Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest

(Published by Allen Lane, 2011, 402pp)

Civilisation, a big and pompous word, always reminds me of the story of the  band of zealous women combing the English countryside recruiting soldiers soon after the outbreak of the First World War. Bearing down on Oxford, brandishing the Union Jack, they encountered a don dressed in his Oxonian master’s gown, reading Thucydides in the original Greek. ‘And what are you doing to save Western civilisation, young man?’, demanded one of the women. Gathering himself to full height, the sage looked down his long nose, then replied: ‘Madam, I am Western civilisation!’

Scottish historian Niall Ferguson tries hard in his latest book to cleanse the word of imperial hubris by putting it at the centre of a sweeping account of the rise and triumph of the West. He says that civilisations are large-scale cultural entities. Smaller than humanity but bigger than cities, states and empires, they encompass everything, from how people clean their teeth and what they do in bed through to their economies and methods of fighting wars. Parting company with Kenneth Clark, whose classic 1969 television series saw civilisation as synonymous with the art and architecture of Western Europe, Ferguson defines Western civilisation as a whole way of life whose ascent during the past half millennium had multiple causes. For the benefit of his audience ( it’s the book for a new  television series), he fingers six factors that together guaranteed the triumph of Western ways of doing things. Ferguson dubs them ‘killer applications’. The list includes economic and political competition, scientific progress and private property rights guaranteed by law; it extends to progress in the field of medicine, the Protestant work ethic and a flourishing consumer culture.

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Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism (Published by Little, Brown, 2011, 470pp _480?)

My first scholarly encounter with Eric Hobsbawm, the gaunt sage of European Marxism, happened one afternoon at the London School of Economics, in the late spring of ‘89. We were naturally ignorant of the coming revolutions, but the podium was ours on the subject of nations, states and democracy in a divided Europe. The topics of freedom, democracy and the fate of the Soviet Union sparked intense audience excitement, but the sage stood firm. At one point, in reply to talk of civil society, the power of the powerless and the possible re-unification of Europe through peaceful revolution, Hobsbawm suddenly snapped. ‘Everything will end badly’, said the cold warrior, wagging a hooked finger at all of us. ‘The end of socialism would be an unmitigated disaster. Capitalism in bloody, nationalist form will be the result.’

Wide sections of the audience hissed; I recall being gripped by a sudden sense of belonging to a different intellectual and political generation. But the sage stuck to his guns, as he still does, three decades later, for virtually the same reasons. How to Change the World is a string of essays connected by a stubborn red thread: we are living through a crisis of capitalism that beckons us back to Highgate cemetery. ‘We have discovered that capitalism is not the answer, but the question’, he writes. ‘Marx is, once again, very much a thinker of the twenty-first century.’ Continue reading »

Stefan Halper, The Beijing Consensus: How China’s Authoritarian Model Will Dominate The Twenty-First Century (Basic Books, New York, 2010)

Recent trade books by outsiders on the subject of China typically take sides in a game of binary opposites: they are either pro-China or anti-China. The intriguing thing about ex-diplomat Stefan Halper’s interpretation of contemporary Chinese politics is that it manages to embrace both extremes. Entangled in friend-foe thinking, it sets out to be positive but ends up as negative, which raises the vital question of whether the book suffers from simple muddle, or whether, as seems more likely, the game of binary opposites inherited from the Cold War turns out to be just that: a single game with unfixed places for multiple players who are more or less tacitly agreed on its rules.

The book is a provocation, not least because it chides the China watchers in Washington known as the hawks’ club. It includes figures like Paul Wolfowitz, the author of a hard-line report on Chinese military capacity in the dying days of the Bush administration; the sinologists Arthur Waldron and Michael Pillsbury; and pundit Robert Kaplan, who is on record as saying that the twenty-first century will be defined by the American military contest with a China that is preparing to ‘lob missiles accurately at moving ships in the Pacific’. Halper also opposes those China watchers who warn of the grave dangers of its burgeoning economic power on the world scene – the critics who doubt that ‘China is coming to get us’ because they are convinced instead that ‘China is coming to buy us’. Halper finally digs in his heels against right-wing believers in ‘great power’ theories, figures such as Robert Zoellick and John B. Henry who draw analogies between contemporary China and Wilhelmine Germany, then conclude that rising global powers inevitably confront hegemonic powers. Continue reading »