Niall Ferguson is among Britain’s most valuable exports – a feted international academic with seats at Harvard, Stanford, the Harvard Business School and the LSE; he has also had spells at Oxford and Cambridge. His tomes sell in their millions; his TV shows are an engaging mix of self-confidence and charm. He is a credible talking head and he is consistently placed on lists of ‘influential people’. Across the globe then, Ferguson ‘matters’. Everywhere save British academic circles, where he’s seen as a neo-conservative oddity.
It’s sometimes said that the British, unlike the French and the Americans, mistrust public intellectuals. But the careers of Richard Dawkins, A. J. Ayer, Bertrand Russell and A.J.P. Taylor say otherwise. Even the truly odious Hugh Trevor-Roper was more loved than feared. Why, then, is Ferguson reviled rather than revered?
Naturally, envy plays its part. Basking in the bright lights of New York was never going to endear him to Britain’s mustier academes. But envy is only a constituent of contempt. Ferguson’s bumptious style is resented. He carries himself with the brash deportment of a nabob – a self-regarding parvenu who has absolute certainty in the merit of each and every one of his opinions.
And he has lot of opinions. His reputation as a financial historian is confirmed. And with good reason: The Cash Nexus is an involved masterpiece of gritty number-crunching. But his discursive meditations on the history of Western culture and empire are intellectually diaphanous. Specialists decry his shallow research, his tabloidese and his insistence on structuring arguments according to the dictates of a six-part television series.
One academic I spoke to, a renowned specialist in 18th Century British imperialism, said that Ferguson consistently overreaches himself to produce “politically motivated pop history.” He continued, “Ferguson’s premise is that ‘empire’ shouldn’t be a dirty word; that the British Empire was a ‘civilising’ influence and the lesser of manifold evils. Fair enough: it’s important to challenge the smug post-colonial consensus. But you should do it credibly and with consideration. Imperialism’s negatives have long outlived its positives, which were largely counter-factual in any case. Upholding British imperialism on the grounds that Louis XIV, Hitler and Hirohito weren’t British is not a substantive argument.”
That is critical scholarship, not intellectual snobbery. It is not sufficient just to be engrossing and self-confident. Say what you like about David Starkey, but his learning is abundant even on television.
Ferguson’s latest book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, is another exercise in breadth rather than depth. In article in last Saturday’s Times (£), Ferguson presents his case in the form a question: ‘Why did a handful of tiny states at the western end of Eurasia come to such prominence?’ Then Ferguson, wearing his television presenter’s hat, condenses the history Western of civilisation into ‘6 killer apps’ – medicine, consumption, the work ethic, competition, property rights and science. From this he deduces that the word was more powerful than the sword, and that the East is now rising according to the Western template.
A contentious thesis worth debating, but, as Sam Leith argues in the upcoming issue of the Spectator, it looks like Ferguson has exceeded himself once again. Already, his assertions are being rubbished over the port and cheese.
Comments