The historian bastard considers himself a punk

The Scottish-American Niall Ferguson probably the most influential historian in the world Henry Kissinger Since his death in 2023. His recognition is not only indicated by the fact that he has written a series of historical bestsellers and has been a researcher and lecturer at the most famous British and American elite universities (Cambridge, Oxford, New York University and Harvard). -the late US Secretary of State, who won the peace prize, also considered him worthy of writing his biography, handing over his personal documents to him. The first volume of Niall Ferguson’s Kissinger biography has so far been published (Kissinger – 1923-1968: The Idealist2016), which cannot be read in Hungarian, but many of his historical bestsellers have been published in Hungary, his best-known and most controversial work, the Civilization – The West and the Others his 2012 summary several times.

The Tory punk

The star historian and brat, who is also accused of “cultural racism”, a Civilization in his work, which can also be consumed as a TV series, he looks for the answer to why, although in the early 1500s, London was still a dark, dirty, infected, miserable place full of worms compared to Beijing, and the countries of Western Europe were far behind in terms of technical development and in wealth from the Heavenly Empire, yet it was not China but the Atlantic countries that conquered the world. As a staunch capitalist, Niall Ferguson finds the answer in competition, private ownership and – From Max Weber inspired – he found it in the “Protestant ethic” that encourages accumulation.

At the same time, also in the fact that the power of the church was pushed back in the West, which gave way to medical discoveries – since the English could hardly have been the masters of the world in the 19th century if they had not discovered it as a “killing device” (Ferguson, with his concept taken from the world of smartphones: ” killer app”) the antidote to malaria. But he also identified pop music and fashion as cultural weapons that ensure the supremacy of the West to this day – as long as the West dares to be itself and does not get bogged down by excessive political correctness.

Niall Ferguson considers himself a “Tory punk”: he was a teenager at the time of the Sex Pistols’ explosion, and as a university student he made a splash by standing for the right-wing prime minister at Oxford University, which is teeming with left-wing professors and students. For Margaret Thatcher was a fan of Sex Pistols singer Jat ohnny Rotten also became more controversial.

“Paid Agent” of the British Empire

According to Niall Ferguson, there is no place for “safe spaces” in universities, even more so for provocative proposals and debates. He caused enormous outrage when he tried to rehabilitate the British Empire in opposition to the post-colonial scientific discourse. The Empire – How Britain Made the Modern World (Empire – How Britain Made the Modern World) in his 2003 work and television series. In contrast to economic exploitation and mass murder, he placed high-level, professional public administration, education and health care, as well as policing attractive to investments, in the other pan of the balance of colonialism.

He did not care about the critics, in fact, he only continued to harass them by calling himself a “paid agent” of the British Empire.

He is not only the writer and presenter of his series promoting history, but also the producer, but Niall Ferguson has never made a secret of the fact that he wants to sell what he does: in his impeccably tailored jackets, he looks like a yuppie banker from the City rather than a humanities scholar. In 1998, Penguin Books signed an unprecedented contract with him, when the publisher paid him 600,000 pounds (1 million dollars at the time) in advance for the next three books. With this amount of money, he has the opportunity to employ scientific assistants who go to archives and syllabize manuscripts for him: otherwise, he would not be able to produce the hefty monographs so quickly.

He created a new intellectual fashion

He has had an impressive career: he came to Oxford University from Glasgow, the capital of Scotland, which seemed like a costume TV drama compared to the industrial area where he grew up, with a long history, but already decaying by the 1970s. AJP Taylor was his hero at school A pictorial chronicle of the First World War Taylor’s 1964 book was the defining reading experience of Ferguson’s childhood, and he modeled his career on his first media historian, Taylor. Niall Ferguson fantasized that in the morning he would be lecturing his students in his book-filled study, in the afternoon he would write an opinion piece for a daily newspaper, and in the evening he would give a half-hour lecture on a TV channel’s history program.

Niall Ferguson really became a kind of “right-wing AJP Taylor” (he says everything about his role model’s leftism that he believed “the poor are always right”), whose mission as a historian is to write not only reliable but also entertaining books. In addition to his provocative statements, Ferguson mainly does this with bold assumptions and counterfactual games. With the unscrupulous condition of the “what if?” question – which all history students were taught that serious historians do not deal with – he created a new intellectual fashion: “Niallism”.

The 1997 one Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals) after the multi-authored volume a The Pity of War (A sorry war) burst onto the public consciousness with his 1998 book, in which he blamed Great Britain’s military intervention in 1914 for the protracted First World War, the “20. for the primordial catastrophe of the 20th century” (as George Kennan called it). Ferguson argued that if Britain had not sent troops against Germany, which had violated Belgium’s neutrality, the European conflict could have ended much more quickly. Even with the victory of Wilhelmine Germany, but with the emperor and the tsar on the throne, the Bolshevik takeover of power in 1917 would have failed, Hitler he would never have been the leader of the humiliated Germany in 1919, so the Second World War and the Holocaust would not have occurred.

We learn from history

Ferguson emphasizes that a historian must not forget that at a given historical moment there was not only the “reality” that eventually occurred, and he admits that “great men”, coincidences and human stupidity are all history-shaping factors. In this way, in contrast to the Marxists, he rejects material determinism, even though he himself started out as an economic historian in the 1990s, his doctoral dissertation was written by a man who moved to Hungary at the end of his life. Norman Stone he wrote about the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany in 1923. He put it on the table as a “guild” economic historian Rothschild also the rich history of a banker’s family. From his research at that time, he developed a book showing the historical significance of informal networks The square and the tower his 2018 work entitled

According to bad language, a The Pity of War in the amazing resonance of his book, not only the inspiration of the book, but also of Niall Ferguson’s first wife, To Sue Douglas his media relations also played a role. As a university student, the historian started working as a journalist under a pseudonym in order to finance his doctoral studies. He lived a double life, “Dr. Ferguson” “Mr. Hyde” was “Alec Campbell” – his later wife edited his articles. Even as a star historian, he did not give up his “writing work”, since the summer of 2020 he has been one of Bloomberg’s opinion leaders.

As a publicist, he could never allow himself to be boring, and this can be seen in his history writing, how his scientific work echoes in his public life writings. He likes to use historical analogies in his political analyzes and predictions. In 2011, he also started his own political consulting company, Greenmantle (Scot John Buchan He chose the title of his 1916 spy novel as the company name). Niall Ferguson does not believe in knowing the past for its own sake, he believes that we study history in order to learn from it and make smaller mistakes in the future. As a consultant, it excites him that while mistakes in the humanities do not have serious consequences, they do in politics.

America must accept that it is an empire

In 2002, he moved to New York to be at the center of the world, where serious things happen, and like a Greek philosopher to Roman generals, he began to dispense advice to American Republicans. His 2004 book, a The Colossus – The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (Colossus – The Rise and Fall of the American Empire) is provocative as usual, drawing lessons from the history of the British Empire for the future of the United States. According to Ferguson, not a Bush-presidency’s Iraq war policy was the problem, but the fact that it was implemented half-heartedly by the shyly and reluctantly imperialist United States, which should finally accept that it is an empire.

Ferguson criticizes American foreign policy because it does not dare to be imperialist, since power is like water: where the Americans are not there, another great power flows in. He wrote with regret that Harvard graduates want to be CEOs of multinationals, not viceroys of Iraq. These are debatable statements, but it is certain that Niall Ferguson never disagrees. As a researcher at the Hoover Institute, he was one of the first to state in his assessment of the international situation that we are living in a new Cold War. Only instead of nuclear weapons, with the race for artificial intelligence research – and this time not Russia, but China (where Ferguson was visiting professor anyway) is the main opponent of the United States, whose island of Taiwan can be what the Suez Canal was to Great Britain in 1956: it must not be left to waste, otherwise the world power is over.

At the William Hill bookmaker, they can give you quite a low winning multiplier that Niall Ferguson will also become national security adviser in the White House after Henry Kissinger.

The author of the article Péter Csunderlik historian.