Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The result of all this, I hope, is an interpretation of the present as well as the immediate past and the near future, which is free from the accepted clichés, slogans, and self-justifications which mar so much of “contemporary history.” Much of my adult life has been devoted to training undergraduates in techniques of historical analysis which will help them to free their understanding of history from the accepted categories and cognitive classifications of the society in which we live, since these, however necessary they may be for our processes of thought and for the concepts and symbols needed for us to communicate about reality, nevertheless do often serve as barriers which shield us from recognition of the underlying realities themselves. The present work is the result of such an attempt to look at the real situations which lie beneath the conceptual and verbal symbols. I feel that it does provide, as a consequence of this effort, a fresher, somewhat different, and (I hope) more satisfying explanation of how we arrived at the situation in which we now find ourselves.

More than twenty years have gone into the writing of this work. Although most of it is based on the usual accounts of these events, some portions are based on fairly intensive personal research (including research among manuscript materials). These portions include the following: the nature and techniques of financial capitalism, the economic structure of France under the Third Republic, the social history of the United States, and the membership and activities of the English Establishment. On other subjects, my reading has been as wide as I could make it, and I have tried consistently to view all subjects from as wide and as varied points of view as I am capable. Although I regard myself, for purposes of classification, as a historian, I did a great deal of study in political science at Harvard, have persisted in the private study of modern psychological theory for more than thirty years, and have been a member of the American Anthropological Association, the American Economic Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as the American Historical Association for many years.

Thus my chief justification for writing a lengthy work on contem¬porary history, despite the necessarily restricted nature of the documenta¬tion, must be based on my efforts to remedy this inevitable deficiency by using historical perspective to permit me to project the tendencies of the past into the present and even the future and my efforts to give this attempt a more solid basis by using all the evidence from a wide variety of academic disciplines.

As a consequence of these efforts to use this broad, and perhaps complex, method, this book is almost inexcusably lengthy. For this I must apologize, with the excuse that I did not have time to make it shorter and that an admittedly tentative and interpretative work must necessarily be longer than a more definite or more dogmatic presentation. To those who find the length excessive, I can only say that I omitted chapters, which were already written, on three topics: the agricultural history of Europe, the domestic history of France and Italy, and the intellectual history of the twentieth century in general. To do this I introduced enough on these subjects into other chapters.

Although I project the interpretation into the near future on a number of occasions, the historical narrative ceases in 1964, not because the date of writing caught up with the march of historical events but because the period 1962-1964 seems to me to mark the end of an era of historical development and a period of pause before a quite different era with quite different problems begins. This change is evident in a number of obvious events, such as the fact that the leaders of all the major countries (except Red China and France) and of many lesser ones (such as Canada, India, West Germany, the Vatican, Brazil, and Israel) were changed in this period. Much more important is the fact that the Cold War, which cul¬minated in the Cuban crisis of October 1962, began to dwindle toward its end during the next two years, a process which was evident in a number of events, such as the rapid replacement of the Cold War by “Competitive Coexistence”; the disintegration of the two superblocs which had faced each other during the Cold War; the rise of neutralism, both within the superblocs and in the buffer fringe of third-bloc powers be¬tween them; the swamping of the United Nations General Assembly under a flood of newly independent, sometimes microscopic, pseudopowers; the growing parallelism of the Soviet Union and the United States; and the growing emphasis in all parts of the world on problems of living standards, of social maladjustments, and of mental health, replacing the previous emphasis on armaments, nuclear tensions, and heavy industrialization. At such a period, when one era seems to be ending and a different, if yet indistinct era appearing, it seemed to me as good a time as any to evaluate the past and to seek some explanation of how we arrived where we are.

In any preface such as this, it is customary to conclude with acknowl-edgment of personal obligations. My sense of these is so broad that I find it invidious to single out some and to omit others. But four must be mentioned. Much of this book was typed, in her usual faultless way, by my wife. This was done originally and in revised versions, in spite of the constant distractions of her domestic obligations, of her own professional career in a different university, and of her own writing and publication. For her cheerful assumption of this great burden, I am very grateful.

Similarly, I am grateful to the patience, enthusiasm, and amazingly wide knowledge of my editor at The Macmillan Company, Peter V. Ritner.

I wish to express my gratitude to the University Grants Committee of Georgetown University, which twice provided funds for summer research.

And, finally, I must say a word of thanks to my students over many years who forced me to keep up with the rapidly changing customs and outlook of our young people and sometimes also compelled me to recognize that my way of looking at the world is not necessarily the only way, or even the best way, to look at it. Many of these students, past, present, and future, are included in the dedication of this book.

CARROLL QUIGLEY

Washington, D.C.

March 8, 1965

I INTRODUCTION:

WESTERN CIVILIZATION IN ITS WORLD SETTING

Cultural Evolution in Civilizations

Cultural Diffusion in Western Civilization

Europe’s Shift to the Twentieth Century

Cultural Evolution in Civilizations

There have always been men who have asked, “Where are we going?” But never, it would seem, have there been so many of them. And surely never before have these myriads of questioners asked their question in such dolorous tones or rephrased their question in such despairing words: “Can man survive?” Even on a less cosmic basis, questioners appear on all sides, seeking “meaning” or “identity,” or even, on the most narrowly egocentric basis, “trying to find myself.” One of these persistent questions is typical of the twentieth century rather than of earlier times: Can our way of life survive? Is our civilization doomed to vanish, as did that of the Incas, the Sumerians, and the Romans? From Giovanni Battista Vico in the early eighteenth century to Oswald Spengler in the early twentieth century and Arnold J. Toynbee in our own day, men have been puzzling over the problem whether civilizations have a life cycle and follow a similar pattern of change. From this discussion has emerged a fairly general agreement that men live in separately organized societies, each with its own distinct culture; that some of these societies, having writing and city life, exist on a higher level of culture than the rest, and should be called by the different term “civilizations”; and that these civilizations tend to pass through a common pattern of experience.