Just as history has told many different stories since it stopped being written exclusively by the victors, it has much more to teach us if we look away from the hierarchies and focus on the crowds. Ferguson, an award-winning historian who changed the way we view Wall Street with his acclaimed The Ascent of Money, here draws on network and complexity theories to put history itself in a new context. Arguing that the networks so prevalent today are not new but only newly visible, Ferguson, senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, shows in his new book, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook, that past eras have been preoccupied with kings, presidents, and prime ministers when the true drivers of change and the source of the most powerful ideas have been the people in the workers’ parties, trade unions, and other organizations.

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