What is the main message of The Square and the Tower?

The main message of The Square and the Tower is the importance of networks and hierarchies throughout history.

How long does it take to read The Square and the Tower?

The reading time for The Square and the Tower varies depending on the reader, but it typically takes several hours. The Blinkist summary can be read in just 15 minutes.

Is The Square and the Tower a good book? Is it worth reading?

The Square and the Tower is worth reading as it offers insightful analysis of power structures and their impact on society.

Who is the author of The Square and the Tower?

The author of The Square and the Tower is Niall Ferguson.

The Square and the Tower Summary of Key Ideas and Review

Name: The Square and the Tower
Rating: 4.4 (90 reviews)
Author: Niall Ferguson

Introduction

What’s in it for me? Get a broad overview of the history of networks, from Gutenberg to Trump.

Opening up a newspaper or switching on the TV can be an overwhelming experience these days. Finding the common thread that runs through the patchwork of today’s complex and seemingly chaotic events is a tricky business.

After all, what on earth could the Arab Spring, the use of targeted Facebook ads to swing a referendum in the United Kingdom and the plots of international terrorist cells have in common?

In a word, networks. Whether you’re a global trader or just a casual Twitter user, chances are you’re hooked into a network that uses technology to share information and spread ideas.

In the age of Brexit and Trump, such networks may seem utterly contemporary. But, as Niall Ferguson shows in this sweeping study of networks, what we’re experiencing now is only the most recent – and chaotic – act in a play as old as Gutenberg and the invention of the printing press.

From the Reformation’s attack on Catholic dogma to the Enlightenment and the dissident groups of Communist Poland, networks have long driven historical change. Just as they are today, they’ve always been powered by technological innovation and, as they do today, they’ve always acted as vectors for radical new ideas.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how the printing press created a network that changed the face of Europe forever;
how the British built a global empire by making use of existing networks; and
Why Donald Trump’s use of Twitter helped him beat Hillary Clinton.

Key idea 1 of 13

History is shaped by the push and pull of hierarchy and networks, two phenomena that share some basic traits.

Some people view history as a kind of pyramid. At the top are the great kings and queens, with a vast hierarchy of knights, priests and peasants below them. Others emphasize the role of clandestine networks such as the Illuminati or the Freemasons, groups of people who, though acting behind the scenes, pull all the strings.

But can either of these models really explain the historical process?

In fact, both hierarchies and networks have molded most of our history. While hierarchies have usually had the final say, networks have long played a vital role in driving historical change and transforming societies.

Take the global economic networks that emerged with the advent of steamships and railways, or the more recent changes precipitated by the emergence of communication networks centered around telephones or the internet. And social networks have also played a key role in change. The French Revolution, for example, was facilitated by the salons of eighteenth-century Paris, where different groups could meet to discuss their ideas.

Networks and hierarchies also share a number of traits.

Think of what a network really is. Simply put, it’s a set of interconnected nodes. These nodes can be people, trading ports or family members. And, because of homophily, our propensity to form networks with people similar to us, these nodes tend to be connected by some commonality.

What unites us with others can be a shared status – such as ethnicity, class, age or sex – or a set of shared values derived from education, religion, occupation or other interests.

A good example of this is the early twentieth-century Bloomsbury group. Consisting of authors and artists, the group took shape around a series of shared ideals concerning art, life, sexuality and politics. The connections between group members were sometimes even formalized through marriage. Indeed, these individual nodes were connected in so many ways that if you were to draw a line signifying each connection, you’d end up with a pattern similar to a spider’s web.

The author Virginia Woolf, for example, married Leonard Woolf but was in love with the famous gardener Vita Sackville-West. At the center of the network was the economist John Maynard Keynes. Because he was connected to virtually every other node, he was the network’s hub or central node.

Hierarchy works like this, too. The difference, however, is that the connections all run down from the top. The “central” node is in fact the apex of the pyramid.

Everyone is connected to the top, with varying degrees of separation. But, as you proceed down the pyramid, there are fewer and fewer horizontal connections between individual nodes.

So, although hierarchies and networks share similarities, networks are more interconnected. In the following blinks, we’ll dig a bit deeper and explore how networks function.

Key idea 2 of 13

Networks are defined by key traits such as centrality, weak ties and brokers.

A network is a series of nodes. But some networks are more effective than others. In general, the more interconnected the nodes in a network, the better that network functions.

We can understand the importance of different nodes by analyzing their relative centrality in a network.

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Key idea 3 of 13

Global exploration and the invention of the printing press created important new networks.

At the dawn of the sixteenth century, the world was divided into around 30 empires, duchies and kingdoms, each ruled by powerful individuals. The only game in town was top-down hierarchy. But two networks were emerging that would shake the foundations of this old order.

One of those networks was a product of Spain and Portugal’s exploration of the world.

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Key idea 4 of 13

The Reformation shook the foundations of hierarchy and kick-started a new age of networks.

The rise of the printing press didn’t just make itself felt in the falling prices of books.

The circulation of written material also set the stage for a major challenge to hierarchy: the Reformation.

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Key idea 5 of 13

The Enlightenment and both the American and French revolutions were network-based.

The printing press, the Reformation, the budding scientific revolution: each posed a threat to the established order. And, soon enough, hierarchies were being challenged on both sides of the Atlantic.

In America, a multitude of associational networks helped launch the American Revolution and put the country on the road to independence.

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Key idea 6 of 13

The nineteenth century witnessed the birth of reformed and networked hierarchy.

Few historical events seem more improbable than the rise of an unknown Corsican soldier to the emperorship of France. But the French Revolution had shaken things up. This was a new world where anything was possible, and Napoleon Bonaparte stamped his name in the history books.

After conquering most of Europe, Napoleon didn’t just reimpose strict hierarchy on France; he inadvertently reimposed it across all of Europe.

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Key idea 7 of 13

The British Empire made use of existing hierarchies to build an empire and spearhead globalization.

In the nineteenth century, Britain began to outstrip both its friends and rivals, and it soon became the most powerful nation in the world. It built a vast empire and ruled the waves.

So how did this tiny island nation achieve global domination?

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Key idea 8 of 13

Two of the twentieth century’s most lethal ideologies started out as networks.

For just under 100 years, the pentarchy oversaw a period of relative peace in Europe. This peace was shattered in 1914, with the outbreak of World War I. Once again, established hierarchies were undermined, and the world order came under threat from emerging networks.

One network that had grown quickly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was socialism.

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Key idea 9 of 13

The postwar years were defined by hierarchy but the end of the twentieth century saw the reemergence of networks.

The postwar period was defined by the Cold War, a conflict between two massive and hierarchical structures: the US-led NATO alliance and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact.

Although both of these alliances were networks, they were each arranged hierarchically around a central hub – the United States, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union, on the other. In both networks, decisions and information flowed outward from the core to the periphery.

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Key idea 10 of 13

The decentralized networks we know today emerged as hierarchies and came under pressure in the 1970s.

By the 1970s, hierarchical structures were also on the wane in the United States. The networked civil-rights movement that had emerged during the previous decade had rolled back the institutions of racial segregation. And other hierarchies were beginning to look similarly fragile.

The world was becoming less rigid. Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s secretary of state, called it an age of “interdependence.” Different nodes, whether countries, coworkers or institutions, would no longer be able to exist in splendid isolation from one another. Each element was dependent on the next.

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Key idea 11 of 13

The early twenty-first century proved that anarchic networks could have a major impact on society.

One of the twenty-first century’s defining moments occurred just a year after its dawn. On September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks targeted the central nodes of America’s economic and political system.

And the perpetrators belonged to a network – the al-Qaeda group.

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Key idea 12 of 13

Recent events have shown that networks can challenge hierarchies in the West as well.

Hierarchies haven’t just come under sustained pressure in the Middle East. Since 2016, a wave of unrest has also destabilized familiar top-down institutions in the West. And, once again, social media proved a powerful engine of disruption.

That’s because social media is a great tool if you want to polarize opinion.

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Key idea 13 of 13

Unless regulation is imposed, the future is likely to be both more networked and much more chaotic.

As we’ve seen, networks and revolutions have long been bedfellows. But what does that mean for us, the inhabitants of the most networked societies in human history?

Well, thanks to the internet we might just be on the cusp of an age every bit as revolutionary as that which followed the invention of the printing press.

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