I am accustomed to thinking of modern life as a world of networks. The internet and social media make networks almost impossible to ignore. But in The Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson argues that networks are not primarily a modern phenomenon. They have always existed, and understanding them can change the way we understand history.
The title comes from Siena, where the open Piazza del Campo—the square—sits beside the Torre del Mangia—the tower. For Ferguson, they represent two different ways human beings organize themselves: networks and hierarchies. The tower is government, church, army, corporation—the formal structures of authority. The square is the less formal world of friendships, families, intellectual circles, merchants, conspirators, correspondents, revolutionaries, and eventually Facebook.
History, Ferguson asserts, has traditionally been written from the tower. We study kings, presidents, generals, governments, and institutions because hierarchies keep records. Networks are harder to see. Yet again and again, networks have changed the world.
Ferguson ranges enormously widely, from the Renaissance and Reformation through the Enlightenment, revolutionary movements, the Rothschild banking network, imperialism, the world wars, the Cold War, and Silicon Valley. Martin Luther did not simply challenge the Catholic Church; his ideas spread through a network made vastly more powerful by the printing press. Revolutionary movements depended upon networks. Financial power depended upon them. So did scientific and intellectual revolutions.
One of Ferguson's most useful ideas is the importance of the highly connected person—the node through which an extraordinary number of relationships pass. Some people matter historically not simply because of their formal position but because they connect people who otherwise would not be connected.
C.S. Lewis says this brilliantly in his essay "The Inner Ring." He opens the essay with a passage from Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace showing a purple-faced general waiting on a mere captain who was part of an exclusive network.
Power can come from where you stand in a network as much as from where you stand in a hierarchy. That idea immediately made me think of Phillips Payson O'Brien's The Strategists and his portraits of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt.
Seen through Ferguson's lens, their networks provide an interesting measure of their effectiveness. Hitler and Mussolini created powerful and hateful fascist networks that helped carry them to power. But power increasingly isolated them. Hitler ended in his bunker, surrounded by a shrinking circle while the state and military he commanded collapsed around him. Mussolini similarly lost the network that had sustained him and died violently at the hands of his own countrymen.
Stalin is more complicated. He rose through networks as well as the Communist hierarchy, but his paranoia repeatedly destroyed the human connections around him. He managed during the existential crisis of the German invasion to restrain some of that paranoia and listen to capable military commanders. The Soviet Union survived and eventually defeated Nazi Germany. Afterward, Stalin again descended into increasingly poisonous suspicion and isolation.
Churchill and Roosevelt were the opposite. Both were extraordinary networkers. They cultivated politicians, military leaders, journalists, advisers, friends, and correspondents across decades. During the war they became principal nodes in each other's networks. Their correspondence and personal meetings created a relationship that connected two enormous political and military systems. Roosevelt died in 1945, widely beloved, just before victory in Europe. Churchill lived another twenty years and died one of the most revered figures of the century.
Networks certainly do not explain everything about those five men or the outcome of the Second World War. But Ferguson gave me another way of looking at O'Brien's portraits. The ability to create networks may help people acquire power; the ability to maintain them may help determine how effectively they use it.
That is what I liked most about The Square and the Tower. Ferguson did not merely give me another history. He gave me another way of looking at history. And those are the history books I value most.
