The application of these insurgent attitudes and this sort of expertise to the subject of the First World War – the determining event of our century and the source of our sorrows – makes for a memorable collision.įerguson’s early attempts to show that the origins of the war did not lie in imperialist or economic rivalries between the great capitalist powers rely too much on the fact that virtually no banker or businessman wanted war. The fact that Ferguson appears to hold Thatcherite economic views – now de rigueur for young historical fogeys – is an extra provocation, though it also means that he has a good grip, for example, on the significance and working of the bond markets. At the same time ‘we’ don’t like anyone who is ‘too clever by half’ – whence the snide tone of many of the reviews of The Pity of War. The English are still more than half in love with the idea of the super-clever young Oxbridge don, so that any young Ferguson who appears on the scene will warrant a good deal of oohing and aahing, particularly if he is the very public recipient of large book advances. That said, his book is extremely clever, precisely because of its tendentious manner, the most interesting of the four books published last year to cash in on the 80th anniversary of 1918. The trouble with this way of doing things is that each argument is treated as a separate target, and Ferguson hardly seems to notice, as he moves from one demolition job to another, that his own arguments often contradict each other.

One can almost hear him grating his teeth in exasperation at any view he conceives to be fashionable and, sure enough, he is soon to be seen tearing into it. The idea is to teach the young to think and argue, and the real past masters at it (Harry Weldon was always held up as an example to me) were those who first argued undergraduates out of their received opinions, then turned around after a time and argued them out of their new-found radicalism, leaving them mystified as to what they believed and suspended in a free-floating state of cleverness.Īll these traits are present in Ferguson’s work: indeed they pretty well define it. Anyone who has been a victim, let alone a perpetrator, of the Oxbridge system will recognise Niall Ferguson’s book for what it is: an extended and argumentative tutorial from a self-consciously clever, confrontational young don, determined to stand everything on its head and argue with vehemence against whatever he sees as the conventional wisdom – or, worse still, the fashion – of the time. Both The Pity of War and the reception it has enjoyed illustrate aspects of British culture about which one can only feel ambivalent.

The Pity of War by Niall Ferguson