Whenever someone is trying to persuade me that liberal democracy is in crisis and that populist demagogues and fire-breathing tyrants are taking over the world, I refer them to the talented Monsieur Macron. If Marine Le Pen had won last year's French presidential election, the thesis of a democratic crisis might have plausibility. But Macron smashed her, winning two-thirds of the vote in the second round.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. For a time, it seemed as if the internet was on democracy's side, helping the crowds in Cairo's Tahrir Square or Kiev's Maidan topple terrible tyrants.

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.

My point is not that Clinton is like Trump, of course. My point is that the presidency will infuriate even the best of men. Yet each presidential biographer makes the mistake of presenting irascibility as a significant character trait of his subject, rather than appreciating that it’s structural: The job is inherently maddening.

The phrase international order reminds me of the phrase Western civilization. As Indian independence icon Mahatma Gandhi wittily replied when asked about Western civilization, "It would be a good idea." The notion that international order exists or has ever existed seems highly questionable to me. The notion of a liberal international order is even more questionable because it is neither liberal, nor international, nor very orderly.

The impression that the world is changing faster today than ever before has become conventional wisdom. Yet the magnitude of change that occurred between when America galloped into World War I on horses and dropped the atomic bomb feels more significant than that undergone since the first dot-com domain name was registered. This observation is not meant to diminish the importance of the seismic changes wrought by the digital age, but rather to suggest the relevance of historical context often absent from the conversation.

As the year 2017 draws to a close, the world has seldom been so binary. You either love Donald Trump or you loathe him. You either adore Brexit or abhor it. This polarization has been fostered by the giant online social networks of our time and the phenomenon that students of networks know as “homophily.” In plain English, birds of a feather flock together.

Facebook encourages you to like or not like what you see in your Newsfeed. Twitter allows you to retweet or like other people’s tweets or block those users who offend your sensibilities.

Each of us decides, at some point in our lives, which dramatic genre we inhabit. Is your life a tragedy? A comedy? As an academic, I aspire to live my life as a rather exalted BBC documentary, but somehow it always gravitates back to sitcom. I have friends who shoot for Hollywood costume drama, but inevitably wind up in low-budget soap opera.

The madness of King Donald is not news in Washington. But until last week the story in Britain was Trump’s badness, not his madness. Then, on Wednesday, the president retweeted three posts from the deputy leader of the fascist splinter-group Britain First, each featuring a video purporting to depict Islamic violence.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Sexual harassment was supposed to be the kind of thing only Republicans did — inveterate sexists such as Donald Trump or alleged molesters of underage schoolgirls such as Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama. How very awkward that the majority of names in the New York Times list of 34 top alleged harassers are men of the left, not the right.