Niall Ferguson
THE SQUARE AND THE TOWER
Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power
‘Niall Ferguson has again written a brilliant book … In 400 pages you will have restocked your mind. Do it’ Deirdre N. McCloskey, Wall Street Journal
‘Engaging, illuminating’ Tim Harford, Financial Times
‘Exactly the kind of grand narrative historians should tackle’ Cormac Shine, Guardian
‘Thought-provoking’ Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year
‘An ambitious and illuminating attempt at a different kind of history’ George Osborne, Evening Standard, Books of the Year
‘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
‘Lightness of touch and vividness of expression … lively and interesting’ Alan Ryan, Literary Review
‘Refreshingly evenhanded … Making profitable use of information science, Ferguson offers a novel way of examining data that will be highly intriguing to students of history and current affairs’ Kirkus Reviews
‘Hugely insightful’ David Aaronovitch, The Times
‘Provocative … great fun’ Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times
‘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
‘Ferguson is right’ Anthony Gottlieb, Guardian
UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
India | New Zealand | South Africa
Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published by Allen Lane 2017
Published in Penguin Books 2018
Copyright © Niall Ferguson, 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover design by Evan Gaffney
Cover photographs © Alamy
ISBN: 978-0-141-98482-7
‘If I broke [my silence], the strength would depart from me; but while I held my peace, I held my foe in an invisible mesh.’
George MacDonald
List of Plates
List of Illustrations
Preface: The Networked Historian
PART I
Introduction: Networks and Hierarchies
1. The Mystery of the Illuminati
2. Our Networked Age
3. Networks, Networks Everywhere
4. Why Hierarchies?
5. From Seven Bridges to Six Degrees
6. Weak Ties and Viral Ideas
7. Varieties of Network
8. When Networks Meet
9. Seven Insights
10. The Illuminati Illuminated
PART II
Emperors and Explorers
11. A Brief History of Hierarchy
12. The First Networked Age
13. The Art of the Renaissance Deal
14. Discoverers
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
21. The Red and the Black
22. From Crowd to Tyranny
23. Order Restored
24. The House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha
25. The House of Rothschild
26. Industrial Networks
27. From Pentarchy to Hegemony
PART V
Knights of the Round Table
28. An Imperial Life
29. Empire
30. Taiping
31. ‘The Chinese Must Go’
32. The Union of South Africa
33. Apostles
34. Armageddon
PART VI
Plagues and Pipers
35. Greenmantle
36. The Plague
37. The Leader Principle
38. The Fall of the Golden International
39. The Ring of Five
40. Brief Encounter
41. Ella in Reform School
PART VII
Own the Jungle
42. The Long Peace
43. The General
44. The Crisis of Complexity
45. Henry Kissinger’s Network of Power
46. Into the Valley
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
51. 9/15/2008
52. The Administrative State
53. Web 2.0
54. Coming Apart
55. Tweeting the Revolution
56. 11/9/2016
PART IX
Conclusion: Facing Cyberia
57. Metropolis
58. Network Outage
59. FANG, BAT and EU
60. The Square and the Tower Redux
Afterword: The Original Square and Tower
Illustrations
Appendix
References
Bibliography
Follow Penguin
1. ‘The Conspiracy to Rule the World’. (Source: http://illuminutti.com/2012/04/16/finally-mapped-conspiracy-to-rule-the-world/)
2. A partial food web for the ‘Scotian Shelf’ in the north-west Atlantic. (From D. M. Lavigne, ‘Ecological Interactions between Marine Mammals, Commercial Fisheries, and Their Prey: Unravelling the Tangled Web’, in Studies of High-Latitude Seabirds, 4: Trophic Relationships and Energetics of Endotherms in Cold Ocean Systems, ed. W. A. Montevecchi, Occasional Paper 91, 59–71 (Canadian Wildlife Service, Ottawa, Canada, 1996). Reprinted by permission of Dr David M. Lavigne)
3. Google n-gram of the frequency of appearance of the words ‘network’ and ‘hierarchy’ in English-language publications between 1800 and 2000. (Reprinted by permission of The Google Ngram Viewer Team, part of Google Research, http://books.google.com/ngrams)
4. Euler’s figure 1 from his Solutio problematis ad geometriam situs pertinentis (1741).
5. Simplified graph of Euler’s Königsberg bridge problem.
6. The foundational concepts of network theory.
7. A simple (but tragic) network: Shakespeare’s Hamlet. (From Franco Moretti, ‘Network Theory, Plot Analysis’, Literary Lab, Pamphlet 2, 1 May 2011)
8. Varieties of network. (From Ricard V. Solé and Sergi Valverde, ‘Information Theory of Complex Networks: On Evolution and Architectural Constraints’, Lecture Notes in Physics, 650 (2004), 192. Reprinted with the permission of Springer)
9. Hierarchy: a special kind of network.
10. The Medici network. (From John F. Padgett and C. K. Ansell, ‘Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici 1400–1434’, American Journal of Sociology, 98, 6 (1993), Figure 2a. Reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press)
11. A network of ‘conquest’: the intermarriage of conquistadors and elite Aztec and Inca families. (By Alvy Ray Smith, from Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, Knopf, 2011. Reprinted by permission)
12. The English Protestant network immediately before and after John Bradford’s execution. (From Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian E. Ahnert, ‘Protestant Letter Networks in the Reign of Mary I: A Quantitative Approach’, ELH, 82, 1 (Spring 2015), 27, Figures 7 and 8. Copyright © 2015 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press)
13. The trade network of the British East India Company, 1620–1824. (From Emily Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company, 1600–1757 (Princeton University Press, 2014), 114. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press)
14. ‘Voltaire’s network of correspondents’. (From http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/casestudies/voltaire.html. Reprinted by permission of Republic of Letters)
15. Parody on Raphael’s School of Athens, by James Scott, after Sir Joshua Reynolds (1751).
16. The revolutionary network in Boston, c. 1775. (From Shin-Kap Han, ‘The Other Ride of Paul Revere’, Mobilization, 14, 2 (2009))
17. The House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
18. James Watt, Matthew Boulton and the social network of steam engine technology, c. 1700–1800. (From Francis C. Moon, Social Networks in the History of Innovation and Invention (Springer, 2014), KL 492–4. Reprinted by permission of Springer)
19. Nineteenth-century networks of scientific practice. (From P. J. Taylor, M. Hoyler and D. M. Evans, ‘A Geohistorical Study of “the Rise of Modern Science”: Mapping Scientific Practice through Urban Networks, 1500-1900’, Minerva 46, no. 4 (2008), 391–410. Reprinted by permission of Springer)
20. ‘The English Octopus: It Feeds on Nothing but Gold!’ Anti-Rothschild cartoon, 1894. (From W. H. Harvey, Coin’s Financial School (1894).)
21. The myth of Lord Milner’s network.
22. The Bloomsbury Group c. 1925. (From Peter Dolton, ‘Identifying Social Network Effects’, Economic Record 93, Supplement S1 (June 2017), Figure 2. Reprinted by permission of the Economic Society of Australia)
23. Evolution of the major relationship changes between the protagonists of the First World War, 1872–1907. (From Tibor Antal, Paul Krapivsky and Sidney Redner, ‘Social Balance on Networks: The Dynamics of Friendship and Enmity, Physica D, 224, 130 (2006), Figure 10. Reprinted by permission of Elsevier Science Limited)
24. Die Ausgesaugten (‘The Sucked Dry’).
25. Alone in Berlin: Otto Hampel and his wife, Elise.
26. The Soviet organization of science under Stalin. (From Blair A. Ruble, Leningrad: Shaping a Soviet City (University of California Press, 1990), 130. Reprinted by permission)
27. Alfred Sloan’s ‘Organization Study’ for General Motors (1921).
28. General Sir Walter Walker. (Copyright © National Portrait Gallery, London)
29. William Phillips. (Courtesy LSE Library)
30. Richard Nixon’s ego network.
31. Henry Kissinger’s ego network.
32. The Nixon and Ford administrations’ ego network.
33. The Nixon and Ford administrations’ directed network.
34. Network design for Arpanet, 1969.
35. Networks of Polish opposition, 1980–81. (From Maryjane Osa, Solidarity and Contention: Networks of Polish Opposition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), copyright © 2003 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. Reprinted by permission of the University of Minnesota Press)
36. Nelson Mandela with Klaus Schwab at Davos, January 1992. (Copyright © World Economic Forum)
37. The global Salafi network, c. 2004. (From Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), copyright © 2004 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press)
38. Networked insurgencies: diagram from the Army Counterinsurgency Manual (2014 edition). (US Army, Insurgencies and Countering Insurgencies, Figure 4-3)
39. Network connectivity balloons in the international financial system. (From a 2011 presentation by Andrew Haldane. Used by permission of Andrew Haldane/Bank of England)
40. Use of mobile phones and social networks in China, the United States and Egypt, 2010. (Source: Pew Research Center)
41. The Al-Qaeda network through American eyes, c. 2012. (From Mary Habeck et al., A Global Strategy for Combating Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (American Enterprise Institute, 2015). Reprinted with the permission of the American Enterprise Institute)
42. Classified slide published by WikiLeaks describing the National Security Agency’s PRISM surveillance programme.
43. The crash of HealthCare.gov in 2013.
44. The sixty-six ‘most important jihadi and support sites for jihad and the mujahideen on Twitter’, as recommended by jihadist blogger Ahmad ‘Abdallah in February 2013. (Source: http://wandrenpd.com/Graphs/66jihadi/Graph.html)
45. Social media followers of the leading candidates in two presidential elections, 2008 and 2016.
46. The 2016 Clinton campaign: a failed hierarchical structure. (Graphic by Peter Bell. Reprinted with the permission of National Journal)
47. Donald Trump’s online social network, 2016. (Source: www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/trumps-information-universe. Reprinted by permission)
48. Prices and quantities of books and PCs, 1490s–1630s and 1977–2004, respectively. (From Jeremiah E. Dittmar, ‘Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of the Printing Press’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 126, 3 (2011), 1133–72. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press Ltd)
49. Satirical network diagrams of the principal US technology companies. (Source: Manu Cornet, www.bonkersworld.net. Reprinted by permission)
50. The Chinese Communist Party Central Committee members’ network. (From Franziska Barbara Keller, ‘Moving Beyond Factions: Using Social Network Analysis to Uncover Patronage Networks Among Chinese Elites’ (working paper, n.d.), Figure 6. Reprinted with permission)
51. The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, 1338–9, by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (Palazzo Pubblico, Siena/De Agostini Picture Library/G. Dagli Orti/Bridgeman Images
1. The Last Judgment (mosaic), Italian School, eleventh century), Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello, Venice. (Mondadori Portfolio/Archivio Magliani/Mauro Magliani & Barbara Piovan/Bridgeman Images)
2. A Jacob Moreno ‘sociogram’.
3. The network of the friendships in a high school, from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent to Adult Health.
4. The United States federal government as a hierarchy, 1862.
5. The United States federal government as a hierarchy, c. 2010. (Reproduced by permission of NetAge, Inc.)
6. The Piazza del Campo in Siena. (Martin Thomas Photography/Alamy Stock Photo)
7. The Cantino planisphere (1502).
8. The St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Huguenots (Protestants), Paris, 1572.
9. Gerard ter Borch, Ratification of the Treaty of Münster, May 15, 1648.
10. 37,062 European locations, mapped on the basis of the birth and death data of 120,211 notable individuals from 1069 BC to 2012 CE. (From Maximilian Schich et al., ‘A Network Framework of Cultural History, Science, 345, 6196 (2014), 558–62, copyright © 2014 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, reprinted by permission of the American Association for the Advancement of Science)
11. An eighteenth-century network. (From Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires (Princeton University Press, 2011), copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press)
12. George Washington as a Freemason (lithograph), American school, nineteenth century. (private collection/Bridgeman Images)
13. ‘Le Gateau des Rois’ (hand-coloured engraving), French school, nineteenth century. (private collection/The Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Images)
14. Angoulême. (Courtesy Emma Rothschild)
15. The Eastern Telegraph Co.’s network, 1894. (Copyright © The Porthcurno Collections Trust, by kind permission of the Telegraph Museum, Porthcurno)
16. ‘The Anti-Chinese Wall’ by Friedrich Gratz, from Puck (1882)
17. Europe in 1914: a German satirical map. (bpk-Bildagentur/Art Resource, NY)
18. First edition of John Buchan’s Greenmantle.
19. Stalin as helmsman. (Universal History Archive/UIG/Bridgeman Images)
20. Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova, Leningrad, November 1945, by Leopold Plotek. (Berlin and Akhmatova, Leningrad ’45 (2005) (oil on canvas), 77 cm x 65 cm, copyright © Leopold Plotek)
21. Page from First Military Conscription and What it Means to You!
22. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, 1991. (George Lange/Contour by Getty Images)
23. Stan Druckenmiller and George Soros, 1992. (Peter Morgan/ REUTERS)
24. The 9/11 plotter’s network. (From Valdis E. Krebs, ‘Mapping Networks of Terrorist Cells’, Connections, 24, 3 (2002), 43–52. Copyright © 2002 by INSNA. Reprinted by permission)
25. graph of the global export ‘product space’. (From the Center for International Development at Harvard University. Reprinted by permission)
26. ‘Trumpworld’. (From Michael Hunger, ‘Analyzing the BuzzFeed TrumpWorld Dataset with Neo4j’ (19 January 2017))
27. Facebook headquarters. (Jeff Hall Photography)
28. Trump Tower. ErikN/123RF, LLC
We live in a networked world, or so we are constantly told. The word ‘network’, which was scarcely used before the late nineteenth century, is now overused as both a verb and a noun. To the ambitious young insider, it is always worth going to the next party, no matter how late it is, for the sake of networking. Sleep may be appealing, but the fear of missing out is appalling. To the disgruntled old outsider, on the other hand, the word network has a different connotation. The suspicion grows that the world is controlled by powerful and exclusive networks: the bankers, the Establishment, the System, the Jews, the Freemasons, the Illuminati. Nearly all that is written in this vein is rubbish. Yet it seems unlikely that conspiracy theories would be so persistent if such networks did not exist at all.
The problem with conspiracy theorists is that, as aggrieved outsiders, they invariably misunderstand and misrepresent the way that networks operate. In particular, they tend to assume that elite networks covertly and easily control formal power structures. My research – as well as my own experience – suggests that this is not the case. On the contrary, informal networks usually have a highly ambivalent relationship to established institutions, and sometimes even a hostile one. Professional historians, by contrast, have until very recently tended to ignore, or at least to downplay, the role of networks. Even today, the majority of academic historians tend to study the kinds of institution that create and preserve archives, as if those that do not leave an orderly paper trail simply do not count. Again, my research and my experience have taught me to beware the tyranny of the archives. Often the biggest changes in history are the achievements of thinly documented, informally organized groups of people.
This book is about the uneven ebb and flow of history. It distinguishes the long epochs in which hierarchical structures dominated human life from the rarer but more dynamic eras when networks had the advantage, thanks in part to changes in technology. To put it simply: when hierarchy is the order of the day, you are only as powerful as your rung on the organizational ladder of a state, corporation or similar vertically ordered institution. When networks gain an advantage, you can be as powerful as your position in one or more horizontally structured social groups. As we shall see, this dichotomy between hierarchy and network is an over-simplification. Nevertheless, some personal disclosures may illustrate its usefulness as a starting point.
On the night in February 2016 when I wrote the first draft of this preface, I attended a book party. The host was the former mayor of New York. The author whose work we had gathered to celebrate was a Wall Street Journal columnist and former presidential speech-writer. I was there at the invitation of the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, whom I know because we attended the same Oxford college more than a quarter of a century ago. At the party, I greeted and briefly conversed with about ten other people, among them the president of the Council on Foreign Relations; the chief executive officer of Alcoa Inc., one of America’s largest industrial companies; the editor of the Journal’s comment pages; a presenter on Fox News; a member of New York’s Colony Club and her husband; and a young speech-writer who introduced himself by saying he had read one of my books (which is without fail the right way to strike up a conversation with a professor).
At one level, it is obvious why I was at that party. The fact that I have worked at a succession of well-known universities – Oxford, Cambridge, New York, Harvard and Stanford – automatically makes me part of multiple webs of college alumni. As a consequence of my work as a writer and professor, I have also joined a number of economic and political networks such as the World Economic Forum and the Bilderberg meetings. I am a member of three London clubs and one in New York. I presently belong to the boards of three corporate entities: one a global asset manager, one a British think tank, one a New York museum.
And yet, despite being relatively well networked, I have almost no power. An interesting feature of the party was that the former mayor took the opportunity, in his short speech of welcome, to hint (not very enthusiastically) that he was considering entering, as an independent candidate, the contest to choose the next US president. But as a British citizen I could not even vote in that election. Nor would an endorsement from me in any way have helped his or any other candidate’s chances. For, as an academic, I am assumed by the overwhelming majority of Americans to be wholly detached from the real lives of ordinary people. Unlike my former colleagues at Oxford, I do not control undergraduate admissions. When I taught at Harvard, I could award good or mediocre grades to my students, but I had essentially no power to prevent even the weakest of them from graduating. I had just one among many senior faculty votes when it came to Ph.D. admissions; again, no power. I have a measure of power over the people who work for my advisory firm, but in the space of five years I have fired a grand total of one employee. I am a father of four, but my influence – never mind power – over three of these children is minimal. Even the youngest, who is five, is already learning how to defy my authority.
In short, I am just not a very hierarchical person. By choice, I am more of a networks guy. As an undergraduate, I enjoyed the lack of stratification in university life, particularly the multitude of haphazardly organized societies. I joined many and turned up, irregularly, to few. My two favourite experiences at Oxford were playing the double bass in a jazz quintet – an ensemble that to this day prides itself on not having a leader – and participating in the meetings of a small conservative discussion club called the Canning. I opted to become an academic because in my early twenties I strongly preferred freedom to money. Seeing my contemporaries and their fathers employed in traditional, vertical management structures, I shuddered. Observing the Oxford dons who taught me – fellows of a medieval corporate entity, citizens of an ancient republic of letters, sovereigns in their book-lined studies – I had an irresistible urge to follow in their leisurely, leathery footsteps. When academic life turned out to be rather less well remunerated than the women in my life seemed to expect, I strove to earn without submitting to the indignity of real employment. As a journalist, I preferred to be a freelance, at most a part-timer, preferably a columnist on a retainer. When I turned to broadcasting, I wrote and presented as an independent contractor, and later formed my own production company. Entrepreneurship has suited my love of freedom, though I would say that I have founded companies more to remain free than to become rich. The thing I enjoy most is writing books about subjects that interest me. The best projects – the history of the Rothschild banks, the career of Siegmund Warburg, the life of Henry Kissinger – have come to me through my network. Only very recently did I appreciate that they were also books about networks.
Some among my contemporaries pursued wealth; few achieved it without at least a period of indentured servitude, usually working for a bank. Others pursued power; they too rose through the party ranks and must marvel today at the indignities they once endured. There are humiliations in the early years of academic life, no doubt, but nothing to compare with being an intern at Goldman Sachs or a lowly campaign volunteer for the losing candidate of a party in opposition. To enter the hierarchy is to abase oneself, at least at first. Today, however, a few of my Oxford classmates sit atop powerful institutions as ministers or chief executives. Their decisions can directly affect the allocation of millions, if not billions, of dollars and sometimes even the fates of nations. The wife of an Oxford contemporary who entered politics once complained to him about his long working hours, lack of privacy, low salary and rare holidays – as well as the job insecurity inherent in democracy. ‘But the fact that I would put up with all that,’ he replied, ‘just proves what a wonderful thing power is.’
But is it? Is it better today to be in a network, which gives you influence, than in a hierarchy, which gives you power? Which better describes your own position? All of us are necessarily members of more than one hierarchical structure. We are nearly all citizens of at least one state. A very large proportion of us are employees of at least one corporation (and a surprisingly large number of the world’s corporations are still directly or indirectly state-controlled). Most people under the age of twenty in the developed world are now likely to be in one kind of educational institutional or another; whatever these institutions may claim, their structure is fundamentally hierarchical. (True, the president of Harvard has very limited power over a tenured professor; but she and the hierarchy of deans beneath her have a great deal of power over everyone else from the brightest junior professor to the lowliest freshman.) A significant proportion of young men and women around the world – albeit a much lower one than in most of the last forty centuries – are engaged in military service, traditionally the most hierarchical of activities. If you ‘report to’ someone, even if it is only to a board of directors, then you are in a hierarchy. The more people report to you, the further you are from the bottom of the heap.
Yet most of us belong to more networks than hierarchies, and by that I do not just mean that we are on Facebook, Twitter or one of the other computer-based networks that have sprung up on the Internet in the past dozen years. We have networks of relatives (few families in the Western world today are hierarchical), of friends, of neighbours, of fellow enthusiasts. We are alumni of educational institutions. We are fans of football teams. We are members of clubs and societies, or supporters of charities. Even our participation in the activities of hierarchically structured institutions such as churches or political parties is more akin to networking than to working, because we are involved on a voluntary basis and not in the expectation of cash compensation.
The worlds of hierarchies and networks meet and interact. Inside any large corporation there are networks quite distinct from the official ‘org. chart’. When a boss is accused by some employees of favouritism, the implication is that some informal relationships are taking precedence over the formal promotion process managed by ‘Human Resources’ on the fifth floor. When employees from different firms meet for alcoholic refreshments after work, they move from the vertical tower of the corporation to the horizontal square of the social network. Crucially, when a group of individuals meets, each one of whom has power in a different hierarchical structure, their networking can have profound consequences. In his Palliser novels, Anthony Trollope memorably captured the difference between formal power and informal influence when he depicted Victorian politicians publicly denouncing each other in the House of Commons and then privately exchanging confidences in the network of London clubs to which they all belonged. In this book, I want to show that such networks can be found in nearly all human history and that they are much more important than most history books lead their readers to believe.
In the past, as I mentioned already, historians were not especially good at reconstructing past networks. The neglect of networks was partly because traditional historical research relied heavily for its source material on the documents produced by hierarchical institutions such as states. Networks do keep records, but they are not so easy to find. As a very green graduate student, I remember arriving at the Hamburg State Archives and being directed towards a bewildering room full of Findbücher – the huge leather-bound volumes, handwritten in scarcely legible old German script, that constituted the archive’s catalogue. These in turn led to the innumerable reports, minute books and correspondence produced by all the different ‘deputations’ of the Hanseatic city-state’s somewhat antiquated bureaucracy. I vividly recall leafing through the books that corresponded to the period I was interested in and, to my horror, finding not a single page that was of the slightest interest. Imagine my intense relief, after a few weeks of abject misery, to be shown into the small, oak-panelled room that housed the private papers of the banker Max Warburg, whose son Eric I had met by sheer good luck at a tea party at the British consulate. Within a few hours, I realized that Warburg’s correspondence with members of his own network offered more insight into the history of the German hyperinflation of the early 1920s (my chosen topic) than all the documents in the Staatsarchiv put together.
Yet for many years, like most historians, I was casual in the way that I thought and wrote about networks. In my mind’s eye, there was a vague diagram that connected Warburg to other members of the German-Jewish business elite through various ties of kinship, business and ‘elective affinity’. But it did not occur to me to think in a rigorous way about that network. I was content to think, lazily, of his social ‘circles’, a very imperfect term of art. And I am afraid I was not much more systematic when I came, a few years later, to write the history of the interlocked Rothschild banks. I focused too much on the complex genealogy of the family, with its far from unusual system of cousin-marriage, and too little on the wider network of agents and affiliated banks that was just as important in making the family the wealthiest in the nineteenth-century world. With hindsight, I should have paid more attention to those historians of the mid-twentieth century, such as Lewis Namier or Ronald Syme, who had pioneered prosopography (collective biography), not least as a way of downplaying the role of ideology as an historical actor in its own right. Yet their efforts had fallen short of formal network analysis. Moreover, they had been superseded by a generation of social(ist) historians who were intent on revealing rising and falling classes as the propellants of historical change. I had learned that Vilfredo Pareto’s elites – from the ‘notables’ of revolutionary France to the Honoratioren of Wilhelmine Germany – generally mattered more than Karl Marx’s classes in the historical process, but I had not learned how to analyse elite structures.
This book is an attempt to atone for those sins of omission. 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. 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. 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.
I suspect I would not have arrived at this insight had I not embarked on writing a biography of one of the most adept networkers of modern times: Henry Kissinger. It was as I reached the halfway stage of that project – with volume I finished and volume II half researched – that an interesting hypothesis occurred to me. Did Kissinger owe his success, fame and notoriety not just to his powerful intellect and formidable will but also to his exceptional ability to build an eclectic network of relationships, not only to colleagues in the Nixon and Ford administrations, but also to people outside government: journalists, newspaper proprietors, foreign ambassadors and heads of state – even Hollywood producers? Much of this book synthesizes (I hope without over-simplifying) the research of other scholars, all of whom are duly acknowledged, but on the issue of Kissinger’s network I offer an initial and, I think, original attempt to address that question.
A book is itself the product of a network. I would like to acknowledge, first of all, the director and fellows of the Hoover Institution, where this book was written, as well as that institution’s overseers and donors. At a time when intellectual diversity is the form of diversity that seems to be least valued in universities, Hoover is a rare, if not unique, bastion of free inquiry and independent thought. I would also like to thank my former colleagues at Harvard, who continue to contribute to my thinking on my visits to the Belfer Center at the Kennedy School and the Center for European Studies, and my new colleagues at the Kissinger Center at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Invaluable research assistance was provided by Sarah Wallington and Alice Han, as well as Ravi Jacques and Olivio Ward-Jackson. Manny Rincon-Cruz and Keoni Correa helped greatly to improve the quality of the network graphs and commentary. I received immensely insightful comments on related papers and presentations from (to name only those who committed their thoughts to paper) Graham Allison, Pierpaolo Barbieri, Joe Barillari, Tyler Goodspeed, Micki Kaufman, Paul Schmelzing and Emile Simpson. Early drafts were read by a number of friends, colleagues and experts whose advice I sought. Those who took the time to send me comments were Ruth Ahnert, Teresita Alvarez-Bjelland, Marc Andreessen, Yaneer Bar-Yam, Joe Barillari, Alastair Buchan, Melanie Conroy, Dan Edelstein, Chloe Edmondson, Alan Fournier, Auren Hoffman, Emmanuel Roman, Suzanne Sutherland, Elaine Treharne, Calder Walton and Caroline Winterer. I received invaluable comments on the concluding section of the book from William Burns, Henri de Castries, Mathias Döpfner, John Elkann, Evan Greenberg, John Micklethwait and Robert Rubin. For sharing their insights or giving me permission to cite their unpublished work, I would also like to thank Glenn Carroll, Peter Dolton, Paula Findlen, Francis Fukuyama, Jason Heppler, Matthew Jackson and Franziska Keller. For their help with the history of the Illuminati, I am indebted to Lorenza Castella, Reinhard Markner, Olaf Simons and Joe Wäges.
As usual, Andrew Wylie and his colleagues, notably James Pullen, have represented me and my work with great skill. And, once again, I have had the privilege of being edited by Simon Winder and Scott Moyers, amongst the most insightful editors working in the English-speaking world today. I should also not forget my copy-editor, Mark Handsley, my faithful Virginian proof-reader and friend, Jim Dickson, and my picture researcher, Fred Courtright.
Finally, my thanks to my children, Felix, Freya, Lachlan and Thomas, who have never complained when book-writing has taken precedence over time with them, and who remain a source of inspiration as well as pride and delight. My wife, Ayaan, has patiently tolerated my repetitive over-use of the words ‘network’ and ‘hierarchy’ in our conversations. She has taught me more than she knows about both forms of organization. I thank her, too, with love.
I dedicate this book to Campbell Ferguson, my much-missed father, whose name I hope and pray will be borne by his sixth grandchild by the time this book is published.
