Person
Every book Niall Ferguson recommended on podcasts
Across 8 podcasts. Every show Niall Ferguson appears on, in one place — not just one.
Niall Ferguson’s most recommended books
- Dominion by Tom Holland
- Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- American Prometheus by Kai Bird
- A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
- 1984 by George Orwell
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- Chip War by Chris Miller
- Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Niall Ferguson is a prominent historian and author who frequently discusses global history, economics, and politics on podcasts. On The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, Ferguson mentioned Tom Holland's book Dominion to illustrate how Christian concepts persist and outlive Christianity in secular society. He also discussed reading Kai Bird's biography American Prometheus while talking about J. Robert Oppenheimer. Appearing on Modern Wisdom, Ferguson recommended Geoffrey West's Scale during a conversation about a project combining history and physics. On The Tim Ferriss Show, Ferguson advised listeners not to limit their reading of George Orwell to just Animal Farm and 1984, but to read his essays as well. In the same episode, he strongly recommended Chris Miller's Chip War as the best book on why semiconductors matter, praised Tom Holland's Dominion again while discussing modern Western society's Christian roots, and recommended his wife Ayaan Hirsi Ali's autobiography Infidel as a good place to start understanding her early life story.
Books recommended by Niall Ferguson
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Dominion
Dominion by Tom Holland is a sweeping historical work examining how Christianity shaped Western culture, secular values, and modern moral frameworks.
Recommended“my friend the historian Tom Holland wrote a nice book recently Dominion arguing that Christian ways of thinking about the world have outlived Christianity”
Where to get it
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Democracy in America
Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is a foundational sociological and political study analyzing the structure, culture, and institutions of American society from the perspective of an outside observer.
Discussed“And then when we read Democracy in America, it became even clearer what Tocqueville's project was...”
Where to get it
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On the Road
On the Road by Jack Kerouac is a seminal autobiographical novel that chronicles the cross-country road trips of its protagonist and captures the restless energy of the Beat Generation.
Discussed“one of my earliest literary simulations was to reenact jack kerouac tripping on the road when i was 17 culminating and getting very wasted in the hanging gardens of zochimilco”
Where to get it
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War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a monumental historical novel blending grand military strategy with intimate domestic life against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars.
Discussed“by the way if you've ever read War and Peace the moment when Pierre sees Natasha everything stops uh that's what the French called a kudafuda it happened to me then”
Where to get it
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American Prometheus
American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J.
Recommended“I haven't watched the movie but I read the the book American Prometheus I I prefer books to movies and the book”
Where to get it
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A People's History of the United States
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn is a controversial and influential historical work that retells American history from the perspective of marginalized groups, laborers, and social movements.
Critiqued“But I don't think we should be teaching young Americans, from how it Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, in which the negatives are constantly emphasized over the positives.”
Where to get it
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1984
1984 by George Orwell is a classic dystopian novel depicting a totalitarian regime characterized by extreme surveillance, historical denial, and psychological manipulation.
Recommended“In the same way that if you want to get to Orwell, don't just read Animal Farm and 1984. Read Orwell's amazing essays.”
Where to get it
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Animal Farm
Animal Farm by George Orwell is a classic allegorical novella that uses a farmyard setting to satirize the corruption of socialist ideals and the rise of totalitarianism following the Russian Revolution.
Recommended“In the same way that if you want to get to Orwell, don't just read Animal Farm and 1984. Read Orwell's amazing essays.”
Where to get it
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Chip War
Chip War by Chris Miller is an essential exploration of the semiconductor industry and its profound influence on global geopolitics.
Recommended“Chris Miller's new book, Chip War, which I highly recommend, is just the best book on why semiconductors really matter.”
Where to get it
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Infidel
Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a powerful memoir detailing the author's escape from a oppressive upbringing in Somalia and her eventual journey of self-discovery and political awakening in the West.
Recommended“Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel is a pretty good place to start. That's her life story, her early life story”
Where to get it
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Life and Fate
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman is a sweeping masterpiece depicting the brutality and human ramifications of the Eastern Front, the Holocaust, and totalitarianism during World War II.
Recommended“if only if one reads grossman's life and fate”
Where to get it
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Scale
Scale by Geoffrey West is a popular science book exploring the mathematical laws and universal scaling principles governing biology, cities, and businesses.
Recommended“he did a book called scale that everybody should read”
Where to get it
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Snow Crash
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is a seminal cyberpunk science fiction novel that famously anticipated the rise of virtual reality, the metaverse, and modern digital culture.
Recommended“The most plausible is Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. And Stephenson saw really brilliantly that we would end up spending half our lives on the internet...”
Where to get it
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The Brothers Karamazov
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky is a profound philosophical novel that explores deep spiritual questions surrounding faith, free will, morality, and the human condition.
Recommended“if you haven't read the brothers karamazov you will not really you're not grown up”
Where to get it
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The Third Reich
The Third Reich by Michael Burleigh is a comprehensive historical study examining the rise and fall of Nazi Germany with a specific focus on its ideological and religious dimensions.
Recommended“I think the antidote to a book like like Taylor's is Michael Burleigh's uh uh excellent book of gosh, more than a decade ago, A New History of the Third Reich, which emphasizes Hitler's messianic political religious side.”
Where to get it
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“The” History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon is a monumental multi-volume historical work chronicling the trajectory of the Roman world from the height of the empire to its eventual collapse.
Discussed“so Gibbon's great Decline and fall of the Roman Empire covers a millennium”
Where to get it
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A people's tragedy
Discussed“Orlando 5g's wrote an excellent history of the Russian Revolution called a people's tragedy”
Where to get it
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A World Restored
Discussed“He's fantastically scathing in his review of of of Kissinger's first book um a review that I only found by by chance. This is A World Restored, a book that that um that has many merits...”
Where to get it
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Capital
Capital by Karl Marx is a foundational critique of political economy that examines the mechanics of capitalist production, commodity fetishism, and the systemic exploitation of labor.
Discussed“I think if one reads Capital it is a a prophetic work about England and about any country that follows England down the the route of of Industrial Revolution and and class society.”
Where to get it
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Crime and Punishment
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky is a profound psychological novel that explores guilt, morality, and the severe consequences of moral relativism and nihilism.
Discussed“remember raskolnikov's nightmare at the end of crime and punishment in which he imagines in his dream a world in which a terrible virus spreads”
Where to get it
The other 16 books Niall Ferguson recommended or discussed, ranked
- Destined for War by Graham T. Allison
- General Theory Of Employment , Interest And Money by John Maynard Keynes
- In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
- L'ancien régime by Alexis de Tocqueville
- Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
- The 39 steps by John Buchan
- The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz
- The constitution of liberty by Friedrich A. von Hayek
- The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon. Vol. 2. [-3-4]. by Edward Gibbon
- The Federalist papers by Alexander Hamilton
- The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
- The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson
- The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg
- The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith
- The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
- Waverley; or, 'Tis sixty years since ... by Sir Walter Scott
Books Niall Ferguson wrote
- Doom
- Civilization
- Paper and Iron
- The Ascent of Money
- The Pity of War
- The Square and the Tower
- Colossus
- Empire
- Virtual History: Alternatives And Counterfactuals
Appearances
Other mentions (29: passing, ad reads, own books)
“and that is really the central argument of Doom it's very significant that in our lifetimes governments have got worse at dealing with disasters not better”
“and uh and that will be the next book that I I publish while you're waiting for that you can buy Doom the politics of catastrophe which was the book that I published most recently”
“Donald Trump don't doesn't care about Taiwan he made that explicit to John Bolton you can read it in John Bolton's Memoir we wouldn't be having showdowns over Taiwan if Trump were president because that was never his Focus”
“and the Scottish Enlightenment which after all produced uh some of the greatest ideas human beings have ever had think of Adam Smith's contribution The Wealth of Nations the theory of moral sentiments that's the kind of intellectual Legacy that I think of myself as being uh uh responsible for”
“and the Scottish Enlightenment which after all produced uh some of the greatest ideas human beings have ever had think of Adam Smith's contribution The Wealth of Nations the theory of moral sentiments that's the kind of intellectual Legacy that I think of myself as being uh uh responsible for”
“20 years ago I wrote a book called Empire how Britain made the modern world and in that book I pointed out that the Britain was responsible both for some Dreadful evils”
“well my last book Doom the politics of catastrophe takes this question on uh I love that that feature of American life that we're always predicting American Decline”
“We were doing Hillbilly Elegy before J.D. Vance was even born, I think.”
“I was at Christ's College that had been immortalized in a novel, The Masters, by C.P. Snow in which Cambridge politics provides the drama”
“And I wrote a lot about that in The Pity Of War and in the book Virtual History because I think it's important for people to understand”
“And I wrote a lot about that in The Pity Of War and in the book Virtual History because I think it's important for people to understand”
“My book Doom makes fun of the pattern where the incentives to predict the end of the world are very strong”
“I think the analytical framework of the book Colossus was correct, namely the neo conservative project to build empires in Iraq and Afghanistan will fail.”
“Point two is, and I dedicated the book Civilization to Ayaan for this reason, we take for granted the freedoms that we are given at birth”
“i remember looking at great numbers of these in the british museum when i was writing the ascent of money”
“and this was the point of the ascent of money as an evolutionary story”
“and they illustrate something i should have made more clear of the ascent of money that not everything used in payment needs to be money”
“when it hit me the other day that we actually had this precedent for crypto i got quite excited and thought i wish i had written that in the ascent of money”
“i found that when i was writing doom and so we slightly are biased in favor of the periods when trust prevailed and the system functioned”
“when i updated the ascent of money which was in 2018 10 years after it came out i wrote a new chapter in which i said bitcoin which had just sold off after its 2017 bubble will rise again through adoption”
“when i wrote this under money which was in 2008 you couldn't really solve the problem”
“this argument was central to my book the pity of war”
“in a book called the square in the tower i argued that it would be very costly for the united states to allow the public sphere to continue to be dominated by a handful of big tech companies”
“I got into an argument with the early Keynes in my very earliest book, the the book Paper and Iron, because I encountered Keynes in a new role...”
“Empire is is the book that uh you couldn't write today. I don't think you could publish that book today.”
“In my field, I was writing a lot of financial history, I'd written the history of the Rothschilds.”
“I actually reenacted Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road' with considerable fidelity to the original.”
“that led me to write that the most recent book the square on the tower was actually book number 15”
“one must call it that in the square and the tower”