Niall Ferguson is not normally an author whose imperialist histories
would interest me but I hadn’t heard of his latest (?) title The
Square and the Tower – networks and power from the Freemasons to Facebook (2018)
and was intrigued to find out what a historian had to say about networks –
particularly when its intro brought back memories of my own involvement in the
early days of the “networked society”.
“The Square and the Tower” claims to present “a new historical narrative, in which
major changes—dating back to the Age of Discovery and the Reformation, if not
earlier—can be understood, in essence, as disruptive challenges to established
hierarchies by networks.”
Social networks “have always been much more important in history than
most historians, fixated as they have been on hierarchical organizations such
as states, have allowed,” and never more so than in modern times.
The first “networked era” followed
the introduction of the printing press in Europe in the late fifteenth century.
The intervening period, from the late 1790s until the
late 1960s, saw the opposite trend: 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 wars.
And, we might add, of large corporations such as General Motors…
The second such era—our
own—dates, according to Ferguson, from the 1970s, and the pace of change
has accelerated along with new communication technologies. A review
in the New York Review of Books tells us that -
Niall Ferguson believes that until recently networks
have been neglected by historians, who prefer to study institutions that leave
well-preserved and accessible archives. He confesses that he has only recently
come to appreciate that his own books “were also books about
networks.”
For many years the British-born financial historian,
chronicler of the Rothschild banks, television broadcaster, and prolific
journalist had been “casual” in the way he thought about networks. When writing
about the career of Sigmund Warburg, he had in his mind’s eye “a vague diagram
that connected Warburg to other members of the German-Jewish business elite
through various ties of kinship, business and ‘elective affinity.’”
Yet it did not occur to Ferguson to “think in a
rigorous way about that network.” He had yet to adopt “formal network
analysis.” This book, he writes, “is an attempt to atone for those sins of
omission.”
Alvin Toffler’s Future
Shock was amazingly prescient in 1970 about what the winds of technical
change were about to bring; and Marilyn Ferguson’s The
Aquarian Conspiracy (1981) confirmed this. Both books repay close study…..
It was in 1976 or so that my
involvement in a research project made me aware of my own role as a networker
– just (in a sense) as Moliere’s Monsieur Jourdain’s
philosopher tutor made him realise he had been speaking prose for most of
his life.
I had become a community activist in the late 1960s - inspired by Saul
Alinsky’s Reveille
for Radicals which was, astonishingly, written
in 1946 but became a bible for activists during the American War on Poverty
of the 1960s.
My elevation in 1971 to the chair of a new social work agency which had
been given an important preventive role by the Labour government of 1964-70
gave me a profile at a Scottish level – to which I owed my selection in 1974 to
one of the top positions in the new Strathclyde Region covering half of
Scotland’s 5 million people. The “Born
to Fail?” report exposing the scale
of poverty in the West of Scotland had appeared the previous year - and a
few of us managed to make this issue the central strategic one for the massive new
Region.
The research project I referred to earlier was managed by a branch of
the famous Tavistock Institute (one which,
perhaps curiously, deal with operational
research) and very
much focused on the negotiations which took place as the Region initiated
rounds of discussion not only with its own departments such as Police,
Education and Social Work but the housing authorities, health boards and even
universities and teacher training bodies – in an effort to try to gain support
for a new social justice strategy which
brought citizen activists together with officials and politicians (and local
budgets) to determine a better future .
I’ve described this work in Case
Study in Organisational Development and Political Amnesia – and am pleased to say that the
Scottish government continues this work to this day…..
Networks have primarily been of interest to sociologists – with
sociometrics mapping the influence of key individuals in systems and Manuel Castells
being the guru of the subject with his writing about “the network society”. But
economists such as Paul Ormerod have also been active – with his
Positive Linking – how networks are revolutionising your world (2011)
Although the management of change became very popular in the 1980s and
1990s – as you can see from this Annotated
Bibliography for change agents I did on the subject - it was 2000 before a
little book The
Tipping Point by journalist Malcolm Gladwell made everyone fully appreciate
the significance of networks and the different roles played in the diffusion of
fashionable products or ideas….You can read
the book in full here
In the next post, I’ll have a look at how other intellectual
disciplines such as political science have tried to deal with the idea of
networks
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