Book review of The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook by Niall Ferguson - The Washington Post - 0 views
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Ferguson maintains that historians have paid too much attention to hierarchies (monarchies, empires, nation-states, governments, armies, corporations) and too little to the loose social networks that often end up disrupting them.
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“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.”
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The author argues that dismissing the role of social networks is a grave mistake because these loose organizational arrangements have been far more important in shaping history than most historians know or are prepared to accept
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