The Square and the Tower Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power

Ferguson, Niall

ISBN 10: 0241290465 / ISBN 13: 9780241290460

Published by UK: Allen Lane an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2017, 2017

About this Item

First edition; small 4to.; paper covered boards, hardcover; xxvii, 573 pages; 16 pages of color plates and black and white illustrations; top corners are bumped else very good in a very good unclipped dust jacket.

Seller Inventory # 49463

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Square and the Tower Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power
• Publisher: UK: Allen Lane an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2017
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0241290465
• ISBN 13: 9780241290460
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Seller catalogs:
  • Social History

About this title

Synopsis

What if everything we thought we knew about history was wrong? From the global bestselling author of Empire, The Ascent of Money and Civilization, this is a whole new way of looking at the world.

Most history is hierarchical: it's about popes, presidents, and prime ministers. But what if that's simply because they create the historical archives? What if we are missing equally powerful but less visible networks-leaving them to the conspiracy theorists, with their dreams of all-powerful Illuminati?

The twenty-first century has been hailed as the Networked Age. But in The Square and the Tower Niall Ferguson argues that social networks are nothing new. From the printers and preachers who made the Reformation to the freemasons who led the American Revolution, it was the networkers who disrupted the old order of popes and kings. Far from being novel, our era is the Second Networked Age, with the computer in the role of the printing press.

Those looking forward to a utopia of interconnected 'netizens' may therefore be disappointed. For networks are prone to clustering, contagions, and even outages. And the conflicts of the past already have unnerving parallels today, in the time of Facebook, Islamic State and Trumpworld.

About the Author

NIALL FERGUSON is one of the world's most renowned historians. He is the author of Paper and Iron, The House of Rothschild, The Pity of War, The Cash Nexus, Empire, Colossus, The War of the World, The Ascent of Money, High Financier, Civilization, The Great Degeneration, and Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist. He is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. His many awards include the Benjamin Franklin Prize for Public Service (2010), the Hayek Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2012) and the Ludwig Erhard Prize for Economic Journalism (2013).