Book review of The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Fac... - 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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the power of networks has varied over time and that the relative importance of the tower and the square has ebbed and flowed. Nonetheless, Ferguson sees two specific periods as standing out as intensely “networked eras.” The first started in the late 15th century, after the introduction in Europe of the printing press, and lasted until the late 18th century. The second, “our own time,” began in the 1970s and is still going on.
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from the late 1790s until the late 1960s, was terrible for networks. Ferguson writes that “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.”
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“The Square and the Tower” will not disappoint readers who have come to expect from Ferguson ambition, erudition, originality and expansive historical panoramas. These often come mixed with telling anecdotes, illuminating minutiae, fun facts and even some facile one-liners that, while entertaining, don’t add much to the argument.
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it is too much, and not all of it is illuminated by the “theoretical insights from myriad disciplines.” In fact, it is surprising how little Ferguson relies on the initial chapters on network theory to make his case.
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In the remaining eight parts of the book, this network theory mostly disappears and the story is told in standard historical narrative.
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its main unit of analysis, the social network, is too imprecise a concept to provide a solid foundation from which to launch the book’s epic theorizing. Most networks have some hierarchical features, and, as Ferguson notes, “a hierarchy is just a special kind of network
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Nonetheless, the networks-and-hierarchies dichotomy does work as a narrative device that allows a gifted storyteller to take his readers on a fascinating tour of world history.