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Tragedy and Hope:
A History of the World in
Our Time
by Carroll Quigley
First Published 1966
The Macmillan Company
(Reprint GSG &
Associates)
1,348 Pages, US$35.00
ISBN 0-945001-10-X
For reasons that are only partly the author's fault, "Tragedy and Hope" has become one of the key texts of conspiracy theory. Famous for its exposition of the workings of the Anglophile American establishment during the first half of the twentieth century, the book is reputed to have "named names" to such a degree that the hidden masters of the world tried to suppress the unabridged edition. It did not diminish the book's reputation that Carroll Quigley (1910-1977), a historian with the Foreign Service School at Georgetown University, made a deep impression on US-president-to-be Bill Clinton during Clinton's undergraduate years at that university. We have Mr. Clinton's own word on this, so it must be true.
If the hidden masters did
try to suppress the book when it first appeared, they seem to have lost
interest by now; the only problem I had buying this enormous volume was
carrying the 15 pounds of it home. "Tragedy and Hope" has no notes,
no bibliography, and a very inadequate index. As with the Bible, its sheer size
has done something to ensure that it would be more cited than read. For what it
is intended to be, a history of the world from about 1895 to 1964, the book is
a failure. As Quigley acknowledges, there are insuperable problems of
perspective in writing about one's own time. On the other hand, the book's
prejudices are fascinating. It was written at the point in the 1960s just
before the American liberal consensus began to unravel. Perhaps as important
for Quigley, that was also the brief interval after the Second Vatican Council
when "liberal Catholic" did not mean someone who rejected all dogma
and tradition. Beyond its value as a
period piece, however, the book occasionally transcends its time. Its remarks
about the future, presumably a future more distant than our present, are close
to becoming conventional wisdom today.
Quigley's frame of
reference is roughly that of Arnold Toynbee: the West, including Europe, the
United States, Latin America, and Australasia, has entered an Age of Crisis. Other
civilizations, when faced with analogous crises, solved them by entering an Age
of Universal Empire. Universal Empires, however, are morbid: they are
stultifying at best and eventually collapse in any case. Quigley's objection is
not to international institutions, or even to world government. What the West
must do, according to Quigley, is end its Age of Crisis without creating a
Universal Empire through military conquest. The problem with the 20th century,
down to the 1960s, has been repeated attempts by persons and groups to achieve
universal power by force or manipulation.
This analysis sounds much
more interesting than it is. Quigley's tale is pretty much a vindication of
President Franklin Roosevelt's administration (1933-1945). By Quigley's account,
the failure to adopt the policies of those years earlier in the 20th century
led to the disasters of the Depression and the Second World War, while the need
of the decades that followed was to expand and perfect the Progressive
tradition they embodied. Much of the reputation of this book among conspiracy
theorists rests on its account of the world financial system of the 1920s, when
the Bank of England no longer had the power to regulate the system, as it had
before the First World War. The gap was filled by private institutions acting
in collusion with the heads of the central banks, generally without oversight
from the world's major governments. A combination of bad luck and stupidity
made the system collapse at the end of the decade, so that currencies became
inexchangeable, trade froze, and force displaced commerce both domestically and
internationally. It's not hard to make ordinary banking practices sound like
the work of the devil, and in this book the devil's little helpers are Morgans,
Rothschilds, and Barings.
One can take or leave
Quigley's long, very long, expositions of economic theory. Many readers will be
inclined to leave an argument that suggests the whole of history was
preparation for the ultimate enlightenment contained in John Kenneth
Galbraith's "The Affluent Society," which argued for Keynsian
macroeconomics and a mildly redistributive social policy. (Quigley clearly
alludes to that book, published in 1958, but does not cite it.) In any case,
Quigley described speculative, international finance-capitalism as a feature of
the past; he did not think it had any relevance to his own day.
What chiefly ensured Quigley's work a lasting place in the pantheon of paranoia, however, was his attempt to provide a social context for this activity. This paragraph appears at the end of a tirade against McCarthyism:
"This myth, like all fables, does in fact have a modicum of truth. There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its paper and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies (notably to its belief that England was an Atlantic rather than a European Power and must be allied, or even federated, with the United States and must remain isolated from Europe), but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known." [Page 950]
"Anglophilia"
sounds like a debilitating psychological ailment, with some reason. In its
American manifestation, it suggests a preference for tweedy clothes, water
sports that don't require surf, and nominal affiliation with the Anglican
Communion. The syndrome has a copious literature, much of it concerned with
prep schools, but here is all you need to know in this context. The ideology of
Quigley's network can apparently be traced to 19th century Oxford, indeed
specifically to All Souls College, back when John Ruskin was expounding a
compound of Gothic Revival aesthetics, the glory of the British Empire, and the
duty to uplift the downtrodden poor. These ideas seized the imagination of
Cecil Rhodes during his years at Oxford. He hoped for a federation of the whole
English-speaking world, and provided the money and impetus for institutions to
link those countries. (Lord Alfred Milner provided the organizing talent.) The
best known of these efforts are the Rhodes Scholarships for study at Oxford.
(Bill Clinton is among the many well-know recipients.) They also included informal
"Round Table Groups" in the Dominions and the US, which sponsored
local Institutes of International Affairs. The US version is the Council on
Foreign Relations.
While the people in these
groups were very influential (that is why they were asked to join), Quigley
makes clear that the Round Tables never had everything their own way, even in
the administration of colonial Africa, where both Rhodes and Milner were
especially interested. As with the finance capitalists, the Anglophile network
was essentially a league of private persons trying to fill a gap in the
international system. As public institutions were created to exercise the Round
Tables' consultative and communications functions, the network itself became
less important.
Quigley makes the increasing marginalization of the Anglophile network perfectly clear, and in fact he does not suggest that it was ever more than one factor among many at any point in the 20th century. Nonetheless, it is his failing as a historian to suggest that a causal nexus can be inferred whenever two actors in a historical event can be shown to have met. Consider this excerpt from a discussion of the history of Iran:
"By that time
(summer, 1953) almost irresistible forces were building up against [Prime
Minister] Mossadegh, since lack of Soviet interference give the West full
freedom of action. The British, the AIOC, the world petroleum cartel, the
American government, and the older Iranian elite led by the shah combined to
crush Mossadegh. The chief effort came from the American supersecret
intelligence agency (CIA) under the personal direction of its director, Allen
W. Dulles, brother of the secretary of State. DulIes, as a former director of
the Schroeder Bank in New York, was an old associate of Frank C Tiarks, a
partner in the Schroeder Bank in London since 1902, and a director of the Bank
of England in 1912-1945, as well as Lazard Brothers Bank, and the AIOC. It will
be recalled that the Schroeder Bank in Cologne helped to arrange Hitler's
accession to power as chancellor in January 1933." [Page 1059]
I don't quite know what
this is supposed to mean; that pretty much the same people overthrew Prime
Minister Mossadegh as brought us Hitler? I am reminded of nothing so much as
Monty Python's parody of an Icelandic saga, about the deeds of "Hrothgar,
son of Sigismund, brother of Grundir, mother of Fingal, who knew Hermann, the
cousin of Bob." Maybe this is Quigley's idea of "thick"
description. Certainly "Tragedy and Hope" is thick with it; it goes
on for pages and pages.
"Tragedy and
Hope" is a fossil, perfectly preserved, of the sophisticated liberalism of
the Kennedy era. Quigley takes a partisan position in the debates about nuclear
strategy that began in the 1950s. (He sat on several government commissions on scientific
questions, including the one that recommended creating NASA. The book explains
the physics of nuclear weapons in some detail; Quigley does not just name
names, he names the weight of fissionable material necessary for a bomb.) Thus,
he praises Oppenheimer and condemns Teller, deplores the cost-cutting strategy
of "massive retaliation" embraced by the Eisenhower Administration
and supports tactical nuclear devices suitable for conventional war.
"Tragedy and Hope" has prose poems to "Operations Research,"
the application of quantitative analysis to military affairs, which he ranks
with Keynsian economics as one of the pillars of modern civilization.
Though it is not entirely
fair to criticize even a book such as this for failing to foresee the immediate
future, still I cannot help but remark how many of these ideas were tested in
the 1960s and found wanting. The number-crunching military philosophy that
Quigley endorsed was essentially that of Robert McNamara's Pentagon; as much as
anything else, it is what lost the Vietnam War for the United States. Quigley
covers Vietnam up through the assassination of President Diem in 1963, but
gives no greater prominence to the conflict there than to other Cold War
trouble spots. This book is good evidence, if any more were needed, that even
the Americans who knew most had not the tiniest idea what they were doing.
The problem with the
Kennedy Enlightenment is not that elements of its conventional wisdom were
wrong; that is true of all eras. The great flaw was its totalitarian streak.
Quigley expresses this attitude perfectly:
"The chief
problem of American political life for a long time has been how to make the two
Congressional parties more national and more international. The argument that
the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps of
the Right, and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to
doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost
identical so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any
election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. The
policies that are vital and necessary for America are no longer subjects of
significant disagreement, but are disputable only in terms of procedure, priority
and method..." [Page 1248-1249]
Quigley was aware that
there was a substantial number of persons in the nascent conservative movement
who did not think that all issues had been settled yet, but he regards their
opinions as not just erroneous but illegitimate. Quigley has fits of class
analysis, so he tells us that the traditional middle class, considered as a
cultural pattern rather than an economic group, was evaporating because of
growing prosperity and feminization. (His description of contemporary students
as promiscuous, unkempt and unpunctual suggests he had some inkling of just how
annoying the Baby Boom generation was going to be.) The Right, however, was
dominated by a parody, also destined to be ephemeral in Quigley's estimation,
of the disappearing middle class. The Right was "petty bourgeois" (he
actually uses the term), grasping, intolerant and careerist. They were
ignorant, even the ones who tried to get into top colleges on the basis of good
grades, since those grades were achieved by unimaginative drudgery rather than
by any real engagement with the life of the mind. The Right even came from
unfashionable places, principally the Southwest, where they made fortunes in
dreadful extractive industries, like oil and mining. The Right, particularly as
manifest in the Republican Party, is merely ignorant. It must be combated, but
need not be listened to.
Let us think less harshly
of Bill Clinton hereafter, if these were the opinions he heard from the Wise
and the Good of his youth.
The infuriating thing is
that Quigley knows better. He was well aware of the totalitarian trajectory of
the respectable consensus of his day, and he was not pleased by it. Consider
this paragraph:
"Because this is
the tradition of the West, the West is liberal. Most historians see liberalism
as a political outlook and practice founded in the nineteenth century. But
nineteenth-century liberalism was simply a temporary organizational
manifestation of what has always been the underlying Western outlook. That
organizational manifestation is now largely dead, killed as much by
twentieth-century liberals as by conservatives or reactionaries...The liberal
of about 1880 was anticlerical, antimilitarist, and antistate because these
were, to his immediate experience, authoritarian forces that sought to prevent
the operation of the Western way. ...But by 1900 or so, these dislikes and
likes became ends in themselves. The liberal was prepared to force people to
associate with those they could not bear, in the name of freedom of assembly,
or he was, in the name of freedom of speech, prepared to force people to
listen. His anticlericalism became an effort to prevent people from getting
religion, and his antimilitarism took the form of opposing funds for legitimate
defense. Most amazing, his earlier opposition to the use of private economic
power to restrict individual freedoms took the form of an effort to increase
the authority of the state against private economic power and wealth in
themselves. Thus the liberal of 1880 and the liberal of 1940 had reversed
themselves on the role and power of the state..." [Page 1231]
Quigley strongly
suspected that, whatever else may happen to the West, democracy was likely to
be a decreasingly important feature. In part, this was for a reason that would
gladden the hearts of defenders of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution:
the disarming of the citizenry, at least in comparison to the military.
Universal male suffrage was partly a side effect of the dominance in the 19th
century of the rifle-armed mass infantry. Firearms were cheap and great
equalizers; governments could use such armies only with a high level of consent
from the citizens who composed them. In the 20th century, however, the new
weapons were beyond the means of private parties or groups, and they could be
operated only by trained experts. In a way, the world came back to the era
knights and castles, when the bulk of the population figured in politics
chiefly as silent taxpayers.
Quigley did recognize
that the trends of the 20th century up to his day might not go on forever, and
at this point the book becomes positively disconcerting. He saw no end to the
standoff between the US and the Soviet Union, except to the extent that their
economic and political systems might be expected to converge in an age
increasingly dominated by experts. ("Convergence": now that's a
buzzword that brings back memories.) On the other hand, he did think that the
lesser countries of each block would be able to operate more independently from
the US and the USSR, and even to relax internally. He makes remarks about the
possibility of balkanization and decentralization that might almost have been
made by Robert Kaplan and Thomas Friedman, who are perhaps best known for their
recent writing about chaos and disintegration in the world after the Cold War.
Like other people writing 40 years later, Quigley also suggests that,
simultaneous with increasing disorder and complexity, new international
institutions would also flourish, so that the nations of his day would lose
authority to entities both greater and smaller than themselves.
"Tragedy and
Hope" suggests that the future may look something like the Holy Roman
Empire of the late medieval period. [Page 1287] In principle, the empire was a
federal hierarchy of authorities, but the principle was scarcely visible in the
tangle of republics, kingdoms, and bishoprics that composed it. The Imperial
Diet was as multichambered as a conch-shell, while the executive functioned
only on those rare occasions when the emperor, an elected official, managed to
persuade the potentates of the empire that what he wanted to do was in their
interest. Actually, Quigley did not have far to seek for this model. The early
European Economic Community of his day already was starting to look like just
such a horse designed by a committee. Its evolution into the European Union has
not lessened the resemblance. Quigley seemed to expect a parallel evolution of
institutions universally, through the UN system, for which a united Europe would
stand as a model. He is not perfectly clear on this point, however. As is so
often the case when people talk about transcending national sovereignty, it is
not clear whether they are talking about the evolution of the West, or of the
world, or of both.
To broach a final topic,
one of the things that struck me about "Tragedy and Hope" was
Quigley's lack of interest in intellectual history, except for science. His
treatments of ideology tend to be cursory, misleading or wrong. Lack of
interest is his privilege, of course, but to write a 1,300-page book about the
first half of the twentieth century without liking ideology is like owning a
candy store and not liking chocolate. The only point when the matter seems to
fully engage his interest is when he is speculating about the ideology that
might help the West to emerge from its Age of Crisis. What the West needs to
do, he says, is to hold fast to its special intellectual virtues, which he
summaries like this:
"The Outlook of
the West is that broad middle way about which the fads and foibles of the West
oscillate. It is what is implied by what the West says it believes, not at one
moment but over the long succession of moments that form the history of the
West. From that succession of moments it is clear that the West believes in
diversity rather than in uniformity, in pluralism, rather than in monism, or
dualism, in inclusion rather than exclusion, in liberty rather than in
authority, in truth rather than in power, in conversion rather than in
annihilation, in the individual rather than in the organization, in
reconciliation rather than in triumph, in heterogeneity rather than in
homogeneity, in relativisms rather than in absolutes, and in approximations
rather than in final answers. The West believes that man and the universe are
both complex and that the apparently discordant parts of each can be put into a
reasonably workable arrangement with a little good will, patience, and
experimentation. In man the West sees body, emotions, and reason as all equally
real and necessary, and is prepared to entertain discussion about their
relative interrelationships but is not prepared to listen for long to any
intolerant insistence that any one of these has a final answer." [Page
1227]
At first glance, this
might seem to be just another instance of the Kennedy Enlightenment assuming
that its own parochial ideas are all the ideas there are. Certainly this
laundry list looks more than a little like John Dewey's pragmatism. Pragmatism
has its virtues, but is hardly the thread that runs through all Western
history. However, that is not where the summary comes from. On close
examination, Quigley's "Way of the West" has more content than is
characteristic of pragmatism, which is a philosophy about procedure. What we have
here, as Quigley tells us himself, is a take on the philosophy of Thomas
Aquinas.
Aquinas has been credited
and blamed for many things. In the 20th century, he had been called "the
father of science" and "the first Whig." There really are features
of his ideas that are friendly to empirical science and to limited government
with the consent of the government. On the other hand, if you need a detailed
account of the physiology of demons, he is your man. A "liberal"
Thomas is not the only possible Thomas, but such an interpretation would have
appealed to a Catholic scholar like Quigley in the immediate aftermath of the
Second Vatican Council, where the ideas of John Cardinal Newman on the
development of doctrine seemed to carry all before them.
There is an obvious
pattern in Quigley's ideas about the future. Consider the specifics: the end of
mass warfare and mass democracy, the disintegration of the nation state into
both a universal polity and local patriotisms, and a global intellectual synthesis
that is willing to entertain any idea that is not contrary to faith and morals.
(Aquinas was rather more honest about that last part than was Quigley.) What we
have here is a vision of the High Middle Ages with International Style
architecture. This vision may or may not reflect the future, but it certainly
has a long history. Let us let Oswald Spengler have the last word; I suspect
this is where the citation-shy Quigley got the idea in the first place:
"But
neither in the creations of this piety nor in the form of the Roman Imperium is
there anything primary and spontaneous. Nothing is built up, no idea unfolds
itself - it is only as if a mist cleared off the land and revealed the old
forms, uncertainly at first, but presently with increasing distinctness. The
material of the Second Religiousness is simply that of the first, genuine,
young religiousness - only otherwise experienced and expressed. It starts with
Rationalism's fading out in helplessness, then the forms of the Springtime
become visible, and finally the whole world of the primitive religion, which
had receded before the grand forms of the early faith, returns to the
foreground, powerful in the guise of the popular syncretism that is to be found
in every Culture at this phase."
The
Decline of the West, Volume II, page 311
Copyright © 2001 by John J. Reilly