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A review by jjupille
Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson
1.0
I won't discuss ideology.
My problem is that it's just written really badly. He does not sustain attention to his argument, which is that the West came to dominate the Rest because of six "killer apps" (blech): competition, science, medicine, property rights, consumerism, and work ethic. Leaving aside the endogeneity problems, he just wanders in and out of focus. The rather long chapter on medicine is a horror of non-sequiturism, with the dozen page discussion of the French Revolution, why Burke was smarter than Marx, utterly orthogonal to anything to do with the claims of the book.
It really is bizarre. It's pastiche. The guy is obviously brilliant, cultured and well-read. But this feels like he's got a huge stock of things he knows and has something to say about, but he doesn't care enough to really stitch together a tight argument. The silly jargon --killer apps? please-- endless alliterations, little personal observations from strolls through mysterious bazaars and famous art galleries, the whole genius at work, the peppering of patrician snobbery with a soupcon of plebeian hipness, give the whole thing a Friedmanesque feel. Selling books, but adding nothing.
Blech. I had to apologize to my students for assigning this. I had picked up a copy of [b:The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die|16129479|The Great Degeneration How Institutions Decay and Economies Die|Niall Ferguson|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1372541698s/16129479.jpg|21954506], but now I don't have the stomach to read it, brief as it looks, since a sin against my reading time is one of the most grievous one can commit against me. Fool me once, and all that.
Eureka! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_%28literary_and_historical_analysis%29
My problem is that it's just written really badly. He does not sustain attention to his argument, which is that the West came to dominate the Rest because of six "killer apps" (blech): competition, science, medicine, property rights, consumerism, and work ethic. Leaving aside the endogeneity problems, he just wanders in and out of focus. The rather long chapter on medicine is a horror of non-sequiturism, with the dozen page discussion of the French Revolution, why Burke was smarter than Marx, utterly orthogonal to anything to do with the claims of the book.
It really is bizarre. It's pastiche. The guy is obviously brilliant, cultured and well-read. But this feels like he's got a huge stock of things he knows and has something to say about, but he doesn't care enough to really stitch together a tight argument. The silly jargon --killer apps? please-- endless alliterations, little personal observations from strolls through mysterious bazaars and famous art galleries, the whole genius at work, the peppering of patrician snobbery with a soupcon of plebeian hipness, give the whole thing a Friedmanesque feel. Selling books, but adding nothing.
Blech. I had to apologize to my students for assigning this. I had picked up a copy of [b:The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die|16129479|The Great Degeneration How Institutions Decay and Economies Die|Niall Ferguson|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1372541698s/16129479.jpg|21954506], but now I don't have the stomach to read it, brief as it looks, since a sin against my reading time is one of the most grievous one can commit against me. Fool me once, and all that.
Eureka! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_%28literary_and_historical_analysis%29