Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Niall Campbell Ferguson is a British historian from Scotland. He is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, University of Oxford, a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities. His specialities are international history, economic and financial history, and British and American imperialism. He is known for his provocative, contrarian views. Ferguson's books include Empire: How...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionTeacher
Date of Birth18 April 1964
I refuse to accept that Western civilization is like some hopeless old version of Microsoft DOS, doomed to freeze, then crash. I still cling to the hope that the United States is the Mac to Europe's PC, and that if one part of the West can successfully update and reboot itself, it's America.
No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.
The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.
The whole point about historians is that we are really communing with the dead. It's very restful - because you read. There's some sociopathic problem that makes me prefer it to human interaction.
Through pure accident of birth, I've managed to stay relatively youthful.
It's not surprising so many people end up with credit-card debts. Saving for your retirement and buying a house are difficult things, and we don't educate people about them at all.
Civilisation is partly about restraining the male of the species from engaging in the violence of the hunter-gatherer period. But it doesn't take an awful lot to unleash it.
As a financial historian, I was quite isolated in Oxford - British historians are supposed to write about kings - so the quality of intellectual life in my field is much higher at Harvard. The students work harder there.
If being rightwing is thinking that Karl Marx's doctrine was a catastrophe for humanity, then I'm rightwing.
I'm over-industrious, so I don't feel quite such a deviant in America as I did in England.
I was never a very convincing social conservative, and always avoided associating myself with that part of the broader conservative movement.
I can't think of anything I would rather do with my money than buy my children the best possible education.
Something that's seldom appreciated about me is that I am in sympathy with a great deal of what Marx wrote, except that I'm on the side of the bourgeoisie.
Only in England would 'professor gets divorced and remarried' be a story.