for anarchism’. Those who lived through the wars of the 1790s and 1800s learned an important lesson that we would do well to re-learn: unless one wishes to reap one revolutionary whirlwind after another . . .’’
(This refers to Hosea 8:7 - “for they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind’’)
“ . . . it is better to impose some kind of hierarchical order on the world and to give it some legitimacy. At the Congress of Vienna, the five great powers agreed to establish such an order, and the pentarchy they formed provided a remarkable stability for the better part of the century that followed. Just over 200 years later, we confront the same choice they faced.’’
What form, or arrangement does Ferguson recommend?
“Conveniently, the architects of the post-1945 order created the institutional basis for such a new pentarchy in the form of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, an institution that retains the all-important ingredient of legitimacy. Whether or not these five great powers can make common cause once again, as their predecessors did in the nineteenth century, is the great geopolitical question of our time.’’
Interesting. This scholarly, erudite, historical, profound work, reaches the goal of. . .world government. Why? Ferguson recognizes the horror of the French Revolution; the overwhelming devastation of the thirty years war; the terrible cost of Napoleon’s ideas. As a historian, he knows peace and security are fleeting.
Page 427 - from a sermon in fourteenth century . . .
“But the Apocalypse, in the thirteenth chapter, presents war in the figure of a beast coming out of the sea with ten horns and seven heads, like a leopard, and with the feet of a bear. What do these ten horns signify?’’
The scripture reads - “And I saw a wild beast ascending out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads, and on its horns ten diadems. Now the wild beast that I saw was like a leopard, but its feet were like those of a bear, and its mouth was like a lion’s mouth. And the dragon gave to the beast its power and its throne and great authority.’’ Rev 13:1,2
The obvious meaning of horns is political power, and this beast has ‘power, throne, great authority’. Political hierarchy, using Ferguson’s term. Composite beast implies one organization made up of multiple separate ‘beasts’. This is a good image of what Ferguson believes necessary; one overarching ‘Tower’ (UN) to exercise ‘great authority’ over the ‘Square’ (society below).
Ferguson turns to Biblical source to illustrate modernity. Fascinating! Why? Seems to fit!
Fifty-one illustrations and twenty-five plates, full color (linked). Wonderful!
Fifty-one pages of linked references (2000?). Tremendous!
Forty-three page bibliography (800?) not linked. Amazing!
Twenty-four page exhaustive index (linked). Fantastic!
- Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2018Does 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.
Top reviews from other countries
- Kindle CustomerReviewed in Canada on October 11, 2022
5.0 out of 5 stars Accessible history meets network theory
One of our greatest contemporary historians takes a fascinating look at the role of informal networks in history. Insightful and compelling!
- CanoReviewed in Mexico on April 10, 2021
3.0 out of 5 stars Good thesis. Too much jumping around no cohesive structure
I like the book and the frame/optic it was under. I sometimes had to remind myself what I was reading about as the overarching theme was not abundantly clear over the whole book and even chapters. Still an interest read with some good chapters are some not so good
- RohilReviewed in India on August 9, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars Super interesting read.
Loved this book. It had me hooked right from the beginning. I liked the style that meandered, around different timelines, and incidents. Was an engaging way to refresh my history and has given me a greater understanding of the way geo-politics works.
-
Ricardo DuarteReviewed in Brazil on June 29, 2020
5.0 out of 5 stars Uma história do mundo através das redes sociais
O ângulo diferente sobre fatos conhecidos é o principal diferencial do livro.
-
Anna v. D.Reviewed in Germany on September 11, 2020
4.0 out of 5 stars Historische Synthese
The Square and the Tower ist kein leicht verdauliches Werk. Es stellt die Gewohnheiten bisheriger Geschichtsschreibung in Frage und erzählt die Geschichte Europas (und Amerikas), gespickt mit Daten, Modellen, Graphen und Tabellen, aus einer vollkommen neuen Perspektive. Inwieweit prägen Netzwerke den Gang der Geschichte, inwieweit sind bestehende Hierarchien flexibel und anpassungsfähig? Niall Ferguson behandelt in seinem Werk „Wendepunkte“ der Geschichte ausgehend von obiger Fragestellung, verbleibt allerdings nicht bei der jeweils zeitgenössischen Antwort sondern zieht generelle Ableitungen zum besseren Verständnis heutiger Vorgänge. Denn, so neu wie wir glauben, ist die Herausforderung durch das Internet und Social Media nicht; vielmehr wiederholt sich hier und jetzt ein Schema das sich in den vergangenen Jahrhunderten immer wieder gezeigt hat, lediglich nunmehr global, gleichzeitig und atemberaubend schnell.
Die Antworten, die die Geschichte auf die Herausforderungen der netzwerkenden Disruption gibt, sind eindeutig. Netzwerke können disruptiv wirken, sie können alte und morsche Hierarchien zum Einsturz bringen; ja sie können sogar eine Zeit der Anarchie hervorrufen, aber, und es ist ein großes Aber, Netzwerke sind nicht konstruktiv. Erst die Überführung des neuen, durch die Disruption hervorgerufenen in eine neue, stabilisierende, Hierarchie, werden deren Errungenschaften von Dauer und Nutzen sein. Square und Tower bedingen einander, sind symbiotisch verwachsen, auch wenn das eine manchmal absterben muss, um Neuem Platz zu machen, so ist die Symbiose unaufhebbar.
Also, sprach Zarathustra und es ward historische Dialektik.
5* für Niall Fergusons Fleißarbeit. 4* für das Werk, welchem dringend eine Einführung in Netzwerktheorie vorangestellt gehört.