Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Niall Ferguson, fully Niall Campbell Douglas Ferguson

British Historian, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford

"American Empire- it is an empire that lacks the drive to export its capital, its people and its culture to those backward regions which need them most urgently and which, if they are neglected, will breed the greatest threats to its security. It is an empire, in short, that dare not speak its name. It is an empire in denial."

"A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible."

"A year ago, it was possible to write about the potential for civil war in Iraq. Today that civil war is well underway."

"Americans could once boast proudly that their system set the benchmark for the world; the United States was the rule of law. But now what we see is the rule of lawyers, which is something different."

"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."

"As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I'm the least authoritarian professor you'll ever meet."

"Ask me not, 'Are you rightwing,' but ask me 'Are you a committed believer in individual freedom, the values of the enlightenment?' Then, yeah, if being rightwing means believing Adam Smith was right, both in the 'Wealth of Nations' and the 'Theory of Moral Sentiments,' then I'm rightwing."

"By 1982 I was a young Thatcherite. The Thatcherite position had a lot in common with the Sex Pistols' position in 1977: it was a rebellion against the stuffy corporatism of the 70s."

"But there was another story which was not new to me. I?d always understood its importance. This was the story of the German Jews and their predicament. I was gripped by the most important and certainly the most perplexing tragedy of modern history, which was the tragedy of the Jews. The Jews?tremendously successful, not only in economic life, but also in cultural life, the standard-bearers of modernity in the arts and in political innovations of the modern period, and of course the ultimate victims of the backlash against it in the 1930s and ?40s. That really started my interest in German-Jewish history,? he continues. ?And it wasn?t long after finishing my book, Paper and Iron, in which the Warburgs were central figures, that I was asked to look at the Rothschild archives, with a view to writing a substantial work on the history of the Rothschilds. It was an opportunity I seized with both hands, and I spent five years practically living in the Rothschild archives in London, with visits to important stuff in Russia and Frankfurt. By the time I was done, I think I was about as deeply immersed in German-Jewish history as it?s possible for a non-Jew to be; after all, it was ironic that somebody with my background was asked to write this book."

"As in Bosnia, the United States should hand over some of the dirty work?.But that will only be possible if the Europeans get what they want: the semblance of an imminent U.S. handover of power in Iraq. Note the word semblance. As the British showed in Egypt, you can keep up this kind of hypocrisy for quite a long time before you actually have to restore self-government for real."

"Consider this: the US economy created 2.4 million jobs in the three years beginning in June 2009. In the same period, 3.3 million Americans were awarded disabled worker benefits. The percentage of working-age Americans collecting disability insurance has risen from below three percent in 1990 to six percent. Unemployment is being concealed ? and rendered permanent ? in ways all too familiar to Europeans. Able bodied people are classified as disabled and never work again."

"Consider? the question of peacekeeping. It has become abundantly clear that the United States is not capable of effective peacekeeping?that is to say, constabulary duties."

"Civilization 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. Bridgend on a Saturday night has its temporary inflatable hospitals for the stabbings and glassings."

"Had Britain stood aside?even for a matter of weeks?continental Europe could therefore have been transformed into something not wholly unlike the European Union we know today?but without the massive contraction in British overseas power entailed by the fighting of two world wars. Perhaps too the complete collapse of Russia into the horrors of civil war and Bolshevism might have been averted.?And there plainly would not have been that great incursion of American financial and military power into European affairs which effectively marked the end of British financial predominance in the world. Granted, there might still have been Fascism in Europe in the 1920s; but it would have been in France rather than Germany that radical nationalists would have sounded most persuasive."

"For some economists, the right time to tighten monetary policy is always never. But there are dangers in procrastination. Having blinked once, both the Fed and the PBOC may soon have a credibility problem. The longer they wait, the frothier asset markets become (stocks in the U.S. and big city housing in China are both up around 20% this year). That may perhaps advance recovery through the "portfolio channel"; it also advances inequality by favoring those with the biggest portfolios. And enriching the rich is not the stated policy objective of either the American Democratic Party or the Chinese Communist Party. Meanwhile, the more monetary policy is regarded as "the only game in town," the less pressure there is on politicians to think seriously about either fiscal or structural reforms. Finally, if monetary policy is too loose for too long, history suggests it can increase the probability of a disorderly asset-price crash. It is not hard to imagine such a scenario in a China that has acquired American levels of leverage, plus a bunch of shaky shadow banks. With Europe emerging only slowly from the euro's near-death experience, the rest of the world must watch nervously to see what policy makers in Washington and Beijing decide to do. One thing is already clear from the wobble in global bond markets this summer, which exposed the vulnerability of emerging markets with large current account deficits: If Beijing and Washington try to exit at the same time, the global economy could take a big hit. Coordination and sequencing are therefore essential. These will become all the more vital if China's leaders are in earnest?as is rumored in Beijing ahead of this month's Third Plenum?about liberalizing their financial sector and capital account, steps that can only increase Sino-American economic interdependence. The Chimerican couple need to go to rehab soon?but separately."

"History is our interpretation of past thoughts that happened to be written down or otherwise preserved. We do not really study [historical] causes, but what people at the time thought were the causes. And our aim in retrieving their thoughts is not so much to explain how things happened as to understand how they seemed to have happened."

"History is not politically correct. Many on the left therefore struggle with its findings."

"Hitler?s goal, was to enlarge the German Reich so that it embraced as far as possible the entire German Volk and in the process to annihilate what he saw as the principal threats to its existence, namely the Jews and Soviet Communism (which to Hitler were one and the same). Like Japan?s proponents of territorial expansion, he sought living space in the belief that Germany required more territory because of her over-endowment with people and her under-endowment with strategic raw materials. Hitler wanted not merely a Greater Germany; he wanted the Greatest Possible Germany. Given the very wide geographical distribution of Germans in East Central Europe, that implied a German empire stretching from the Rhine to the Volga. Nor was that the limit of Hitler?s ambitions, for the creation of this maximal Germany was intended to be the basis for a German world empire that would be, at the very least, a match for the British Empire."

"I can't imagine having a conversation about 'Celebrity Big Brother' in Cambridge, Massachusetts."

"I don't envy the historians of the current period. You have a disappearing decision trail in politics. It's likely that databases of emails won't be preserved, and if they are there will be so many that it will be extremely hard to use them. Plus, in investment banks they downgraded the use of email and switched to voicemail for key decisions, because of legal issues."

"I can't think of anything I would rather do with my money than buy my children the best possible education."

"I don?t think running away is an option, I think regardless of who is president, we are still going to have a military presence in Iraq by 2012. It?s not like Vietnam; you can?t just walk away, leaving it to go to hell, with everybody killing one another. As bad as that was, it had no geopolitical cost at all for Americans; the costs of failure were zero. Whereas the geopolitical cost of running away here is almost unimaginable. Not only would a full-scale regional civil war create all sorts of opportunities for Iran. It creates all sorts of opportunities for the Iranian-backed Shi?ah and the wildest Sunni radicals who are behind al Qaeda. It makes your most important ally in the region, Israel, desperately vulnerable."

"I grew up as a teenager in late 70s Glasgow. The main industries were sectarianism and strike action. We lived near Ibrox Park for a while, and I can remember the rats in the street when the dustbin men struck, and the sirens on Old Firm match days."

"I have three kids in Britain, and I am there at least once a month."

"I opted for history after reading War and Peace. "What is the power that moves nations?" I always remember that quote."

"I think the rise of quantitative econometrics and a highly mathematical approach to risk management was the obverse of a decline in interest in financial history."

"I was born quite a pessimistic person. When I'm driving I constantly visualize the person in the other car doing something really stupid and killing me. I keep as safe a distance as I can."

"I was never a very convincing social conservative, and always avoided associating myself with that part of the broader conservative movement."

"I would say I'm a 19th-century liberal, possibly even an 18th-century one."

"I sent off an article making that point, and it came back with a referee?s report from one of the grand old men of German economic history, denouncing the very notion that an historian could ask a what-if question. I thought about this damning report, and I decided that he was wrong, and in a sense Virtual History was born at that moment. My feeling was, and I?m still very committed to the notion, that we need to ask this stuff. We can?t duck these questions. There?s a reluctance among mainstream historians to engage what seems to me a philosophically irrefutable point: that if we?re going to propose anything of a causal nature, we?ve got to make explicit the counterfactual that statement implies. I think it?s almost fraudulent not to make your counterfactual explicit. You?re cheating your readers and your students. If you really do think that, let?s say, the Fed was responsible for the Great Depression, then you have to show how a different monetary policy would have avoided it."

"I think that it is important to be gregarious, and that friendships are not just a leisure pursuit, that they are an integral part of what it is to be human, and one does better work if one has a circle of friends that is active."

"If being rightwing is thinking that Karl Marx's doctrine was a catastrophe for humanity, then I'm rightwing."

"I, the British Empire began as a primarily economic phenomenon, its growth powered by commerce and consumerism. The demand for sugar drew merchants to the Caribbean. British were not the first Empire builders. They were IMERIAL IMMITATORS!"

"I'm over-industrious, so I don't feel quite such a deviant in America as I did in England."

"In general, I have felt more at home in the U.S. than I ever felt in England."

"If the financial system has a defect, it is that it reflects and magnifies what we human beings are like. Money amplifies our tendency to overreact, to swing from exuberance when things are going well to deep depression when they go wrong. Booms and busts are products, at root, of our emotional volatility."

"It is not easy to explain so profound a change in the ethics of a people. It used to be argued that slavery was abolished simply because it had ceased to be profitable, but all the evidence points the other way: in fact, it was abolished despite the fact that it was still profitable. What we need to understand, then, is a collective change of heart."

"If there is one educational policy I would like to see adopted throughout the United Kingdom, it would be a policy that aimed to increase significantly the number of private educational institutions ? and, at the same time, to establish programmes of vouchers, bursaries and scholarships to allow a substantial number of children from lower-income families to attend them."

"It was an idea that made the crucial difference between British and Iberian America ? an idea about the way people should govern themselves. Some people make the mistake of calling that idea ?democracy? and imagining that any country can adopt it merely by holding elections. In reality, democracy was the capstone of an edifice that had as its foundation the rule of law ? to be precise, the sanctity of individual freedom and the security of private property rights, ensured by representative, constitutional government."

"It?s our generation that is witnessing the end of Western predominance. The average American used to be more than 20 times richer than the average Chinese. Now it?s just five times, and soon it will be 2.5 times."

"It's great to see countries like China and India lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty by essentially copying Western ways of doing things."

"It's all very well for us to sit here in the west with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don't rule it out."

"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."

"I've become a transatlantic human being - six months here with my family and six months in Harvard. I abuse caffeine on the way out and alcohol on the way in."

"My lament and refrain in those distant days was, ?Why does America ignore British history? Why does nobody here talk about 1920, and Britain?s experiences in Baghdad?? Remember what Churchill said: ?At present we are paying eight millions a year for the privilege of sitting on an ungrateful volcano out of which we will in no circumstances get anything worth having.? It was a revelation to me that Americans were so parochial. I must say I came here no doubt with all kinds of illusions, but I was still surprised. I think that what happened is that people said, ?Well, this guy is in favor of empire (which empire they don?t say), so therefore he must be in favor of the war.? What I did say was that the United States should use its power more aggressively to get rid of rogue regimes and failed states, but the notion that that had any role to play in 2003 is absurd."

"Once I got to Washington in 2003, I realized from the "Beltway" perspective that Iraq was just a shadow on the cave wall. They were amazingly ill-informed about the country itself. I asked someone in the US treasury department about their model for the Iraqi economy after Saddam, and she replied: "Post-Communist Poland." I found it terrifyingly naive."

"My fundamental tenets are concerned with freedom of the individual; the market isn't perfect, but it's the best available way of allocating resources."

"Nineteen percent of the world?s population today ? Westerners ? own two-thirds of its wealth."

"Only in England would 'professor gets divorced and remarried' be a story."

"One of the main arguments that I make in my new book, 'The Great Degeneration,' is that the rule of law in the U.S. is becoming the rule of lawyers."