Analysis & Opinions - The Hindu

‘I Expect Things to Get Worse Before They Get Better,’ Says Historian Niall Ferguson

| Feb. 28, 2018

The age of the Internet has given rise to a kind of ideological polarization that is set to get worse, says the historian.

History, as it is routinely studied and understood, is hierarchical, but change and revolutions come from social networks, argues historian Niall Ferguson in his latest book, ‘The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook’. The book scans numerous episodes from history to illustrate the dynamics between hierarchy and networks, and says the current era of social chaos is not new and may get worse before getting better. Excerpts from an interview with Mr. Ferguson, who is now Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Is there an equilibrium between network and hierarchy for a society and the international system to be stable?

Theoretically, there must be. As I show in the book, the extreme cases of a very centralised, hierarchical system or a completely decentralised, network-based system don’t work well. And most natural world organisms tend to have a hybrid character — some elements of hierarchy, some elements of network. The way in which the Roman Catholic Church survived for centuries... it has been somewhere in that sweet spot. There is a very clear hierarchical structure, but at some level Roman Catholicism remains a social network and a remarkably vital one, despite its great age. Institutions that have lasted for a long time are somewhere near that happy medium.

Would it be useful to try to understand history as ongoing, cyclical, hierarchy-network swings?

It might be a little too neat. Large networks are complex systems, and they have emergent properties that are rather unpredictable. They are quite capable of sudden changes. The key here is that revolutionary networks like the Bolsheviks were capable of transforming, with amazing speed, into hierarchies of tremendous rigidity and centralisation. That hierarchical structure endured for 70 years, and then fell apart with extraordinary swiftness. I prefer to think of history as a somewhat erratic and chaotic process rather than as one characterised by cycles, or pendulum swings. That is why it is hard to predict history, and it does not operate in a way that submits to nice, neat laws.