Quigley on the Evolution of Civilizations

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

Nov 10, 2024

A Hard Look at a Philosopher - A book review by Professor Carroll Quigley

Saturday 09 November 2024 is the 114^th anniversary of the birth of Carroll Quigley (09 November 1910 – 03 January 1977), who was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on this date in 1910.

Some men are known for their books and some men are known for their personal influence, often through teaching. Quigley was known both for his books and his teaching, but it was his teaching influential students at an influential school that secured his reputation. Since he taught an entire generation of students at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University from 1941 to 1976, he influenced many individuals within the US government foreign policy establishment.

This distinctive form of influence has given Quigley a distinctive reputation. Most professors who write on the kind of topics that Quigley covered aren’t referenced by figures in the government, but Quigley was. As a consequence, Quigley has been criticized for reasons that have little to do with his work. For example, Scott McLamee once referred to “…the weird theories of the late Carroll Quigley…” in his article The Quigley Cult, published in George magazine in 1996, without telling us why exactly he thought Quigley’s theories were “weird.”

I think it’s quite common to dismiss thoughtful works like those of Quigley simply because one doesn’t hear about them continually throughout one’s formative years, but this feeling of weirdness is merely a function of familiarity, or, better, complacency. There’s nothing at all “weird” about Quigley’s theories, but there is a great deal that is unfamiliar in Quigley, because he was an original thinker. And I’d like to point out the Wikipedia article on Quigley uncritically references the McLamee article as though it’s authoritative.

Quigley’s major books were The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis (1961), Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966), and Weapons Systems and Political Stability: A History, posthumously published in 1983. Quigley was a man of his time, and his books breathe the atmosphere of the Cold War, which seemed at the time to be a permanent feature of history. In my recent episode on Francis Fukuyama I talked about how everyone thought of the Cold War as a fixture of contemporary history that would continue into the indefinite future.

Tragedy and Hope is very much a book of its time, but Quigley does have some prescient insights into the history he did not live to see, and he involves a more abstract conception of history in the quest of more comprehensive understanding. The last division of Tragedy and Hope, Part Twenty, “Tragedy and Hope: the Future in Perspective,” is deeply invested in Cold War themes, but Quigley eventually transcends this outlook and begins to lay out a more abstract conception of human beings in relation to their history. Here is an example of this from the final section of Tragedy and Hope:

“In order to think about himself or the universe with the more abstract and rational end of his being, man has to categorize and to conceptualize both his own nature and the nature of reality, while, in order to act and to feel on the less abstract end of his being, he must function more directly, outside the limits of categories, without the buffer of concepts. Thus man might look at his own being as divided into three levels of body, emotions, and reason.”

Quigley goes on to spell out what he means by the human being divided into three levels, and who this manages to unite thought and action:

“The body, functioning directly in space-time-abstraction, is much concerned with concrete situations, individual and unique events, at a specific time and place. The middle levels of his being are concerned with himself and his reactions to reality in terms of feelings and emotions as determined by endocrine and neurological reactions. The upper levels of his being are concerned with his neurological analysis and manipulation of conceptualized abstractions. The three corresponding operations of his being are sensual, emotional or intuitive, and rational. The sequence of intellectual history is concerned with the sequence of styles or fads that have been prevalent, one after another, as to what emphasis or combinations of man’s three levels of operations would be used in his efforts to experience life and to cope with the universe.” (pp. 1222-1223)

Though tied to a Cold War paradigm, Quigley transcended his circumstances not by imaging a near-term end to the Cold War, and the new political paradigm to follow that of the Cold War, but through a distinctive conceptualization of his historical circumstances. Quigley’s mind ranged widely and tended to abstractions that others dealing with the same topics never considered. For example, his posthumously published Weapons Systems and Political Stability: A History did not narrowly consider weapons systems, but framed their development in the context of human needs, which in this later work he expands beyond the three levels described in the previous quote:

“…the scale of human needs… forms a hierarchy seven or eight levels high, ranging from the more concrete to the less concrete (and thus more abstract) aspects of reality. We cannot easily force the multi-dimensional complexities of reality and human experience into a single one-dimensional scale, but, if we are willing to excuse the inevitable distortion arising from an effort to do this, we might range human needs from the bottom to the top, on the levels of (1) physical survival; (2) security; (3).economic needs; (4) sex and reproduction; (5) gregarious needs for companionship and love; (6) the need for meaning and purpose; and (7) the need for explanation of the functioning of the universe. This hierarchy undoubtedly reflects the fact that man’s nature itself is a hierarchy, corresponding to his hierarchy of needs, although we usually conceal the hierarchical nature of man by polarizing it into some kind of dualistic system, such as mind and body, or, perhaps, by dividing it into the three levels of body, emotions, and intellect.”

Notice that at the end of this quote Quigley is criticizing his earlier position that I previously quoted, which he has here expanded. In any case, Quigley has here re-created the Maslovian hierarchy of needs, though Maslow is not mentioned anywhere in the book. I’m not very sympathetic to Maslow, but I’m not going to talk about that today, but we see in passages like this that Quigley goes far beyond the ordinary scope of history and political science.

In an appendix to Weapons Systems and Political Stability: A History, “The Structure of Revolutions: with Application to the French Revolution,” Quigley takes up the problem of political stability in relation to revolutions (the latter being, presumably, the antithesis of political stability), and, while he focuses on the French Revolution, he again takes an unusually wide and abstract view of revolutions:

“Political stability is present in civilizations only when the distribution of political participation and political rights in the polities reflects the potential distribution of weapons in the society. When the distribution of weapons is wider than the polity of ‘active’ citizens, the latter must be widened to obtain stability; when the distribution of effective weapons is much narrower than the polity, the polity should be narrowed, in perception if not in law or there will be danger of coups de’etat in which the possessors of weapons will change the personnel of the governments as established by the legal polity. Changes in the dimensions of the polity (a legal or constitutional issue) may be achieved by political reforms or by revolution (reformist to make the polity wider, fascist to make it narrower).”

This is a highly abstract way of opening a discussion about revolution, and this was Quigley’s particular contribution: taking present historical problems and placing them in the most comprehensive context in order to understand them at the greatest degree of generality.

Quigley’s The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis is one of the great works written on civilization, and here also he pursued the kind of abstraction and generality that many philosophers had come to avoid as a result of philosophical controversies over the very idea of “laws of history”—a perennial ambition of philosophers of history, but an ambition now widely regarded with suspicion when it is not outright derided. Quigley opens the preface to The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis with this observation:

“This book is not a history. Rather it is an attempt to establish analytical tools that will assist the understanding of history. Most historians will regard such an effort as unnecessary or even impossible.”

The first chapter begins with an anecdote about searching for a perfect quartz crystal on a railroad embankment; none of the crystals he found perfectly matched the structure of quartz crystals described in books of minerals. Quigley then applied this lesson more generally to the sciences:

“Later, when I studied science in school and college, I found that most scientific ‘laws’ were of this idealized character. They were not statements of what actually happens in the world or of what we observe through our senses, but rather were highly idealized and much oversimplified relationships that might occur if a great many other influences, which were always present, were neglected. I found that the most highly praised ‘scientific laws’ attributed to great men like Galileo or Newton were of this character. It was a blow to discover that Newton’s laws of planetary motion did not, in fact, describe the movements of the sun’s satellites as we observe them, except in a very approximate way. In some cases, notably that of the planet Mercury, the approximation was by no means close.”

Proceeding along the same line of thought, he applied the same idea to the social sciences, but found here that the attitudes of social scientists prevented them from making generalizations:

“Still later, when my interests shifted from the physical sciences to the social sciences, and I worked with students of human society who were generally lacking in any close familiarity with the natural sciences, I found a curious situation. The social scientists usually had erroneous ideas about the methods and theories of natural science, believing them to be rigid, exact, and invariable. Accordingly, they felt that these methods were not applicable to the social sciences. Thus I found that natural scientists were quite prepared to accept as a ‘law’ a rule that was only approximately true or was true in only one case in a hundred, while the social scientists were reluctant to accept any rule that was only approximate or even one that had no more than one exception in a hundred cases.”

This is, I believe, one of the most important realizations that anyone can arrive at, and the lack of this realization has compromised the social sciences as well as philosophy of the social sciences, which, under the influence of an exaggerated idiography, has enshrined the particularistic at the expense of the nomothetic. At present this pendulum continues to swing in the idiographic direction, and even the physical sciences are tending in this direction. When the pendulum will swing back in anyone’s guess.

Quigley sought to bring this scientific understanding to the study of history and civilization, and he was partly successful as far as his own work extends. Yet, as we have seen in so many cases, Quigley had a great deal of influence, but few have attempted to build on his work. There is no Quiglean school of historiography seeking to apply and extend Quigley’s insights. Possibly because history established its paradigm so early in Western history—with Herodotus and Thucydides—it is been nearly impossible to budge since that time, except for the most incremental developments. Occasionally the exceptional thinker appears who questions the historical paradigm, and tries to go beyond it, but they remain largely isolated. We could say that Quigley follows and builds upon Toynbee, so that he belongs to a larger Toynbeean school of historical thought, and there would be some justice in this claim, but I think making this claim would be more misleading than helpful. Quigley followed out his own program for a social science of history in his book on civilization, and precisely because there is no real Quiglean school, there is still much that can be learned from it, because many of its lessons remain little known and little applied.

Given Quigley’s focus on civilization and on laws in social science, it’s not surprising to hear him compared to Toynbee. It has been said that Quigley’s thought is derivative of Toynbee’s, but, while the influence was there, and is unmistakable, at the same time Quigley is strongly critical of Toynbee. For example, “Toynbee never defined his terms, and constantly violated his own precepts in his own practice.” Quigley analyzes the development of civilization into seven stages, as follows: 1) Mixture, 2) Gestation, 3) Expansion, 4) Conflict, 5) Universal empire, 6) Decay, and 7) Invasion. Here Quigley is especially critical of Toynbee. He says that Toynbee failed to account for the early history of civilizations, which he has expanded and analyzed into the four movements of mixture, gestation, expansion, and conflict: “Toynbee’s failure to provide a satisfactory analysis of process explains his failure to understand, or to provide stages for, the first part of a civilization's existence.”

Quigley also says that Toynbee failed to make a connection between his stages and his mechanisms. For Toynbee, the mechanism that drives civilization is challenge and response, but this movement of challenge and response is not reflected in the stages that Toynbee attributes to civilizations. Quigley’s analysis explicitly counters this, as his first four stages in the history of a civilization are at the same as the mechanism by which civilizations develop.

Economics is never far from Quigley’s analysis in The Evolution of Civilizations. In this respect Quigley reminds me in some respects of Peter Turchin of our own time. Last year I read Turchin’s End Times, and there was a similar interest in understanding the economic mechanisms that drive societies, and which, when they fail, cause societies to fail. Both Quigley and Turchin emphasize that when elites—and this is Turchin’s term, not Toynbee’s—cease to invest their resources in the furtherance of the society of which they are a part, that society breaks down. For Quigley, this is another of the central mechanisms that accounts for civilizations. (I should note here that Quigley mostly uses societies interchangeably with civilizations.)

The third stage in the development of a civilization, expansion, is at the heart of Quigley’s exposition, and for Quigley all civilizations possess what he calls instruments of expansion. This instrument of expansion is a complex process that consists of three elements:

Inventiveness
A class of persons who accumulate surplus value, and
The investment of the surplus value into new inventions or their applications

All three need to come together for a civilization to pass through its expansionary stage after cultural mixture and gestation of that mixture. That Quigley offers developmental periods that reflect the mechanisms of a civilization’s development, and that he spells out the instrument of expansion as a mechanism is where he sees his account of going where Toynbee did not go, and is the source of his criticism of Toynbee. If you say that Toynbee did have a mechanism, the mechanism of challenge and response, Quigley says:

“Toynbee’s process of ‘Challenge and Response’ explains nothing, is based on a mistaken Darwinian biological analogy, and provides no technique for analyzing a society or for communication with others about it.”

Quigley closes his The Evolution of Civilizations saying that will review six chief points for the study of history and civilization, though he only actually names five points. He numbers these points in the text but passes over number four. Perhaps Quigley thought his fourth point was obvious the context, but I don’t see an obvious but unnamed point between the third and fifth points. In any case, his chief points include:

Distinction between knowledge and understanding
Civilizations pass through cycles of rise and fall
Periodization
Vocabulary
A method for dealing with history and social problems

All of these are closely tied together. Quigley says that knowledge is easy but understanding requires a self-conscious effort. When Quigley argues that civilizations pass through cycles of rise and fall, he repeats one of the central themes of the book. I said that one of Quigley’s criticisms of Toynbee was that Toynbee failed to provide an explanatory mechanism for the development of civilizations. One of the mechanisms for which Quigely is known is the institutionalization of the instrument. Earlier we saw Quigley argued the productive stage in the development of a civilization depended on an instrument of expansion. That he calls this an instrument is important for his exposition. This is at the heart of his conception of civilization. Societies produce instruments to achieve certain ends, but the instrument transforms itself into an institution that seeks only to perpetuate itself an ceases to fulfill its function as a social instrument. When the instruments of expansion are institutionalized, civilizations fail and fall.

Quigley’s concern with periodization is that conventional periodizations are misleading and counter-productive as analytical tools. We saw that Quigley was critical of Toynbee failing to connect the developmental stages through which a civilization passes so the mechanisms of development. This critique of periodization is of a piece with this criticism of Toynbee.

Quigley’s concern with vocabulary is that he has supplied a vocabulary that can be the basis of further work. I said earlier that there is no Quiglean school of history, but Quigley appears to hope that there would be: “The real point is that my vocabulary is fruitful: fruitful in research projects, in arousing original questions and interpretations, and in making communication between historians more helpful.” The old vocabulary is tied to old periodizations that Quigley has just criticized as unhelpful and misleading. Quigley acknowledges that his vocabulary isn’t perfect—no vocabulary is—but it is better than what he inherited, and he cleared hoped that other would adopt it in their analyses.

His final point recurs to his first point, which was the distinction between knowledge and understanding. The kind of understanding he wanted to convey to his students was how to deal with history and with social problems in general. Quigley emphasized that his teaching work aimed at training executives rather than clerks. Clerks employ their knowledge, but the executive must have understanding, and the historian should try to place himself at this executive level. Here we find the applicability of history to the present: “The techniques I have discussed as instruments for dealing with the past have value outside the study of history, for they are equally useful in dealing with the present or the future.” Quigley described a classroom exercise of assembling a commission of inquiry to Brazil, in which students would have to justify their choices for how the commission would be constituted and how it would conduct its inquiry.

I think anyone with a concern for the rational analysis of history, and this seems to me to be the proper attitude in philosophy of history, should be able to agree with Quigley on many of these points. Quigley wants better historical analysis leading to a better understanding of civilization, and this doesn’t necessarily involve an agenda. But I think that there is a subtle ideal just below the surface in Quigley that appears when he discusses the nature of Western civilization as being distinct from the other civilizations he considers in his book. Let me try to give a hint of what I mean by this.

In my episode on Nietzsche I talked how Nietzsche, after having been close to Wagner, broke with him, and years later Wagner sent Nietzsche a copy of the score for Parsifal. Nietzsche hated it, since Parsifal presents the spectacle of the world saved by the fool. Quigley gives a very different interpretation of the Parsifal story, which makes it central to Western civilization. For Quigley, Parsifal represents the core of truth-finding in Western civilization. Of Parsifal Quigley says:

“The earliest great work of German literature, Parzival, has as its subtitle ‘The Brave Man Slowly Wise.’ This is typical of the Western ideology’s belief that wisdom (or any real achievement) comes as a consequence of personal effort in time.”

In that quote Quigley emphasized the individual; in the next, he emphasizes the role of the community:

“There are two important ideas here: one is that no one has the whole truth now but that it can be approached closer and closer in the future, by vigorous effort, and the other is that no single individual does this or achieves this, but that it must be achieved by a communal effort, by a kind of cooperation in competition in which each individual’s efforts help to correct the errors of others and thus help the development of a consensus that is closer to the truth than the actions of any single individual ever could be.”

A little further along he adds: “There is also a third idea here; namely, that the resulting consensus is still not final, although far superior to any earlier or more individual version.” Here Quigley is providing a sketch of Western individualism from the point of view of the community. I don’t disagree with Quigley, but I would formulate from the point of view of the individual.

Individualism has a place in western civilization that it does not have in other civilizations. This is an overall economic benefit to Western civilization, because it means that the individual can follow their individual calling, investing their entire life into something that others either have no interest in or which they believe to be folly, and this incurs little or no cost to society overall. If the individual fails to make anything of their quest, little is lost. If the individual is successful, the whole of society benefits. Societies in which collectivism plays a larger role than individualism do not have this advantage.

If I am right in attributing this view to Quigley as the underlying spiritual ideal never made fully explicit in his work, then one place in which he could have further illuminated his thesis would have been to show how this Western quest for wisdom through a social dialectic is integrated into the overall mechanism of Western civilization.