This is my first time reading the author.

This is not the kind of non-fiction I usually read but the blurb drew me in. The book sounded fascinating.

Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work for me.

Ferguson digests a huge amount of historical material and tries to present it as a struggle between the power of hierarchies and networks. I found some sections interesting bordering on fascinating and other sections left me cold.

Ultimately, I didn’t find every argument presented in the book compelling and believing. Some of the possibilities put forward are intriguing but didn’t completely come together.
The Square And The Tower is a fascinating read.

More polemic than history, Ferguson has certainly digested a huge amount of material and tries to re-cast the entire history of mankind as a constant struggle between the power of hierarchies and networks. This kind of systematic binary categorisation, however, tends to simplify his vision - as his own narrative makes clear, the boundaries between a hierarchy and a network may shift, dissolve and reform: Russian communism, and Hitler's fascism might both have started as political networks but then both turned into the ultimate hierarchies of dictatorships and centralised power.

Despite this acknowledged outcome, Ferguson's own well-publicised politics lead him to the conclusion that 'the lesson of history is that trusting in networks to run the world is a recipe for anarchy' - and the key here is that 'to run the world', because this is what Ferguson is really concerned with. That his own narrative acknowledges the hierarchies of totalitarianism ('the secret of totalitarian success was, in other words, to delegitimise, paralyse or kill outright nearly all social networks outside the hierarchical institutions of party and state') and then *still* conclude that hierarchy, authoritarianism and centralised control is better than the 'anarchy' of distributed networks is a paradox at the heart of the book and something that I found disturbing.

The early part of the book which summarises decades worth of research on network theory feels overlong and could have been sharpened considerably. The later sweep through all of human history has its predictabilities given the author especially in relation to colonial imperialism ('but is "conquest" the correct term to describe what followed?'). The latter sections on contemporary politics (the rise of radical Islam, the Trump election, the Brexit referendum) are, in some ways, the most impassioned but, at the same time, sometimes lose their connection to the overarching argument about networks vs. hierarchies.

Ferguson is not the most elegant of writers here and his binary vision of power structures across human history is perhaps less radical than the book tries to claim (after all, network analysis has been around for the last 50 or so years) - all the same, this is provocative polemic that will undoubtedly prompt public discussion and debate - surely the very attributes of the networks which he, ultimately, disses.