Big Think Interview With Niall Ferguson | Big Think

Big Think Interview With Niall Ferguson

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A conversation with the Harvard University historian.

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NIALL FERGUSON:

Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior fellow of the Center for European Studies, Harvard, where he served for 12 years as the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History. He is also a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation Distinguished Scholar at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC.

He is the author of 14 books. His first, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation 1897-1927, was short-listed for the History Today Book of the Year award, while the collection of essays he edited, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, was a UK bestseller. In 1998 he published to international critical acclaim The Pity of War: Explaining World War One and The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild. The latter won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History and was also short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly/Wingate Literary Award and the American National Jewish Book Award.

His latest book is The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook (2017).

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What was your early history education like?

Niall Ferguson: When I was a schoolboy in Glasgow, I suppose I was treated to the usual smorgasbord of historical subjects that most British school children study. A few weeks of the Romans, a few weeks of ancient Britains, some Scottish history, and then it became a little bit more serious. The Wars of the Roses, the Reign of James the VI and I, what was then called the English Civil War, or Revolution, but these days they call it something much fancier like the British Civil Wars (plural). And I studied the 19th and 20th centuries at school too. I’m not sure all of these different things were terribly well connected, but I did find myself drawn more and more to the subject the older I got. And the turning point, I think was the year—and I’m guessing my age was 15 or 16—when I was studying Hamlet in English Literature, and the 30 Years War in history. Now the study of the play, Hamlet, is something that everybody should undertake, and I still have fond memories of the essay I wrote on the theme of death in Hamlet.

But when I was studying the 30 Years War, I was encouraged by my history teacher, Bonnie Woods, to go to the Mitchell Library, which is a wonderful library in Glasgow. And I went in, in search of books on the 30 Years War and was absolutely stunned to find an entire shelf of books on the 30 Years War; the first of which was by Friedrich Schiller, the great German sturm und drang dramatist and historian. And it was the realization that there were so many different ways of thinking about the 30 Years War as opposed to the one play of Shakespeare called Hamlet that shifted my attention from English to History.

Question: What is the value of historical perspective?

Niall Ferguson: Historical study differs from a great many other things; say the whole realm of the social sciences for two reasons. Firstly, we’re not engaged in model building. We’re not trying to simply the world of human beings into some kind of mathematical model. Historians live and breathe the complexity of the past and we accept that there really is a sample size of one. There’s only one human history and we can’t rerun it in any laboratory, so we can’t be engaged in a scientific endeavor. The second thing that history does is that it encourages that minority of human beings who are alive, I think it’s only 7% of human beings who ever lived who are alive right now, to understand what the other 93% experienced in their time.

So, historians build a bridge backwards through the generations, and at the heart of our enterprise is the imagination. One has to imagine what it was to be in another time, in another predicament. And that active imagination is at the heart of the historical process. The great philosopher, R.G. Collingwood said, “We are engaged in reconstructing past thought on the basis of those remnants that other civilizations leave behind; the letters, the documents.” That’s really what history is.

So, this combination of understanding complexity and reimagining past life seems to me to be a tremendously valuable combination of skills...

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