In an interview with Peter Robinson, Ferguson recounted the "humiliation" his wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, endured at being disinvited from giving the commencement address at Brandeis University in 2014.

[60] In the first lecture, held at the London School of Economics, titled The Human Hive, Ferguson argues for greater openness from governments, saying they should publish accounts which clearly state all assets and liabilities.

The fourth and final lecture, Civil and Uncivil Societies, focuses on institutions (outside the political, economic and legal realms) designed to preserve and transmit particular knowledge and values.

[63] In his 2001 book, The Cash Nexus, which he wrote following a year as Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England,[54] Ferguson argues that the popular saying "money makes the world go 'round'" is wrong; instead he presented a case for human actions in history motivated by far more than just economic concerns.

[74]Ferguson attributes this divergence to the West's development of six "killer apps", which he finds were largely missing elsewhere in the world in 1500 – "competition, the scientific method, the rule of law, modern medicine, consumerism and the Protestant work ethic".

Tolerance extended to thinkers like Sir Isaac Newton in Stuart England had no counterpart in the Ottoman Empire, where Takiyuddin's state built observatory was eventually demolished due to political conflict.

The book examines Kissinger's life from being a refugee and fleeing Nazi Germany in 1938, to serving in the United States Army as a "free man" in World War II, to studying at Harvard.

"[78] In a negative review of The Idealist, the American journalist Michael O'Donnell questioned Ferguson's interpretation of Kissinger's actions leading up to Nixon's election in 1968 as United States president.

"[82] In The Wall Street Journal, Deirdre McCloskey wrote: "Niall Ferguson has again written a brilliant book, this time in defence of traditional top-down principles of governing the wild market and the wilder international order.

According to Ferguson, Britain should have stayed out of World War I and allowed Imperial Germany to smash France and Russia and create a continental empire from the Atlantic to the Middle East.

The joke is on Ferguson's American conservative admirers, inasmuch as he laments the defeat of the Kaiser's Germany because it accelerated the replacement of the British Empire by the United States of America and the eclipse of the City of London by Wall Street.

[69]The German-born American historian Gerhard Weinberg in a review of The Pity of War strongly criticized Ferguson for advancing the thesis that it was idiotic for Britain to have fought a Germany that allegedly posed no danger.

John Lewis Gaddis, a Cold War-era historian, praised Ferguson's "unrivaled range, productivity and visibility", while criticising the book as unpersuasive and containing contradictory claims.

[65][121] Richard Drayton, Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King's College London, has stated that it was correct of Seumas Milne to associate "Ferguson with an attempt to 'rehabilitate empire' in the service of contemporary great power interests".

[65] Wilson agrees with Ferguson's point that the British innovations brought to India civil services, education, and railways, and had beneficial side effects, but faults them for being done in a spirit of self-interest rather than altruism.

"[132] Matthew Carr wrote in Race & Class that "Niall Ferguson, the conservative English [sic] historian and enthusiastic advocate of a new American empire, has also embraced the Eurabian idea in a widely reproduced article entitled 'Eurabia?

Carr adds that "Ferguson sees the recent establishment of a department of Islamic studies in his (Oxford college) as another symptom of 'the creeping Islamicization of a decadent Christendom' ", and in a 2004 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute entitled "The End of Europe?

A century ago it was the West's great blunder to think it would not matter if Lenin and his confederates took over the Russian Empire, despite their stated intention to plot world revolution and overthrow both democracy and capitalism.

[145] During the 2020 United States presidential election, Ferguson observed that contrary to arguments from Trump's opponents that he only appealed to older White men, statistics showed his support among Black and Latino voters had risen.

[148] He argued that Trumpism was likely to remain a force within American politics and likened it to Jacobite Pretenders who sought to revolt in order to restore the House of Stuart to the British royal throne after the Glorious Revolution.

The two scholars called for the following changes to the American government's fiscal and income security policies:[153] In February 2010, during the Greek government-debt crisis, Ferguson appeared on the Glenn Beck Program predicting that if interest rates rose in the United States, it could experience a similar sovereign default and mass civil disorder to what was occurring in Greece.

[158] In May 2009, Ferguson became involved in a public exchange of views with economist Paul Krugman arising out of a panel discussion hosted by PEN/New York Review on 30 April 2009, regarding the American economy.

Ferguson contended that the Obama administration's policies are simultaneously Keynesian and monetarist in an "incoherent" mix, and specifically claimed that the government's issuance of a multitude of new bonds would cause an increase in interest rates.

By 2017, he had changed his mind on Bitcoin's utility, saying it had established itself as a form of "digital gold: a store of value for wealthy investors, especially those located in countries with weak rule of law and high political risk".

Ferguson has also argued (citing Walter Scott's novel Waverley) that Scotland after the Jacobite rebellion remained a land divided by warring clans and religious factions, and that the Union helped to quell some of the conflicts.

Ferguson furthermore states that the best way for the British government to thwart independence and the SNP's separationist demands was not by "unthinkingly accepting the SNP's argument that it has a moral right to a referendum on secession every time it wins a parliamentary election" and allowing a slim majority vote in favour to decide the outcome but instead by following the example of Canadian prime minister Jean Chretien and minister Stephane Dion's who handled the Parti Quebecois's calls for Quebec secessionism by taking the matter to the Canadian Supreme Court and introducing the Clarity Act rather than letting it solely be up to "a slim majority of the voters of Quebec if Canada broke up".

He also argued the "real disintegration of Europe" will happen over the EU's migration policies that he says have both exacerbated and failed to provide solutions to illegal immigration to the European continent from North Africa and the Middle East.

Ferguson stated that high levels of illegal immigration from Muslim-majority nations would in turn further the rise of populist and Eurosceptic movements committed to rolling back or leaving the EU.

"[180] When commenting on the ethnic diversity of the candidates for the July–September 2022 Conservative Party leadership election, Ferguson disputed that racism or nostalgia for the British Empire had played a significant role in the vote for Brexit.

[193][194][195] Upset about the media coverage of his relationship with Hirsi Ali, which implied that he had begun dating her before his first marriage had unraveled, Ferguson stated: "I don't care about the sex lives of celebrities, so I was a little unprepared for having my private life all over the country.