Tuesday, March 15, 2011

A few thoughts on Niall Ferguson

First, I sorta wish I could show his new series to my World Civ classes -- except that I would worry they'd just accept what he says over anything I say.

Second, I would like to see a bunch of post that point out that he is, like Laurence Stone, apparently, a big tool.


Third, I do not love his Eurocentrism

7 comments:

Historian on the Edge said...

He is a big tool. I take no small pride in having once participated fully in a departmental meeting that decided not to offer him a chair. At some point I will probably denounce him more formally on my own blog.

Another Damned Medievalist said...

May I buy you a beer at Leeds? I am even more impressed :-) And I very much look forward to the denunciation!

Anonymous said...

Ha. Cliopatria is collectively not fond of Ferguson, and has several times given others a platform to snipe at him. You may like any of:

http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/3336.html

http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/5814.html

http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/26858.html

or:

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/47430.html (this particularly good as it's actually a response to critique on scholarly grounds by Ferguson).

And of course we don't teach by ad hominem, but if we were to and we wanted evidence of giant tooldom:

http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/123111.html

Another Damned Medievalist said...

Oh I LOVE this!


Sorry, but she's just ... omg awful. She was also Theo Van Gogh's girlfriend, IIRC. She is simply awful. I was sent to a think tank for a week by my bosses -- it was supposed to be fun, and it mostly was, but the readings for the seminars were entirely a celebration of Western (and particularly US) exceptionalism. Two of us, an English sociology prof whose late husband was a wonderfully left-wing writer for the Grauniad and NME, and I were the only people in our group who constantly objected to the implicit message in the readings. The readings on Islam were... appalling. The interpretations of Islam were those offered by O. bin Laden and Hirsi Ali -- and a teeny bit of the Quran.

Hirsi Ali... not even raised Muslim, apparently.

Anonymous said...

But class traitors are so interesting >:-) Seriously, she may be all you say, but if I had to pick one of the two of them to talk to for an evening, it would not be Ferguson, it would be the Somali feminist. Not least because I feel as if I know Ferguson's story already and it's a high-power version of mine or that of the people I went to school with...

Mind you, I suspect the conversation that would be most fun would be with Ferguson's wife...

Another Damned Medievalist said...

I agree completely.

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