Niall Ferguson received Liberty Fund’s George F. Will Award for advancing our understanding of the wellsprings of Western prosperity on April 13, 2026, in Washington, DC. The award recognizes individuals who, like George F. Will, have made significant contributions to our understanding of the free society, individual liberty, and the human condition.

　　Niall Ferguson’s work takes liberty seriously—not as an inevitability, but as a historical achievement. Across his scholarship, he examines how ideas about politics, markets, and culture shape institutions—and how those institutions, in turn, shape the possibilities for free and responsible societies.

　　Of his many works, Civilization: The West and the Rest may best capture the essence of the free and responsible societies we all want to be a part of. The book is an argument about divergence: why the West, which for much of history was not obviously superior to the great civilizations of Asia or the Islamic world, came to dominate the modern age. What makes the book memorable is that Ferguson does not explain Western ascendancy in mystical terms. He explains it through institutions, habits, and social technologies. His central claim is that the West developed, and at crucial moments better deployed, six “killer apps”: competition, science, property rights, medicine, consumerism, and the work ethic. These were not merely ideas; they were embodied in institutions and in the behaviors those institutions cultivated. Civilization, in this view, is not an inherited birthright; it is an operating system responsible for the “rise of the West … the preeminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ. It is the story at the very heart of modern history.”

　　The opening of the book asks the obvious but all-important question: why did this happen? Around 1500, Europe hardly looked destined for global dominance. It was divided, unstable, and in many ways less impressive than its rivals. Yet fragmentation became a source of strength. The first chapter, on competition, makes the case that political disunity gave Europe an advantage over more centralized polities. Because power was divided among rival kingdoms, principalities, and city-states, no single authority could suppress innovation everywhere. Talent, capital, and ideas could move more freely than in more centralized regions. Competition generated experimentation and innovation. Europe’s disorder was, paradoxically, productive—a driving force toward the pluralism that made it unique and adaptive.

　　A related factor is science, or, more specifically, the institutionalization of fact-based methodologies. The West produced great thinkers and scientists, but competitor civilizations had deep intellectual traditions too. The difference was that Western societies created durable structures that rewarded testing, verification, and the practical application of knowledge to real problems. Real-world results mattered. Science improved navigation, engineering, warfare, and economics. The West built institutions capable of turning knowledge into force. The story of Newtonian physics and artillery captures the combination of ideas that shifted power realities on the ground, not simply in the laboratory.

　　Ferguson’s treatment of property is perhaps the strongest because it gets to the core of political and economic order. He argues that representative institutions, the rule of law, and secure private property rights gave the West a powerful advantage. People invest, build, save, and innovate when they believe what they create will not be arbitrarily taken by the state or the whims of a ruler. The American experiment, in this telling, worked not because it was some entirely new system dreamt up in Philadelphia, but because it inherited and refined British institutional forms that restrained power and protected liberty. The American and later English examples are powerful: prosperity depends less on resources than on the institutional framework governing them. Property rights are not merely economic tools; they are fundamental to advancing Western civilization.

　　Ferguson also points to how Western power was strengthened by advances in public health, sanitation, vaccination, and disease control. Medicine broadly understood extended life, increased productivity, and enabled armies, empires, and cities to function at a scale previously unimaginable. A society that can control disease and reduce premature death is stronger socially, economically, and militarily. Medicine, viewed this way, becomes similar in power to the killer app of science: the practical application of medical knowledge proved an invaluable tool in the rise, spread, and defense of Western civilization.

　　The institutions responsible for the rise of the West were never self-executing in their own right.

　　A fifth factor, consumerism, initially sounds less elevated than the others, but Ferguson makes a persuasive case that mass consumption was a crucial driver of Western dynamism. Consumer society expanded demand and pushed innovation beyond elite circles. Economic life was increasingly oriented not toward the tailored luxuries of a few, but toward the rising expectations of many. The West became strong not only because it could produce, but because it created systems in which ordinary people could improve their material condition—more than that, they demanded it. Consumerism, in this argument, is not indulgence or greediness. It is part of the larger machinery of growth and social mobility. In short, it helped justify and sustain the Industrial Revolution.

　　The sixth and final “killer app” is the work ethic, which ties Western success to habits of discipline, thrift, delayed gratification, and personal responsibility. Often associated with the Protestant work ethic, it was broader than that and mattered not only in churches but in commerce, education, law, and civic life. A civilization rises when it forms people capable of virtue and self-command. Ferguson’s point is not narrowly religious, but cultural and social: work, rightly understood, is a habit that shapes judgment and conduct. Civilizations weaken when they lose those habits and begin to live off what is wrongly viewed as inherited capital.

　　The West rose because it possessed better ideas, and—just as important—because it built and sustained what novel complexes of ideas and associated behaviors that made those ideas durable, practical, livable realities. This interpretation is also an implicit warning. Institutions rarely collapse in dramatic fashion; more often, they decay slowly. Political systems lose the capacity to govern; legal systems become bloated and unintelligible; financial systems drift from productive investment toward rent-seeking; and educational institutions cease to form character and intellect and instead become reactionary and insular. Civilizational decline appears as a gradual hollowing out—a steady erosion of competence, trust, legitimacy, and confidence. That is why Civilization is not merely a celebration of Western ascendancy but a warning against civilizational apathy. The West’s success rested on a package of political pluralism, capitalism, the scientific method, the rule of law, property rights, representative institutions, broad-based prosperity, and a culture serious enough to perpetuate them. As Ferguson writes, “What makes a civilization real to its inhabitants, in the end, is not just the splendid edifices at its centre, not even the smooth functioning of the institutions they house. At its core, a civilization is the texts that are taught in its schools, learned by its students, and recollected in times of tribulation.” A civilization that neglects both the institutional and educational preconditions of its own success should not be surprised when its strength fades and its dominance slips.

　　Which brings us to the present. Ferguson’s conclusion to the book reviews the “rivals” to Western dominance, and none of the characters will surprise. China, Russia, the Islamic world—all have had historical periods of dominance, and all are seeking it again. If the West is to endure in the face of a revanchist China, Russia, Iran, and other challengers, it will not be enough to invoke the institutions that pushed the West to ascendancy in the abstract. The response has to be a recommitment to the ideas and institutions that propelled the West in the first place. The West survives not by nostalgia, but by renewal and reinvigoration.

　　But renewal in our time cannot be viewed as an exclusively domestic project. The current war in Iran underscores a harder truth: internal institutional strength, however necessary, must be matched by external staying power to ensure the preconditions of that institutional strength remain. Peace and the prosperity it enables depend on a secure world order and the institutions that sustain it. A West focused only on domestic problems while proving unable to secure trade routes, absorb energy shocks, deter revisionist powers, or work with allies abroad will soon discover that institutional excellence without geopolitical resolve is not enough. Domestic strength becomes fragile when it is left strategically exposed and undefended.

　　The implications extend well beyond the immediate battlefield. At home, war in the Middle East carries obvious economic risks in the form of energy volatility, inflationary pressure, and supply disruption. The risk of a much longer-lasting recession like that of the late 1970s is the most obvious example. For China, such a conflict is both a warning and an opportunity: a warning about the fragility of dependency and an opportunity to study whether the United States and its allies still possess the endurance for a prolonged contest—something Beijing will weigh carefully as it calculates its posture toward Taiwan. Russia, too, watches a divided and resource-strained West with interest, since every major crisis outside Europe can dilute attention, matériel, and political cohesion otherwise directed toward Ukraine.

　　The deeper point is that the institutions responsible for the rise of the West were never self-executing in their own right. They endured because they were perpetuated and defended. If Western civilization is to remain strong, the internal habits and institutions described above must once again be joined to the external resolve to protect an order that makes them possible. Internal staying power, in other words, must be matched by international staying power. Defending our interests and our system means more than admiring the inheritance of the West; it means resisting those powers whose ambitions did not build the civilizational achievements we inherited and whose success would weaken the conditions that made them possible in the first place.

　　Any opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Liberty Fund.