Niall Ferguson: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why did Scott — speaking of Scott — write a nine-volume biography of Napoleon? It’s almost a million words. It’s quite pro-Napoleon. He was fairly well paid as a novelist. Wasn’t he too Tory or too authoritarian in some sense? What’s striking to me about Scott — and I haven’t read the Napoleon biography — is, apart from the extraordinarily superhuman prolific capacities, is the ambivalence about the romantic. He’s like a one-man combination of Johnson and Boswell because he’s — at one and the same time — attracted by the romance of the Jacobites and the romance of revolutionaries, too, but he’s also conscious that, really, you’re better off with the sober bourgeois existence that’s on offer in Glasgow and Edinburgh. That ambivalence, I think, is absolutely central to the culture that I come from. If you ask the question, where does Jekyll and Hyde come from? Why does [Robert Louis] Stevenson — who’s really the heir of Scott — why does Stevenson constantly explore split personalities or fraternal feuds? Read The Master of Ballantrae. Because it gets at this fundamental tension between the romantic, the Tory, the Catholic on the one side and the rationalist, Whig Protestant on the other side. You know that there’s something unattractive about the hard-nosed Protestant types. On the other hand, if you entrust your country to romanticism, it’s probably going to revert to Afghanistan. I don’t think a Stuart restoration should have gone very well. I think there’s good reason to be skeptical about that. Jonathan Clark wrote a fantastic essay — almost my favorite essay in the book, Virtual History — imagining lots of different counterfactuals and contingencies of British history. It’s one of the best reflections on the various counterfactuals of the 17th and 18th century, including the counterfactual that you somehow avoid the American Revolution. It’s a great piece of writing. He’s a great historian. He’s one of the great historians of our generation, who — because he was a conservative — was essentially driven into a kind of academic exile. If you look at the broader history of historicism, and you look at the Germans or Scott, there seems to be this odd connection between historicism as a mode of thinking and excessive preoccupation with leadership — Carlyle also. Where does that come from, that connection? And is that a danger or is it a virtue?…

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