Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quigley.pdf

Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time', by Carroll Quigley

TRAGEDY AND HOPE Chapters I-IV

by Dr. Carroll Quigley

ISBN 0913022-14-4

CONTENTS

I. INTRODUCTION: WESTERN CIVILIZATION IN ITS WORLD SETTING

II. WESTERN CIVILIZATION TO 1914

III. THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE TO 1917

IV. THE BUFFER FRINGE

V. THE FIRST WORLD WAR

VI. THE VERSAILLES SYSTEM AND RETURN TO NORMALCY 1919-1929

VII. FINANCE, COMMERCIAL POLICY AND BUSINESS ACTIVITY 1897-1947

VIII. INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM AND THE SOVIET CHALLENGE

IX. GERMANY FROM KAISER TO HITLER 1913-1945

X. BRITAIN: THE BACKGROUND TO APPEASEMENT 1900-1939

XI. CHANGING ECONOMIC PATTERNS

XII. THE POLICY OF APPEASEMENT 1931-1936

XIII. THE DISRUPTION OF EUROPE

XIV. WORLD WAR II: THE TIDE OF AGGRESSION 1939-1941

XV. WORLD WAR II: THE EBB OF AGGRESSION 1941-1945

XVI. THE NEW AGE

XVII. NUCLEAR RIVALRY AND COLD WAR, AMERICAN NUCLEAR

SUPERIORITY 1950-1957

XVIII. NUCLEAR RIVALRY AND COLD WAR, RACE FOR THE H-BOMB 1950-

1957

XIX. THE NEW ERA

XX. TRAGEDY AND HOPE: THE FUTURE IN PERSPECTIVE

CONTENTS

I. INTRODUCTION: WESTERN CIVILIZATION IN ITS WORLD SETTING

II. WESTERN CIVILIZATION TO 1914

III. THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE TO 1917

IV. THE BUFFER FRINGE

Back cover

TRAGEDY AND HOPE is a lively, informed and always readable view

of our not quite One World of today, seen in historical perspective.

Quigley has already shown his command of the kind of historical

perspective seen in the a world like that of Toynbee and Spengler; but

unlike them he does not so much concern himself with projections from

a distant past to a distant future as he does with what must interest

us all much more closely - our own future and that of our immediate

descendants. He uses the insights, but in full awareness of the

limitations of our modern social sciences, and especially those of

economics, sociology, and psychology. Not all readers will agree with

what he sees ahead of us in the near future, nor with what he thinks

we should do about it. But all will find this provocative and

sometimes provoking book a stimulus to profitable reflection.

David Brinton

Inside cover

TRAGEDY AND HOPE shows the years 1895-1950 as a period of

transition from the world dominated by Europe in the nineteenth

century to the world of three blocs in the twentieth century. With

clarity, perspective and cumulative impact, Professor Quigley examines

the nature of that transition through two world wars and a worldwide

economic depression. As an interpretative historian, he tries to show

each event in the full complexity of its historical context. The

result is a unique work, notable in several ways. It gives a picture

of the world in terms of the influence of different cultures and

outlooks upon each other; it shows, more completely than in any

similar work, the influence of science and technology on human life;

and it explains, with unprecedented clarity, how the intricate

financial and commercial patterns of the West prior to 1914 influenced

the development of today's world.

Carroll Quigley, professor of history at the Foreign Service

School of Georgetown University, formerly taught at Princeton and at

Harvard. He has done research in the archives of France, Italy and

England, and is the author of the widely praised "Evolution of

Civilizations." A member of the editorial board of the monthly Current

History, he is a frequent lecturer and consultant for public and semi-

public agencies. He is a member of the American Association for the

Advancement of Science, the American Anthropological Association, and

the American Economic Association, as well as various historical

associations. He has been lecturer on Russian history at the

Industrial College of the Armed Forces since 1951 and on Africa at the

Brookings Institution since 1961, and has lectured at many other

places including the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory, the Foreign

Service Institute of the State Department, and the Naval College at

Norfolk, Virginia. In 1958, he was a consultant to the Congressional

Select Committee which set up the present national space agency. He

was collaborator in history to the Smithsonian Institution after 1957,

in connection with the establishment of its new Museum of History and

Technology. In the summer of 1964 he went to the Navy Post-Graduate

School, Monterey, California, as a consultant to project Seabed, which

tried to visualize what American weapons systems would be like in

twelve years.

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION: WESTERN CIVILIZATION IN ITS WORLD

SETTING

Page 3

Each civilization is born in some inexplicable fashion and, after

a slow start, enters a period of vigorous expansion, increasing its

size and power, both internally and at the expense of its neighbors,

until gradually a crisis of organization appears... It becomes

stabilized and eventually stagnant. After a Golden Age of peace and

prosperity, internal crises again arise. At this point, there appears

for the first time, a moral and physical weakness.

Page 5

The passage from the Age of Expansion to the Age of Conflict is

the most complex, most interesting and most critical of all periods of

the life cycle of a civilization. It is marked by four chief

characteristics: it is a period:

a) of declining rate of expansion;

b) of growing tensions and class conflicts;

c) of increasingly frequent and violent imperialist wars;

d) of growing irrationality.

Page 8

When we consider the untold numbers of other societies, simpler

than civilizations, which Western Civilization has destroyed or is now

destroying, the full frightening power of Western Civilization becomes

obvious.

This shift from an Age of Conflict to an Age of Expansion is

marked by a resumption of the investment of capital and the

accumulation of capital on a large scale.

In the new Western civilization, a small number of men, equipped

and trained to fight, received dues and services from the overwhelming

majority of men who were expected to till the soil. From this

inequitable but effective defensive system emerged an inequitable

distribution of political power and, in turn, an inequitable

distribution of the social economic income. This, in time, resulted in

an accumulation of capital, which, by giving rise to demand for luxury

goods of remote origin, began to shift the whole economic emphasis of

the society from its earlier organization in self-sufficient agrarian

units to commercial interchange, economic specialization, and, a

bourgeois class.

Page 9

At the end of the first period of expansion of Western

Civilization covering the years 970-1270, the organization of society

was becoming a petrified collection of vested interests and entered

the Age of Conflict from 1270-1420.

In the new Age of Expansion, frequently called the period of

commercial capitalism from 1440 to 1680, the real impetus to economic

expansion came from efforts to obtain profits by the interchange of

goods, especially semi-luxury or luxury goods, over long distances. In

time, profits were sought by imposing restrictions on the production

or interchange of goods rather than by encouraging these activities.

Page 10

The social organization of this third Age of Expansion from 1770-

1929 following upon the second Age of Conflict of 1690-1815 might be

called "industrial capitalism." In the last of the nineteenth century,

it began to become a structure of vested interests to which we might

give the name "monopoly capitalism."

We shall undoubtedly get a Universal Empire in which the United

States will rule most of the Western Civilization. This will be

followed, as in other civilizations, by a period of decay and

ultimately, as the civilizations grows weaker, by invasions and the

total destruction of Western culture.

EUROPE'S SHIFT TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Page 24

The belief in the innate goodness of man had its roots in the

eighteenth century when it appeared to many that man was born good and

free but was everywhere distorted, corrupted, and enslaved by bad

institutions and conventions. As Rousseau said, "Man is born free yet

everywhere he is in chains."

Obviously, if man is is innately good and needs but to be freed

from social restrictions, he is capable of tremendous achievements in

this world of time, and does not need to postpone his hopes of

personal salvation into eternity.

Page 25

To the nineteenth century mind, evil, or sin, was a negative

conception. It merely indicated a lack or, at most, a distortion of

good. Any idea of sin or evil as a malignant force opposed to good,

and capable of existing by its own nature, was completely lacking in

the typical nineteenth century mind. The only evil was frustration and

the only sin, repression.

Just as the negative idea of the nature of evil flowed from the

belief that human nature was good, so the idea of liberalism flowed

from the belief that society was bad. For, if society was bad,the

state,which was the organized coercive power of society, was doubly

bad, and if man was good, he should be freed, above all, from the

coercive power of the state.

"No government in business" was commonly called "laissez faire"

and would have left society with little power beyond that required to

prevent the strong from physically oppressing the weak.

This strange, and unexamined, belief held that there really

existed, in the long run, a "community of interests" between the

members of a society. It maintained that, in the long run, what was

good for one was bad for all. It believed that there did exist a

possible social pattern in which each member would be secure, free and

prosperous.

Page 26

Capitalism was an economic system in which the motivating force

was the desire for private profit as determined in a price system with

the seeking of aggrandization of profits for each individual.

Nationalism served to bind persons of the same nationality

together into a tight, emotionally satisfying, unit. On the other

side, it served to divide persons of different nationalities into

antagonistic groups, often to the injury of their real mutual

political, economic or cultural advantages.

The event which destroyed the pretty dream world of 1919-1929

were the stock market crash, the world depression, the world financial

crisis.

Page 28

The twentieth century came to believe that human nature is, if

not innately bad, at least capable of being very evil. Left to

himself, man falls very easily to the level of the jungle or even

lower and this result can be prevent only by the coercive power of

society. Along with this change from good men and bad society to bad

men and good society has appeared a reaction from optimism to

pessimism. The horrors of Hitler's concentration camps and Stalin's

slave-labor units are chiefly responsible for this change.

CHAPTER II: WESTERN CIVILIZATION TO 1914

WESTERN CIVILIZATION TO 1914

Page 39

The financial capitalist sought profits from the manipulation of

claims on money; and the monopoly capitalist sought profits from

manipulation of the market to make the market price and the amount

sold such that his profits would be maximized.

Page 41

Karl Marx,about 1850, formed his ideas of an inevitable class

struggle in which the groups of owners would become fewer and fewer

and richer and richer while the mass of workers became poorer and

poorer but more and more numerous.

Mass production required less labor. But mass production required

mass consumption.

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