Niall Ferguson author photo
Image via Wikimedia Commons, sous licence CC BY-SA 2.0.

Niall Ferguson

Né(e): April 18, 1964 – Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom

Niall Ferguson is a British-American historian specializing in international, economic, and financial history. Best known for The Ascent of Money and Empire, his work has won the International Emmy and the Wadsworth Prize. Ferguson’s scholarship and commentary have significantly influenced debates on the British Empire and global finance.

Biographie et Parcours de l'Auteur

Niall Ferguson, born in Glasgow in 1964, is a British-American historian renowned for his influential work on international, economic, and financial history. Educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated with First Class Honours in 1985, Ferguson's early academic journey included a Hanseatic Scholarship in Germany and a research fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge. He rapidly advanced through academic ranks, returning to Oxford as a professor before undertaking appointments at New York University, Harvard University, and later Stanford University, where he holds the prestigious Milbank Family Senior Fellowship at the Hoover Institution. His teaching career has also included visiting positions at LSE and a role as senior faculty fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center.

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Citations

quote
Money amplifies our tendency to overreact, to swing from exuberance when things are going well to deep depression when they go wrong
-The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
quote
So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don't understand how incredibly vulnerable it is
-The Guardian Interview
quote
The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man
-The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
quote
There really is no such thing as ‘the future’, singular. There are only multiple, unforeseeable futures, which will never lose their capacity to take us by surprise
-The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World: 10th Anniversary Edition
quote
The dead outnumber the living fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril
-Civilization: The West and the Rest
quote
The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos
-TED Talk: The 6 Killer Apps of Prosperity
quote
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
-Interview Quote
quote
We have fallen into the trap of believing that very, very complex laws addressing every conceivable contingency are good. But,in fact, common-law systems in England and in North America were once highly conducive to economic innovation because they adapted, they were evolutionary rather than prescriptive
-IMDb Quotes
quote
Under democracy, the young and unborn are always disenfranchised and it doesn't really matter whether there are lots of them or relatively few of them. What we've seen post-1945 is that they are potential victims of a consistent policy that postpones payment, championed by politicians who desperately want the cost of whatever they do to be borne by future generations
-IMDb Quotes
quote
The real social contract, (Edmund Burke) argued, was not Rousseau's social contract between the noble savage and the General Will, but a 'partnership' between the present generation and future generations
-Civilization: The West and the Rest

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Voix de la Communauté

"Andrew Roberts in The New York Times praised Niall Ferguson's Kissinger as 'comprehensive, well written and riveting' and suggested it could be his masterpiece"

The New York Times

"Eric Hobsbawm, while praising Niall Ferguson as an excellent historian, criticized him as a 'nostalgist for empire."

Eric Hobsbawm

"Robert Skidelsky in The New York Review of Books called Niall Ferguson's Rothschild volumes a 'stupendous achievement, a triumph of historical research and imagination."

The New York Review of Books

"The Economist noted Niall Ferguson's past work could be rushed, but called his Kissinger biography a work of 'engrossing scholarship."

The Economist

"The Economist, reviewing Ferguson's War of the World, described his two books on the Rothschilds as 'one of the finest studies of its kind."

The Economist

"Bernard Porter in The London Review of Books challenged Niall Ferguson's Empire as a 'panegyric to British colonialism."

The London Review of Books

"John Lewis Gaddis called Niall Ferguson's scholarship on the Rothschilds 'unrivaled in range, productivity and visibility,' though critiqued it as sometimes unpersuasive"

John Lewis Gaddis

"TIME magazine named Niall Ferguson one of the 100 most influential people in the world after the publication of Colossus"

TIME

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