Super Conservative British Historian Niall Ferguson : "The West risks not the genteel decline of old age so much as collapse. As a highly complex system, civilisation has a “tendency to move quite suddenly from stability to instability”

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"That, he argues, was what happened to Ancient Rome, the Ming dynasty in 17th-century China, the Bourbons in 18th-century France, 20th-century Britain and, most recently, the Soviet Union. The West’s present fiscal crisis might yet prove to be a symptom of the rot within."

The Economist
Western civilisation : A success that looks like failure

The West’s long run as top dog may be ending. But the values that made it great, consumerism included, have been sold on to the rest of the world

March 10, 2011

Book "Civilization: The West and the Rest". By Niall Ferguson. Allen Lane


Who is Niall Ferguson ??
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Niall Ferguson ( born 1964) is a British historian who specialises in financial and economic history, particularly hyperinflation and the bond markets, as well as the history of colonialism.

Ferguson is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University as well as William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and also currently the Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs at the London School of Economics. During the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Ferguson advised Senator John McCain's campaign.

In the UK, Ferguson is probably best known as the author of Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. In 2008, Ferguson published The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, which he also presented as a Channel 4 television series. Both at Harvard College and at LSE, Ferguson teaches a course entitled "Western Ascendancy: The Mainsprings of Global Power from 1600 to the Present."

Richard Drayton, Professor of Colonial History at the University of London, has stated that it is correct to associate "Ferguson with an attempt to "rehabilitate empire" in the service of contemporary great power interests."

Western civilisation : A success that looks like failure


Some excerpts :

Historians will find things to pick at—how could they not in a whistle-stop journey through 600 years? The politically correct will bristle at Mr Ferguson’s defence of empire—though he does not shy from its enormities. But the book’s main weakness lies when it comes to the second question: is the West doomed?

Mr Ferguson presents a thesis that the West risks not the genteel decline of old age so much as collapse. As a highly complex system, civilisation has a “tendency to move quite suddenly from stability to instability.” That, he argues, was what happened to Ancient Rome, the Ming dynasty in 17th-century China, the Bourbons in 18th-century France, 20th-century Britain and, most recently, the Soviet Union. The West’s present fiscal crisis might yet prove to be a symptom of the rot within.

Leave aside whether the rule of Caesars was really shattered in a generation or whether the French revolution marked the end of a civilisation. The trouble with Mr Ferguson’s view that the West may collapse is that he also believes Asia is adopting the West’s values. China, following the path of Japan, is harnessing Western science, medicine and technology, and encouraging its hard-working people to become consumers and, within limits, to own their own homes. That is not so much a defeat of the West as its triumph.

Unless Asia has any exclusive “killer apps” of its own, it is hard to see how such a triumph could alone condemn the West to disaster. Whereas a handful of Western countries were once at it, a whole planet has started to join in. More likely than the end of civilisation—and more boring—is that the West will just cease to be special.

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