The War of the World
Historian Fergusson provides a revolutionary reinterpretation of the modern era that resolves its central paradox: why unprecedented progress coincided with unprecedented violence, and why the seeming triumph of the West bore the seeds of its undoing. From the conflicts that presaged the First World War to the aftershocks of the Cold War, the twentieth century was by far the bloodiest in all of human history. How can we explain the astonishing scale and intensity of its violence when, thanks to the advances of science and economics, most people were better off than ever before? Wherever one looked, the world in 1900 offered the happy prospect of ever-greater interconnection. Why, then, did global progress descend into internecine war and genocide? Drawing on a pioneering combination of history, economics, and evolutionary theory, Ferguson examines what he calls the age of hatred and sets out to explain what went wrong with modernity. --From publisher description.
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What Hacker News says
- Socialism gained only after World War I disrupted incumbent powers and wealth. World Wars I and II really need to be considered as a unit. War continued into the '20s in Eastern Europe and then resumes in 1936 in Spain. See "War of the World" by Niall Ferguson.
Socialism was not that strong before WW I destroyed the power structures of the German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires. The resumption of war in World War II destroyed the Japanese and Chinese Empires and enervated the British and French sufficiently that the British and French Empires dissolved after the war.
- "The world at the beginning of the 20th century seemed for most of its inhabitants stable and relatively benign. Globalizing, booming economies married to technological breakthroughs seemed to promise a better world for most people."
From the description of Niall Ferguson's The War of the World.
- > under existential threat
You mean government regulation a la China because some memes really are dangerous? If you increase the velocity of transmission, then even in a free system there are some dangerously infectious falsehoods that it might be in the public good to slow. Think War of the World on Facebook.
- Niall Ferguson's The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred, which looks at the 20th century, starts by pointing out how comfortable and settled everything looked at the start of the 20th century and as Keynes put it that this state appeared "normal, certain and permanent".
For all we know the historians of the 21st century may look back at our time in similar ways.
- I don't think there is any immediate prospect of war. However, I can't help recalling the start of Nial Ferguson's "The War of the World":
"The world at the beginning of the 20th century seemed for most of its inhabitants stable and relatively benign. Globalizing, booming economies married to technological breakthroughs seemed to promise a better world for most people."
I'm sure everyone then thought that a war in Europe was impossible - even for no other reason than how closely related all of the relevant Royal Families were. And yet we all know how that turned out.
- I have recently read Niall Ferguson’s “War of the World", which gives a new history of the 20th century. One that was one long 100-year war spanning from set up for WWI which led to WWII which led to Cold War.
He argues that the same types of thinking and scenarios are unfolding once again in the 21st century, “Three things seem to me necessary to explain the extreme violence of the 20th century. ... These may be summarized as ethnic conflict, economic volatility and empires in decline.”
This is a very serious question of mine and would like to hear any thoughts, speculations, etc on the matter.
A quick review of the book: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/books/review/Montefiore.t.html?pagewanted=all
