Carroll Quigley - The Evolution of Civilizations

So much for the historians who say that tools of historical analysis are unnecessary. To the much smaller group of historians who say that such tools are impossible to obtain, I can only offer this book as an attempt. This group of critics is much more difficult to deal with. They are skeptics sophisticated enough to recognize that there is a problem, but not consistent enough to cease being historians when they insist that there is no solution. The only justification they can offer is to fall back on tradition once again. These skeptics recognize the infinity of past facts and the subjectivity of the criteria usually used in making a selection from these facts, but they are content to continue to work with the traditionally acceptable selections from both. I offer them here principles of selection based on the methods used in science, but I recognize the difficulty of the problem of persuading them that I have anything helpful. As skeptics these people are almost impervious to persuasion.

I came into history from a primary concern with mathematics and science. This has been a tremendous help to me as a person and as a historian, although it must be admitted it has served to make my historical interpretations less conventional than may be acceptable to many of my colleagues in the field.

My greatest personal debt to historians has been to Frederic William Maitland and to Charles Howard McIlwain. The former I did not know, although his influence on me has been very great. The latter, my best-loved teacher, remains the model of my professional life.

This book was read in manuscript by Crane Brinton of Harvard and A. L. Rowse of All Souls College, Oxford; it has benefited from their diametrically opposed opinions. To Professor Brinton, as teacher and friend during three decades, I owe many favors. A word of thanks is also due to that great and lamented scholar, the late Donald Cope McKay of Harvard, who, as my undergraduate tutor, first introduced me to ancient history. And finally, no words can express my gratitude to my wife, Lillian Fox Quigley, whose patient and expert assistance has made many rough roads smooth during the quarter century since we first went off to Europe when she was in her teens.

Oxford, England June 1961

The Evolution of Civilizations

1. Scientific Method and the Social Sciences

Touring the summer that I was twelve years old, I walked four or five times a week to fish from Hingham Bridge. The distance was about five miles, part of it along a high railroad embankment that had been ballasted with crushed quartz. In this ballast were hundreds of quartz crystals. Each day I stopped awhile to look for a perfect crystal. I found some excellent ones, but never one that could be called perfect. The books I consulted told me that a quartz crystal should be a hexagonal prism with a regular hexagonal pyramid at the end. The ones I found were invariably irregular in some way, with sides of varying sizes, frequently with several crystals jammed together so that, in seeking to share the same material, they mutually distorted each other's hexagonal regularity.

After several weeks of casual searching, I found three or four crystals that were almost perfect, at least at the pyramidal end. But to find these, I had examined and discarded hundreds of distorted crystals. By what right, I asked, did the books say that quartz crystals occurred in regular pyramidal hexagonal prisms when only a small percentage of those found had such a shape? Obviously, the books meant that crystallized quartz has a tendency to take hexagonal form and will do so unless distorted by outside forces. The fact that ninety-nine percent are distorted does not deter the scientist from forming in his mind an idealized picture of an undistorted crystal, or from stating, in books, that quartz crystals occur in that idealized form.

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.

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.

After years of work in both areas of study, I concluded that the social sciences were different, in many important ways, from the natural sciences, but that the same scientific methods were applicable in both areas, and, indeed, that no very useful work could be done in either area except by scientific methods. In both areas the laws arising from the use of scientific methods will be idealized theories reflecting observed phenomena only approximately, but these theories must be based on our observations; and any wide failure of approximation or any totally inapplicable cases must either be explained in terms of unconsidered outside factors, or the theories themselves must be changed to cover such variant observations. The "laws" of historical change described in this book seem to me to fit the observed cases at least as closely as most of the theories of natural science. Most of the laws I shall mention apply, without exception, or with only slight, explicable divergencies, to all the cases I know. They are then, it would seem to me, as worthy of consideration as the scientific laws on the formation of crystals.

Before proceeding to examine any theories of historical change, we should review what we understand by the term "scientific method." In general, this method has three parts which we might call (1) gathering evidence, (2) making a hypothesis, and (3) testing the hypothesis. The first of these, "gathering evidence,"refers to collecting all the observations relevant to the topic being studied. The important point here is that we must have all the evidence, for, obviously, omission of a few observations, or even one vital case, might make a considerable change in our final conclusions. It is equally obvious, I hope, that we cannot judge that we have all the evidence or cannot know what observations are relevant to our subject unless we already have some kind of tentative hypothesis or theory about the nature of that subject. In most cases a worker does have some such preliminary theory. This leads to two warnings. In the first place, the three parts of scientific methodology listed above were listed in order, not because a scientist performs them separately in sequence, but simply because we must discuss them in an orderly fashion. And, in the second place, any theories, even those regarded as final conclusions at the end of all three parts of scientific method, remain tentative. As scientific methodology is practiced, all three parts are used together at all stages, and therefore no theory, however rigorously tested, is ever final, but remains at all times tentative, subject to new observation and continued testing by such observation. No scientist ever believes that he has the final answer or the ultimate truth on anything. Rather he feels that science advances by a series of successive (and, he hopes, closer) approximations to the truth; and, since the truth is never finally reached, the work of scientists must indefinitely continue. Science, as one writer put it, is like a single light in darkness; as it grows brighter its shows more clearly the area of illumination and, simultaneously, lengthens the circle of surrounding darkness.