Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist
A visit to Jerusalem last week reminded me of the enduring value of sociology as a discipline, despite its lamentable politicisation in recent times. The founders of sociology – I think especially of Max Weber – would have been fascinated by Israeli society. In their politics, Israeli citizens are deeply divided: there are 12 parties
Astriking generation gap in the western world has been revealed by the responses to the 7 October atrocities in Israel. Noting in these pages the surge in pro-Palestinian sentiment among young people on both sides of the Atlantic, my old friend Douglas Murray worries that ‘When it comes to Palestine, the kids aren’t all right’.
Everyone knows F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous line from the end of his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon: ‘There are no second acts in American lives.’ But Fitzgerald wasn’t talking about second chances. He meant that, unlike in a traditional play – where Act I presents a problem, Act II reveals the complications and Act III
When the Queen died, I was on my way to Kyiv. My mind focused on the war in Ukraine, I found myself uncharacteristically lost for words when I was asked to comment. I took refuge in the complexities of the journey, which involved a delayed flight from Rome to Lublin, a frantic drive to Chelm
‘War’, in Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s most famous dictum, ‘is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.’ A generation of Democrats — the American variety, but also European Christian and Social Democrats — have sought to ignore that truth. Appalled by the violence of war, they have vainly
The pandemic is not quite over, but we are getting used to its inconveniences. What disaster will be next? An antibiotic-resistant strain of the bubonic plague? Climate collapse? Coronal mass ejection? Will the next catastrophe be natural — perhaps a massive volcanic eruption, the likes of which we have not seen for more than two
‘There’s an osmosis in war, call it what you will, but the victors always tend to assume the… the, eh, trappings of the loser,’ says one of the officers in Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. ‘We might easily go fascist after we win.’ Americans have long been haunted by the notion of the
‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,’ George Orwell famously observed. He was talking not about everyday life but about politics, where it is ‘quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously’. The examples he
The Covid-19 pandemic came along just as Cold War II was getting under way between the United States and the People’s Republic of China — the superpowers of our time — with the European Union and a good many other US allies quietly hoping to be non-aligned. Far from propelling Beijing and Washington towards détente
The 1960s were swinging. The 1970s were stagflationary. In the 1980s we made loadsamoney and greed was good. The 1990s were dot.commy. And the 2000s were the boom and bust decade. Characterising ten-year periods in this casual way is something journalists love to do. It’s deplorably unscientific and yet pleasingly decentralised. A consensus simply emerged
I spent the early part of last week in London, filming what are known in the television trade as PTCs (‘pieces to camera’). These will form the connecting tissue for a three-part documentary series loosely based on my most recent book, The Square and the Tower. Ten years ago, I did a lot of this
In the 1962 Japanese sci-fi classic King Kong vs Godzilla, the two giant monsters fight to a stalemate atop Mount Fuji. I have been wondering for some time when the two giants of American social media would square up for what promises to be a comparably brutal battle. Finally, it began last month — and
I suppose there are such things as amicable divorces. Mine wasn’t. Like the First World War, it was fought for more than four years, and ended with the Treaty of Versailles (by which I mean that it imposed territorial losses and the payment of annual reparations for a very long time). Which brings me to
In 1873, when Jules Verne published his Around the World in Eighty Days, it seemed worth betting that a circumnavigation of the globe could be achieved in less than three months. Having just completed the feat in roughly three weeks, I feel like a slowcoach. (I gather it can be done on scheduled flights in
I have a sinking feeling that Joe Biden might be the next president of the United States. In a brilliant essay published by the American Spectator in 2010, Angelo Codevilla of Boston University foresaw a popular revolt against ‘America’s ruling class’. What he calls ‘the Country party’ repudiates the co-option of the mainstream Republican party
It used to be that the most annoying thing in academic life was political correctness. But a new irritant now threatens to supplant it: the scourge of correct politicalness. The essence of correct politicalness is to seek to undermine an irrefutable argument by claiming loudly and repetitively to have found an error in it. As
It was Clare Booth Luce, the witty and glamorous wife of the publisher of Time magazine, who coined the phrase that no good deed goes unpunished. It is all you need to know about British politics today. The UK had the best performing of the G7 economies last year, with a real GDP growth rate
It was back in 2001 that my good friend Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs coined the acronym ‘Bric’, short for Brazil, Russia, India, China. These were the emerging markets that were going to surpass the developed economies. And so they have. Well, nearly. I, too, am partial to a good acronym and it has always
São Paolo It was back in 2001 that my good friend Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs coined the acronym ‘Bric’, short for Brazil, Russia, India, China. These were the emerging markets that were going to surpass the developed economies. And so they have. Well, nearly. I, too, am partial to a good acronym and it
It’s an ill wind that blows no one any good. The financial crisis that came to a head five years ago with the failure of Lehman Brothers has been especially beneficial to the economist Paul Krugman. In his widely read New York Times column and blog, Krugman regularly boasts that he has been ‘right’ about the crisis
