Niall Ferguson on Why We Study History (full) | Conversations with Tyler

hello everyone and welcome back to another conversations with tyler today i'm here with neil ferguson who needs no introduction and that's neil n-i-a-l-l and neil has a new book out called doom the politics of catastrophe neil welcome it's great to be with you tyler as a general cultural matter how would you describe the difference between english pessimism and scottish pessimism well english pessimism doesn't exist in in the eyes of the scots because the english always expect to win the world cup uh in soccer and therefore we're we're aware of the view that they have a hubristic optimism that it's our role periodically to puncture not nearly often enough scottish pessimism is different because the phrase we're doomed only really works in a in a scottish accent and i think this is fundamentally the difference between calvinists and anglicans or episcopalians i i grew up in the calvinist west of scotland uh glasgow and its environs and i think i had drummed into me a kind of pessimism that that's only alleviated by gallows humor scotland has the weather to go with the pessimism it does rain a lot and i remember when i first heard the song the sunny side of the street wondering where that was and realizing that americans really do see things differently partly because it's it's sunnier but when i went to oxford and i must have been 17 i was struck by the very different sensibility of of the english who became my friends uh that they're definitely much less steeped in doom and gloom than i was and how does welsh pessimism fit into this picture well i'm a student of of welsh pessimism because i spend quite a bit of time in in wales when i'm in the uk i have a place here i've come to realize after nearly two decades of living and working in the united states that the differences between the celtic periphery countries scotland wales and ireland are really small differences as in narcissism of small differences we're all fundamentally very alike and really should just be united under a new name not not england and so i don't mind which not england i'm in uh it's essentially the same south wales is like the west of scotland it was a center of the industrial revolution coal mines dilapidated steel works uh the pubs feel the same the conversations are similar and there isn't this preoccupation with embarrassment and class which are the things that make england slightly unbearable after a while so i i like coming to wales but wales is scotland light they are they are undoubtedly less morose although they they certainly like to drown their sorrows and i think of wales although this will annoy any welsh people listening as as scotland light it's the diet version it's the same but but it's just it's just not so strong but that's perhaps why i enjoy i enjoy being here that there are times when i go back to scotland and that kind of claustrophobic feeling seizes me the other good thing about the welsh is that they don't take their nationalism too seriously nobody really thinks they'll ever be an independent wales i mean not really not seriously whereas unfortunately a significant proportion of my countrymen in scotland seem to believe that there could be a people's republic of scotland a terrible idea in my view now i don't actually read you as such a pessimist but if you just sort of ask yourself at the intellectual level who has made the most convincing persuasive case for british pessimism is it james fitz james stevens is it john gray is it coleridge who is it marx marx why even today well i mean marx's uh vision of of the industrial revolution was really inspired by uh observations or at least reading about the the british isles in the industrial revolution even if he wasn't exactly doing field work and uh because the english really are obsessed with class you can understand why spending a lot of time in in london would give you the idea that class was the key to history and that ultimately some terrible uh eruption of class conflict would would signal the the death knell of of capitalism i think if one reads capital it is a prophetic work about england and about any country that follows england down the the root of of industrial revolution and class society so i i can't think of any more i mean you could say you know blake but i can't think of any more influential pessimistic view of of of history than marx's in it persuasive to you i have expected you would say jean-luc herrera the notion that this deadeningly dull bureaucracy is our sad future yeah i think that's probably closer to my read although i don't associate the problems of of bureaucracy with england particularly it seems to me that that the modern bureaucratic state is really a german idea uh the germans idealized it maybe i should say the prussians although by the time max weber was writing about bureaucracy it was really german and i think we in the english-speaking world imported an idea of bureaucracy from the germans in the same way that we imported the phd and all all the bad things about academic life from the germans so when bureaucracy came to to britain which it did i think rather later than it came to to germany it almost immediately became an object of of mockery the funniest thing ever written about bureaucracy is the sitcom yes minister so i i don't i don't see that as the distinctively english or british pathology though it's it's become a general pathology of the of the western democratic world certainly in the last 50 years is james bond a scottish prophet of doom it's interesting that that bond was played by scottish actor sean connery but bond was also conceived of uh by infleming in a way that if you read the original novels implies at least a streak of scottishness i i was raised on bond i think sean connery was was our hero because i remember explaining this to to sean connery when i met him for the first time i don't know if you've ever had that experience tyler being introduced to a famous person uh it's very uncomfortable at least uh i felt embarrassed because i was on the doorstep of his house in uh in lyford key and i i'd been taken to the south without any warning that it was sean connery's size it was quite a modest bungalow by a golf course by a well-meaning friend who thought i should meet the the most famous of all scotsman and we knocked on the door and the door was opened by sean connery obviously in the middle of his lunch wearing only a sarong and i couldn't think what to say to him so i i after the earth refused to swallow me up i i sort of mumbled it's a great honor to meet you mr connery i i think i learned everything about how to be a man from watching you in the cinema in glasgow in the 1970s and connery looked at me and raised his eyebrow and said oh that's strange don't you know i'm a homosexual and that was such a great comeback line that it broke the ice i replied is that why you're wearing a skirt and we kind of went from there so conor's bonded a big influence on me uh i make all my children watch those movies but what's the point of the storyline the storyline is it's like world war ii britain's clearly second fiddle to the united states um as much as it as it was in in the second world war in the cold war but we've got something the americans aren't so good at which is intelligence it's it's spies and uh and that's really the plot line and and i realized that all the heroes that i grew up with were heroes born of that british sense that we we definitely didn't have the brawn but we might still have the brains uh doctor who was my favorite uh fictional character when i was a or science fictional character when i was a boy and doctor who's the only superhero who uses his brain not not his muscles all american superheroes and bodybuilders but doctor who doesn't have a muscle on his body so i think that's the point of both those characters that you're you're trying to compensate for your dwindling economic muscle with with superior brains it was unfortunate that it turned out that in fact our intelligence network had been much more successfully penetrated by the kgb than than the us network but we blame that on cambridge where i come from does the philosophy of history in bond movies embody too much extreme contingency just the right amount or not enough because if the villain would just kill james bond and dispense with the unnecessarily slow dipping mechanism right the villain would then go on to destroy or rule the world you don't expect me to talk do you goldfinger no mr bond i expect you to die but how is he going to die an incredibly slow-moving laser is going finally to reach his private parts and slice him in two but it's just too slow yeah i think even as a child i recognized that there was something implausible about sean connery's uh unkillability this is amusingly mocked in mike myers austin pass films but the plot twists if you if you think back to the early fleming novels in the the early movies the plot twists that matter are rather relevant to our own time because the people who are the villains are not clearly direct employees of the soviet union of the russians they are they're kind of semi-freelancing organized criminals whether it's dr no or goldfinger and that's actually quite appropriate in our time because that's that's how cyber warfare is is waged criminal gangs who are semi-officially working with the kremlin are are really quite a major threat to our our our political and economic stability and i hope that somewhere out there there is a a double 07 like figure who who kind of bumps off the ring leaders of the moldovan hacking uh or malware organization that's that's behind the colonial pipeline attack actually this makes bond feel quite relevant and the the plot twists are absurd of course fleming was a bit like john buchan these books are of the direct lineal descendants as you probably know tyler of the great richard haney books that john buchanan wrote beginning with the 39 steps it's a it's a tradition i think that can be traced all the way back to to the the period before the first world war and and you read these books i think with a certain um suspension of disbelief because the authors are signaling to you that there's something slightly camp going on here that it's not to be taken too seriously buchen regarded the the hani novels as as ripping yarns i think he called them shockers he would refer to them as shockers and fleming was equally uh disdainful really of the bond novels but but they capture a truth about cold war the bond novels and and that is that cold war isn't actually cold it involves quite a lot of violence just small-scale precision violence rather than the large-scale violence of of of world war here's a very simple question what is the nature of the epistemic crisis faced by modernity at its most fundamental level why are we screwed up nothing proximate something ultimate or fundamental i think the the problem is that we're haunted by doomsday scenarios because they're they're seared in our subconscious by religion even though we think we're very secular and so we have this hunch that the end is nigh the world is going to end in 12 years or no it must be 10. and so i think part of the problem of of modernity is that we're still haunted by the end time and we also have the nasty suspicion this is there in nick bostrom's work that we've created a whole bunch of technologies that have actually increased the probability rather than reduce the probability of an extinction level event on the other hand we're told that there's a singularity in prospect when all the technologies will come together to produce superhuman beings with massively extended lifespans and the uh the added advantage of artificial general intelligence and so i think the epistemic problem as i see it is i mean ian morris wrote this in one of his recent books which is the scenario extinction level events or the singularity i mean that seems a tremendously uh widely divergent uh set of of of scenarios to choose from and i i sense that perhaps this is just the historian's instinct that that each of these scenarios is in fact very low probability indeed and that we should spend more time thinking about the more likely scenarios that lie lie between them your your essay which uh which i was prompted to read before our conversation about the epistemic problem and consequentialism set me thinking about work i'd done on counter-factual history for which i would have benefited from reading that that essay sooner and i i think that that if you ask what are the counterfactuals uh of the future we spend too much time thinking about the quite unlikely scenarios of the end of the world through climate change or some other calamity of the sort that bostrom talks about or some extraordinary leap forward and i i can't help feeling it these are not that we can attach probabilities they lie in the realm of uncertainty but these don't seem likely scenarios to me i think we'll end up with something that's rather more mundane and perhaps perhaps a relief if we're really serious about the end of the world or perhaps a disappointment if we're serious about the singularity if you had been alive at the time and the glorious revolution were going on which side would you have been rooting for and why speaking of counterfactuals i i think everybody should ask themselves that question each morning um juego torre uh are you a are you a jacobite i i'm but do you want dutch people coming over to run your country that's another part of it right yeah i would have been quite worried nothing against dutch people but you might think well they don't have a stable ruling coalition so they're going to be all the more tyrannical yeah i mean i i wrote i wrote about the dutch takeover in in empire it's sort of bizarre that that uh the british isles just get taken over by a dutch monarch the behest of a of a faction uh mainly motivated by religious prejudice and hostility to roman catholicism at the time i would have been a whig i would have been a wig on religious grounds i'm i'm from the the ardently protestant lowlands of scotland and i'm i'm i'm like all people from that part of the world drawn to the romanticism of of the jacobites but also repelled by what it would have been like in practice if you want to understand all this by the way you have to read walter scott uh which i hadn't done for years and years i'd never really read scott because i was told he was boring and then during the pandemic i started reading the waverly novels and it's all there all the fundamental dilemmas that were raised uh not just by the glorious revolution but prior to that by the civil war of the 17th century and that were raised again in the 1745 uh jacobite rising and scott's brilliance at explaining something that that i don't think is properly understood and that is that scotland had had the most extraordinary historical trajectory it went from being afghanistan in the 17th century i mean it was basically afghanistan you had violent warring clans in the north in the mountainous parts of the country and a theocracy of extreme calvinist zealots in the lowlands and this was a deeply dysfunctional very violent place with much higher levels of homicide than than england really it was a barbaric place and something very strange happened and that was that in the course of beginning really from the late 17th century in the course of the 18th century scotland became the most dynamic tiger economy in the world and also it became the cradle of the enlightenment had really all the best ideas of of western civilization all at once uh in a really short space of time with a really small number of people all sitting around in glasgow and edinburgh and i i still don't think a book has been written that properly explains that you certainly wouldn't have put a bet on scotland behaving that way by the late 18th century if all you knew about it was scotland in the mid-17th century so if you look at it that way then you kind of have to be a whig and you have to recognize that the institutions that that came from england including the dutch institutions that were imported in the glorious revolution really helped scotland get out of of its afghan its afghan predicament why did scott speaking of scott write a nine volume biography of napoleon it's almost a million words it's quite pro-napoleon he was fairly well paid as a novelist i mean wasn't he tutoring or too authoritarian in some sense what's striking to me about scott and i haven't read the napoleon biography is the um apart from the extraordinarily prolific superhuman prolific capacities is the ambivalence about the romantic he's like one man a one-man combination of of johnson and boswell because he's at the same at one in the same time attracted by the romance of uh of of the jacobites and and the romance of of revolutionaries too but he's also conscious that really you're you're better better off with the sober bourgeois existence that's on offer in in in glasgow and edinburgh and that ambivalence i think is is absolutely central to the culture that i come from if you ask the question where is where does jacqueline hyde come from why does stevenson who's really the heir of i mean stevenson is the heir of scott why does why does stevens constantly explore split personalities or fraternal feuds read the master of balance rate because it gets at this fundamental tension between the romantic the tory the catholic on the one side and the rationalist uh whig protestant on the other side and you know that there's something unattractive about the hard-nosed uh protestant types on the other hand if you entrust your country to to romanticism it's probably going to it's probably going to revert to afghanistan i don't think a steward restoration would have gone very well i think i think there's good reason to to be skeptical about that jonathan clark wrote a fantastic essay almost my favorite essay in in the book virtual history imagining lots of different counterfactuals and contingencies of british history and it's one of the best reflections on uh the the various counterfactuals of the of the 17th and 18th century including the counterfactual that you somehow avoid the the american revolution it's a great piece of of writing he's a great historian he's one of the great historians of our generation who because he was a conservative was essentially uh driven into a kind of academic uh exile if you look at the the broader history of historicism and you look at the germans or scott there seems to be this odd connection between historicism as a mode of thinking and an excessive preoccupation with leadership carlisle also and where does that come from that connection and is it a danger or is it a virtue well i'm not sure it's unique to to the historicist after all hegel has his uh moment of of idolizing napoleon doesn't he and the historicists ultimately produce in meineker somebody who who transcends great men i think one has to look at it partly from the vantage point of 19th century publishing if you think about how history evolves as a discipline it's partly propelled by the the publishers in the 19th century and they did like biographies they knew what we know now biographies sell so there was an incentive to to write biographies uh and and when mynika sought to break free of that and i think meinek is in many ways one of the most important and profound historical thinkers it's it's probably not that commercially successful um but you're asking questions now about the philosophy of history a subject that is largely lost these days i mean most most historians are remarkably indifferent to the philosophy of history and i i think it's a great loss that we we no longer really ask these questions we no longer read meineke causality and values uh is one of my nike's great essays and it should be required reading for history undergraduates but i bet you it isn't assigned anywhere in the united states today who is the most profound philosopher of history collingwood why because collingwood brilliantly captured what it is that historians are engaged in doing and put it better than anybody i've read he was par part-time archaeologist part-time philosopher of history a very oxford kind of person but collingwood says uh that the historical and heroic paraphrase rather than try to quote from memory the historical act is essentially one of reconstitution of past thought that you you are reconstituting past thought from such relics of thought that survive and then you're juxtaposing that past thought with your own thought the thought of your own time in order to be informed by it you're not studying it for its own sake you're interested in its implications in the light that it sheds on your own predicament this this is put best in his his autobiography uh another thing that should be required reading which he published in 1939 and when i discovered it which was only after i'd i'd crossed the atlantic and and started teaching it at harvard it was a kind of sudden illumination that that's exactly the kind of approach to history that i favor because as collingwood says we're doing this for a purpose which is to understand our own predicament better by that juxtaposition of of past and present thought on philosophy of history what did you take from ajp taylor men only learn from history how to make new mistakes that's one of taylor's many throwaway lines taylor was my hero when i was a school boy i applied to modern college oxford because i thought he was a fellow there well he had been but i was young we didn't have the internet and i hadn't realized that he'd stop being a fellow there some years before i turned up but i read taylor as a as a schoolboy beginning with the the illustrated history of the first world war which is a pop boiler really but it's just full of fantastic writing taylor was as good a pro stylist as george orwell we we should really put them in the same league when it comes to improving the way we write english taylor loved paradox he loved to be the contrarian his origins of the second world war is still a masterpiece of polemical writing the struggle for mastery in europe is just a tour de force that transformed my thinking about 19th century history but it's just brilliant writing i also remember a great tale of line about the historical sensibility being a little bit like a musical sensibility that that taylor understood that one was really engaged in something closer to music than science and i think that's i think that's right he was a very scrupulous uh diplomatic historian of the old school i mean taylor really did believe in the rankian principle that you plowed through the documents and tried to construct the the the sequence of events that way he's fantastically scathing in his review of of of kissinger's first book um a review that i only found by by chance uh this is a world restored a book that that um that has many merits but but taylor despised it because of its its flourishes uh and and the the fact that they're not really anchored in in the documents from a philosophy of history point of view where do you think taylor's second world war book went wrong hitler is too much of a bumbler right what did he what happened there i think the contrarian impulse is a very strong one and it's a part of the british academic tradition what taylor wanted to do was to turn everyone on their head including people he loathed like hugh trevor roper uh his rival successful rival for the regis chair at oxford so there was a personal element to that at the same time i think taylor's method because it's strictly adhered to the diplomatic documents led him to the very appealing conclusion uh that hitler was just a traditional german statesman and that the war was a kind of accident mainly due to misunderstandings i think that's really as much about the nature of the source material as it is about taylor's love of of paradox and and contrarian thinking actually taylor's account of the the events of 1938-39 is quite good and there's much in it that's right but what's missing is that which you would only find from looking at what hitler was saying uh in other contexts and i think taylor knowingly underplayed hitler's ideological motivations because he was pursuing that contrarian argument and had the material to pull it off but you have to ignore the the diabolical uh and ultimately catastrophic impulses that that were hitler's primary motivations i think the antidote to a book like like taylor's is michael burley's uh excellent book of gosh more than a decade ago a new history of the third reich which emphasizes hitler's messianic political religious side you can't really explain why hitler is able to overcome the anxieties of germans in 1938 and initiate a war in 1939 after all germans had as terrible memories of world war one as anybody did you can't understand how he's able to deliver the the mobilization of 39 unless you unless you recognize that there's something more than just traditional real politic going on here and i think burley better than most english-speaking historians captures the the political religious quality of national socialism that the sense that some national redemption is taking place that hitler is the redeemer now most of the the kind of english language biographies that people read like ian kershaw's or alan bullock's or richard evans very boring books failed to capture the diabolical appeal that hitler had and make him sound almost an ian kershaw's account like a kind of negligent colleague at a provincial university only michael burley really gets that hitler has this terrifying star quality that leads germans into uh the abyss again and it's the second time they're going into that abyss that's what's missing from taylor what have you learned from quentin skinner about history how to be patronized i think quentin once said to me when i was a very young fellow at christ's college that in the great chain of being uh intellectual history was at the top and economic history was at the bottom the bottom feeders and uh that was the kind of thing that that you could say in in cambridge in the early 1990s uh at high table to put some young upstart in his place but quentin's a brilliant man and i i think had a huge and ultimately admirable influence on the way that cambridge did political thought because he insisted on contextualizing the documents and insisted that we don't read texts as if they are handed to us on on stone tablets but that one has to understand italian ideas of republicanism by by delving deeply into the contexts in which someone like machiavelli worked so i'd mark quentin as a scholar even if he was crushing when i was a young a young hopeful under constitutional monarchies do you prefer kings or queens i have no preference aren't queens better they're less likely to do wrong and get themselves into trouble we had mary queen of scots who got herself in more trouble than pretty much any monarch i can think of i don't think the sample size is large enough tyler is it and if you i mean if you kind of look at monarchs i did this a while back found a good paper and worked on the data on how monarchs uh end they do come to a lot of sticky ends the women as well as the men if you if you do you know a large enough sample size and look at not just the english kings and queens i mean i've always been a bit allergic to kings and queens as a subject of study because that's what historians in england are supposed to do if it's not got henry viii in it you're going to struggle for an audience and i've i've studiously avoided writing about monarchs i once tried to write a book about the royal families plural after i'd done the rothschild book which is probably my best book i wanted to do a similar book about the dynasty the saks coburg gosa dynasty this was the german family who somehow became the rulers of most european countries by the later 19th century they were all related and i i went to considerable lengths to prepare that book which of course queen victoria was a big part of because she was the matriarch of the sax co-books the problem with the project was that their letters were so much more boring than the rothschilds letters i would just fall asleep in the royal archives at windsor i gathered an enormous amount of material i drew a wonderful family tree which i still have a genealogy of european royalty which i have outside my office at hoover showing that it's really one family they just happened to have nearly all the thrones of europe by 1900 uh but the the letters just they were just full of gossip and hunting uh stories and i i i just got on so much better with the rothschild correspondence i i realized that i i didn't have a great affinity with with royal history and steered clear of it for most of my career it's probably why i ended up in the united states because american readers are more interested or ready to read about bankers than british readers who do who do like kings and queens what's going to happen in northern ireland and how do you as a scot maybe understand that situation differently in order to become prime minister boris johnson who is the israeli of our time not the churchill realized that he had to agree to something that was completely unworkable the northern ireland protocol for uh listeners viewers uninterested in all this i'll i'll try to keep it simple ultimately uh if you took the united kingdom of great britain and northern ireland which is the full name of this country where i currently sit out of the european union you have to have a border between northern ireland and the republic of ireland that's not something that the good friday agreement smiles upon so you had to kind of agree not to do that and that implied of course that you'd have your customs border in the irish sea and that northern ireland would functionally be treated in the same way as the rest of ireland as the republic of ireland in trade at least and this of course when you think about it for a split second is a terrible blow to unionism in ulster and northern ireland and a great win for the proponents of irish reunification but boris doesn't care about that like most people who've grown up in english politics he has only the haziest notions about northern ireland and uh from his point of view the goal was to get to the top of the greasy pole and if that meant agreeing to something unworkable then so be it uh so that worked out well for him and it continues to work well because brexit is not a an end state it's a it's an ongoing on probably in interminable process which helps the conservatives in england particularly with the working class what happens in northern ireland well i was told just the other day that the troubles would return because uh of these issues i think that's bluff i don't think there really are that many people north or south of the the irish border who want to go back to the battle days so i think there's a a lot of bluff there and the media likes to hype it up but i don't think we'll go back to the 50 years from now will will there be one ireland maybe i mean if you ask english voters if you asked ask english voters that question they're like oh yeah maybe who cares and you ask them the same question about an independent scotland they're like yeah sure i mean the thing that's important is that the english don't care about this stuff anymore and they used to care they just don't care anymore and i think that indifference is the more powerful force if you ask younger people in northern ireland they care less than older people about uh about northern ireland remaining part of the united kingdom so 50 years yeah it's possible i mean i i think the key thing to remember that that is what you get from doing history over long time skills is that there's a shape-shifting quality to this thing we call uh the united kingdom i mean it's only been the united kingdom of great britain and northern ireland for about a hundred years before that ireland was united but united as part of of the united kingdom and you don't have to go too far back uh only go back to the early 19th century uh and you encounter a pre-union arrangement in which ireland is sort of notionally uh a separate entity go back to 1707. that's only that's when scotland's parliament's united with england it's all it seems to me perfectly possible that it could shift again uh perhaps after my my lifetime but in my children's lifetime previously you asked me how i feel about this i i was a scottish nationalist at the age of 15 prepared to punch people on the nose over the issue i i think once you grow out of that kind of thing by the time i got to oxford i'd become a young thatcherite a kind of punk tory and the more i reflected on it as an historian the more i could see that scotland had a great deal out of the union it was entirely to the advantage of people like me that that scotland was a part of a greater political unit the johnson was right about the finest site of scotsman sees the higher road to london all that persuaded me and i've been a proponent of of the union ever since but having fought the battle over 2014 when the referendum on independence occurred last i'm a little bit despondent at the thought of having to make all those arguments again and maybe in the end you just have to treat it like the quebec quebec issue and try to call the nationalists bluff because i don't really think there's that profound a sentiment in favor of of nationalism the snp keeps this going with a mixture of anti-english sentiment and trying to distract attention from its own failures because they basically do run scotland i mean devolution's given them all the power that matters these issues are kind of so parochial that it's hard for me to get excited about them anymore and i would now say well okay try independence and see see how you like it you you think you're going to be a scandinavian country but you'll turn out to be a balkan country and serve you right do you prefer boswell or johnson i of course prefer boswell but that's because uh i identify more with boswell i sometimes feel i'm kissing just boswell kind of trotting along writing down the the aphorisms and and making the the weaker arguments but but johnson has the better lines and and boswell deserves the credit for giving him the better lines alistair gray or irvine welsh alistair gray why better writer lannox a great book john lennon or paul mccartney john lennon i cried when he died all the song all the the great songs are by by lennon i was i a hero worshiped lennon as a as a boy i mean i discovered music by a curious dual track i came from an unmusical family my parents were not interested in music and punk rock began my liberation from an unmusical life i'd sort of hated all that progressive stuff that people listened to pink floyd sent me into a coma punk rock was great but then i kind of was able to rediscover the the roots of of of british popular music and that included the the beatles but but with all due respect to makko who's uh a lovely man and who's birthday i believe it has just been yeah it is today you know you know paul that that john wrote the the more powerful songs and had the more powerful voice what is the best american punk rock band there isn't one not the replacements not the dead kennedys punk was british the dead kennedy's yeah you know b-plus what's the best xtc song i never liked them much but you named a book after an xdc song right paper and iron that's your first book it definitely wasn't inspired by xtc that title they were british punk rockers at the beginning at least yeah yeah i mean it's funny i used to listen to john peel and and that was my kind of musical education this was a wonderful radio show the late john peel who at 10 o'clock every night from 10 to midnight would play the latest punk the latest reggae and i think xdc was a band he played but they were never one of my favorites i was after the sex pistols i was a a jam fan a clash fan a damned fan buzzcocks those were the bands that really uh moved me i i recovered my memory of the adverts uh the other day because i was i was thinking how terrible covert has been for teenagers and i suddenly remembered the adverts bored teenagers a really good song that i hadn't heard for years punk was a wonderful uh eruption of of a distinctly british popular culture and that's why no american bands could ever quite get it right what's your favorite bridge in glasgow there's a bridge over the river kelvin near the school where i went glasgow academy which might be boringly called the kelvin bridge i forget its name but it's a sort of it's a lovely spot glasgow's a rather beautiful city you might be surprised to hear me say that but the area around the university and the place where my school was has the the the river kelvin and uh and that that that bridge is one that i associate with yes walking to and from school in all weathers it's such a great tragedy that the macintosh library burnt down yes libraries are are really a crucial part of my life because without the public libraries i would not have been able to read as much as i did as a kid if i hadn't been sent to the mitchell library as a school boy i wouldn't have understood that history was this unmanageable quantity of data i remember seeing the shelf of books about the 30 years war i'd been asked to write an essay on the 30 years war and i went to the mitchell library and there were all the books in the 30 years war and it hit me oh my god they're just hundreds of them that was when the challenge of history suddenly gripped me that there was this vast almost unmanageable body of of literature to to read on any topic so libraries yes libraries libraries are better than google very important because libraries sort the material in a way that is honest and google sorts it in a way that's designed to sell ads to you so i i think libraries are they are sacred places isn't it funny think back that the way that print evolved as a technology produced an enormous amount of content that was not selling ads and the libraries ended up as the organizing institutions of information with a system of cataloging that wasn't designed to do anything other than get you to associate the book you were reading with the other books that were related to it i think library cataloging systems are a much underrated contribution to our civilization if we look back at the great thinkers of the past and ask ourselves who produced the strongest defense of liberalism liberalism in the broad sense of that word so it could be john stewart mill or hayek or burke or or tocqueville or for you personally who is it tockfield why has always resonated with me much more than mill uh and and higher more than hayek two and i think i think that's partly an oxford story i i as an undergraduate we were required to read top fields launching a regime in french in our first term and i my french wasn't that good so it was quite hard work but the conversations about that book that i remember having not only with my tutor angus mcintyre but with my near contemporary andrew sullivan were very seminal the realization that top feels idea of liberty is something that has to be protected by non-obvious means by things that you might not as a a liberal even approve of that that's a fascinating insight and then when we read democracy in america it became even clearer what top fields project was which was to show why france had failed to be or could not be the united states and why american liberty had a very distinctive set of of institutional of institutional supports and i think what i like about top field is that that it's a historical method that he uses you see i'm a philosophical ignoramus i can't get past first bathes with abstract arguments i need to be told a story and tockfield's story of what had gone wrong in 18th century france which makes a lot more sense when you read his account of what's gone right in 19th century america that just clicked with me i sometimes think of your implicit view of liberalism as a lot like that of keynes so history of britain is history of the british empire right kane starts out working on india it's the quality of the british elite that matters most of all and when things go wrong it's a kind of moral failure of that elite he was not very directly philosophical but he had plenty to say about history political agreements treaties economic movements does that resonate with you or how do you feel when you read canes or i remember because i i was interested in economics and because i had been educated in scotland and was more numerate than my english contemporaries i gravitated towards economic history and there were options at oxford that that included economic and social thought instead of political thought so while everybody else was reading aristotle and uh and locke i was reading uh adam smith and then the general theory and the general theory was the hardest thing i'd ever read and i read it from cover to cover taking notes three times in an attempt to understand it it's kind of probably strikes you as a crazy way to learn economics but but it was oxford and that's how i learned that book i read it multiple times in a row and took a lot of notes yes and and you have to do that because it's a difficult book it's actually the hardest of his his books to read earlier works are much more straightforward anyway that that began my strange uh ongoing lifelong fascination with with keynes the reason i'm in some ways out of sympathy with keynes is that his bloomsbury background his bloomsbury network made him so iconoclastic so determined to tear down all that the victorians had built that ultimately he ended up clearing a path for a failed socialist experiment not that keynes himself was a socialist but but his tearing down of the of the victorian verities uh of the gold standard of free trade of the importance of posterity all of those things did not create a viable basis for liberalism but just opened the path uh labour dominance and a period of of stagnation in in the period after keynes's death but you can't read cain's without admiring the intellect and the man skidelski's brilliant three-volume biography which is a model of how to write a biography of an economist is a wonderful work not not least because of the conclusion that by the end keynes was not a keynesian or at least regarded the people who called themselves keynesians with great skepticism but yeah i i got into an argument with the early keynes in my very earliest book the book paper and iron because i encountered keynes in a new role which wasn't well known and that was his role as an advisor to the german to the weimar government during the reparations negotiations and that that informal role that keynes played from the versailles peace negotiations right through to the complete collapse of the currency is a fascinating chapter in his life and it doesn't it doesn't i think um look so good as some of keynes's more famous contributions because i i don't think he gave the germans great advice and when the whole thing ended in catastrophe in 1923 keynes distanced himself from it and certainly didn't acknowledge his curious part in that that episode is kane's too much of an aesthetic thinker for you if you think about the ties to bloomsbury he was an art collector he helped resuscitate the theater at cambridge uh his in early infatuation with moore i mean is that where you and he intellectually part company at a fundamental level no i'm a dreadful east feat perhaps of of a lower caliber than keynes but uh but i i have my own bloomsbury scienti i have uh a network of artists and and musicians that dates back to oxford uh oxford days uh i'm never happier than when diverting myself with music or art no i'm i'm more bloomsbury than than you might might think my my parting of the ways with keynes is that as i said that the impulse of bloomsbury was just to despise the victorians straight she was more open about this because eminent victorians is just a hatchet job on all the icons of the the 19th century but keynes more subtly dismantles the victorian achievement and i'm more sympathetic to that achievement the the redeeming feature of of keynes's life i think is the heroic effort he made to keep britain from going under in world war ii and skedelski's third volume is is a terrific account of that very difficult fight that keynes had to fight to prevent roosevelt and his advisors dismantling the british empire there and then which they were in a strong enough position to do it took a lot of intellectual effort to to keep britain in the game in 1945. so what do you think is the empirical or historical view that you hold and maybe others do not that makes you so much less anti-victorian than keynes or many many others including you know the woke of today well my my heretical position uh and it's been my view for at least 20 years is that the benefits of the british empire outweighed the costs and if one does a cost-benefit analysis of british imperialism one comes to the conclusion if one is in any way rigorous about it that it was a remarkably benign empire compared with other available empires and the counterfactuals crucial here because those people on the left who make a living out of comparing uh the empire to the third reich uh are are just not being rigorous they're they're committing category errors and more importantly they're not positing realistic counterfactuals empires is the book that you couldn't write today i don't think you could publish that book today certainly if you tried to you'd encounter all kinds of of pushback bruce gilley's article that got unpublished basically makes the argument of that that book and my only regret when i read gilly's article was that he didn't cite it but the basic argument of empire is an economic one it is that if you think about what the empire became in the 19th century it became a an empire of of liberalism uh an empire of free trade an empire of free migration of free capital movement and it was also an empire that turned away from slavery before others did so the argument of the book was that compared with the over available alternatives including indigenous empires because that was the op that was the alternative the british empire was a very positive force in the 19th and even more positive force in the 20th century this is a deeply unfashionable view it has made me a hate figure for the academic left because in the last 20 years it has become mandatory to regard imperialism as an unmitigated evil to dismiss economic cost-benefit arguments to ignore uh counterfactual rigor and just to engage in a in a massive act of condescension to the past which is to say and this is the opposite of what collingwood had in mind colin was idea was that we should reconstruct past thought faithfully and juxtapose it the modern historical ethos is to go back with our value system and condescend to the past and and regarded as a blinding insight of scholarship that that people in the past were racists i can see that the british empire was much better for singapore much better for hong kong at least after some point better for places like barbados but if i look at india post-independence india even with very poor economic policy it seems to have higher economic growth rates than it did under empire and it seems that under empire just very very little was invested in public goods provision well a lot more than would have been tirthanka roy wrote the best book on this uh and roy shows that actually there was really quite large-scale investment in infrastructure we all love the word infrastructure these days well the british empire was all about infrastructure and there's vastly more railroad and telegraph and dock construction than in qing china oriental empires invest far less in infrastructure than the british empire did so any plausible counterfactual of indian history can't be the the policies of the 1990s magically happen uh in the 1890s the question is what was going on in comparable geographies in in the 1890s roy's book is very interesting because the the great defect of british investment was that they invested nothing really in primary education they invested in elise education because they wanted to train uh a native indian elite that that would help them run the empire but but there was a there was a really serious shortfall in in investment in in in basic education and that that's that's clearly one of the the reasons that india remains so poor but remember india's uh relative uh per capita gdp doesn't catch up with britain's until quite re it doesn't begin to close the gap i should say with britain until quite recently i mean the first decades of independence were not uh were not characterized by very rapid growth last two questions first what is to you the most plausible dystopia in science fiction the most plausible is neil stephenson's snow crash and stevenson saw really brilliantly that we would end up spending half our lives on the internet and that our avatars would start having more fun than us it's that juxtaposition of a kind of breaking down california in which people are online half the time and great flotillas of illegal migrants that i love about snow crash brilliant book actually two more questions i want to ask now first your recent trip to mexico city what did you learn there well my motivation was not really to learn much i went to see my daughter who whom i hadn't seen for nearly 18 months but you can't help but learn and often you learn more when your motivation is not to learn right i learned that that the populism of the left might get rewarded much more than the populism of the right and latin america because despite pretty bad excess mortality mexico is going to recover quite rapidly on the coattails of the united states whereas brazil is going to continue having a torrid time for which bolsonaro will be roundly blamed i was impressed actually by how okay things seemed in mexico city not that it's representative of the wider country but i i'd expected it to be a more downhearted place than i encountered last question other than finishing the second volume of your kissinger biography what else do you have planned for the future in terms of work i don't want to write any more books after the second volume of of the kissinger biography because i think that that will be quite enough 17 and i'm not sure that anybody really reads books anymore at least not all the way through i read them so yeah but we're a dwindling number tyler a dwindling number and uh i'm i'm increasingly of the opinion that it's a fool's errand to try to change people's minds with 400 or 500 page volumes i want to write the kissinger book because i think there's a lot to be learned from the 1970s and i've gathered some amazing material that nobody's looked at before because most books about the 1970s just use american sources or a few foreign sources but i've been i've been looking at the central committee transcripts and they're great so that that's a book worth writing and it will illuminate the u.s china relationship in a fresh way and after that i think it's time to move on the most important thing to do on my 57 if you can count on maybe a couple more decades let's assume i live as long as my dad the most important thing you can do in that remaining part of your life must be intellectual succession planning i don't see a whole lot of intellectual succession academic life in my view has gone off the rails in ways that i never would have imagined in the 1980s when i was starting out we need new institutions i urgently need new institutions and i want to spend more time on institution building and less time on on book writing in what whatever time has is left to me and that should strike terror in my enemy's hearts neil ferguson thank you very much and again i'm happy to recommend neil's latest book doom the politics of catastrophe thank you tyler

Channel: Mercatus Center

Views: 13,437

Rating: 4.8728323 out of 5

Keywords: history, scotland, united kingdom, libraries, books, punk rock, podcast, ireland

Id: v7hEF8CS79U

Length: 63min 30sec (3810 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 28 2021