This is a history book like no others. The author developed a detailed model of civilization life cycle analysis. According to him, civilizations pass through 7 predictable stages. Typically the 7th and last stage of one civilization is the first stage of another one that is succeeding the first dying civilization.

Using his model, he analyzes in detail the life cycle of several major civilizations, including: the Mesopotamian, Minoan, Classical, Russian, and Western.

Reading this book almost feels like uncovering a manuscript of secret knowledge. Although I have read quite a bit on this subject, other historians and authors rarely refer to Quigley. Yet, I feel that he is the giant within his field of historical analysis. And, that his model could serve well in better understanding current affairs.

This is a fascinating book and definitely worth the time and money. In the beginning of the book, Quigley makes the case for the introduction of the scientific method to the social sciences. As a matter of fact, the first 170 pages of the book lays the rationale behind and need for analytical tools to study history. He states that the alternative would be just the presentation of facts with no explanation for what is actually happening. One needs to know what is happening to be able to determine which facts to present, which requires analytical tools. The first 170 pages also deal with distinctions between societies and civilizations, as well as between parasitic and productive societies. He defines civilizations as producing societies with an instrument of expansion
He then states that civilizations proceed through the following stages:
1. Mixture - different societies come into contact and produce a society with an outlook different from any of the parts.
2. Gestation - the period of time between the mixing of the different societies and the expansion of the civilization.
3. Expansion - the surplus generated by the society is invested in activities that benefit the civilization. This can include an increase in knowledge, increase in area, technological advancements that increase efficiency, etc. Civilizations have different instruments of expansion. He calls a social organization or unit an instrument if it meets social needs.
4. Age of Conflict - The rate of increase using the social instrument slows down which brings interesting times. The instrument can be reformed or a new instrument consistent with the civilization's outlook can circumvent the old instrument. If reform is achieved, a new age of expansion begins. If the vested interests of the previous instument of expansion increasingly consume resources while serving no social needs, Quigley says that the instrument has then become an institution. Expansion can continue, but it is at the expense of neighbors, which leads to imperialist wars. When the vested interests have crushed all internal opposition, the next stage appears.
5. Universal Empire - typically a state or politcal unit on the peripheral of the civilization gains power over the whole civilization. The illusion of a golden age appears. The social organization remains stagnant.
6. Decay - lack of belief in the civilization's outlook or inability to meet needs of the people leads to people opting out of the system.
7. Invasion - external forces disrupt the civilization's social organization and it is unable or unwilling to defend itself. That spells the end of the civilization.
The civilizations that he analyzes are the following: Mesopotamian, Caananite and Minoan, Classical, and Western. His examples are excellent as is his analysis. I particularly liked his example of the the Pythagorian rationalists love for rationality went beyond their love for the truth, as a disciple of Pythagoras proved the irrationality of reality using the Pythagorean theorem. We have that lot to blame for discrediting the scientific method for about two thousand years!
A very enjoyable read!

This is a striking book. When one is past the formative years, it rarely happens that a single book can substantially change one's view of the world. For me the "Evolution of Civilizations" influenced my understanding of history more than anything I've read in many years.

The most important author's contribution to historical analysis is identification of the growth mechanism - "instrument of expansion", which can be quite different in different civilizations. It must include two necessary conditions - generation of surplus output, and its investment in productive economic activities. Later, this "instrument of expansion" becomes institutionalized, when surplus is spent on maintenance of status quo of ruling elites and various vested interests, and a society enters "Age of Conflict".

One of the distinctions, which Quigley attributes uniquely to the Western civilization, is that it passed through the "Age of Expansion" and reached the "Age of Conflict" three times in its history. First - during Middle Ages (he specifically puts dates 970-1270) with the feudalism as an instrument of expansion, which became institutionalized as chivalry and municipal mercantilism. The second period is the Renaissance era (1440-1630), with the commercial capitalism as instrument of expansion, which ended in the "Age of conflict" of the brutal Thirty Years War, absolutism, and state mercantilism of the emerging nation-states. The third "Age of Expansion" is associated with the Industrial Revolution, beginning in the second half of the 18-th century. It had the industrial capitalism as an instrument of expansion, which became institutionalized in the monopolistic capitalism and imperialism.

Quigley puts the end of the third "Age of Expansion" specifically in 1929, with the Wall Street crash and the beginning of the Great Depression. This is an americentric view; in fact the process of institutionalization and monopolistic excesses can be traced to late 19-th century, and by early 20-th century they were plainly evident. Western economies still expanded, but financial crashes, increasing in frequency and magnitude, underlined new fragility due to the exhaustion of the expansionary mechanism. In this sense the WWI was a typical "Age of Conflict" war, similar to the Hundred Years War and the Thirty Years War of the previous "Ages of Conflict" in Europe - not a clash of civilizations, or the conflict between the old and the new. Instead it was pointless, horrible slaughter underlying the conflict between vested interests of various elites and countries belonging to one civilization, and largely devoid of irreconcilable ideological differences.

Yet, contrary to the author, it is unlikely that the Western civilization is unique in this sense. The ascendance of every civilization includes several distinct stages. In fact it is more historically consistent to talk about the probability of the civilization's survival after a period of crisis, brought by institutionalization of the "instrument of expansion" and solidifying status quo. One can argue, for example, that the Islamic civilization experienced at least two distinct "ages of expansion" - the first centered at times of Abbasid Caliphate, the second - during the ascent of the Ottoman Empire, in 14-16th centuries.

In the case of Orthodox Christian (i.e. Russian) civilization Quigley puts the "Age of Expansion" in the interval 1500-1900, and then - a new one beginning with the Soviet era. In fact, just like Western civilization, the Orthodox one experienced three very distinct stages of expansion before 20th century. The first one was Kievan Rus, which flourished along the North-South trading routes between the Baltic and Black seas (hence the duality of the most important cities - Kiev in the south and Novgorod in the north), which entered the "Age of Conflict" near the end of 12-th century and was conquered by Mongol invasion. The next period of expansion probably began around 1350 (its first show of strength was the victory over Mongols in Kulikovo Pole in 1380) and was centered around Moscow. It lasted probably until institutionalization of the part of the boyar elites loyal to Ivan IV (Grozny), around 1560. Its instrument of expansion was oriental-style autocracy, based on the ideas of civil and military administration borrowed from China, Golden Horde and Islamic countries. The subsequent "Age of Conflict" included terrible repressions of later-stage Grozny period, "Time of Troubles" in early 17-th century, and early period of the Romanov dynasty. The next stage began with Peter the Great, and was associated with St. Petersburg period. Its instrument of expansion was European-style absolutism, with westernizing aristocratic elite and bonded peasantry. It reached its zenith around 1815 with the victory over Napoleon, and began to stagnate around 1830.

I would argue that Quiglean interpretation of the subsequent period included unsuccessful attempt at the new instrument of expansion (western-borrowed industrial capitalism) in late the 19-th and early 20-th century, which was aborted and instead a new civilization was born. This socialist (or atheistic) civilization rapidly expanded to about the third of the globe and exerted strong influence on the western world. Its "instrument of expansion" included Communist party as an organization responsible for investing economic surplus (which later became institutionalized in "nomenclatura") and social engineering, which allowed rapid industrialization and development of education and health care. It reached its zenith in victory over Hitler, launch of the Sputnik and Gagarin's flight. This civilization entered its first "Age of Conflict" around 1965, apparent in progressing economic stagnation, intra-civilizational tensions with China (including a small war in 1969), one of the first manifestations of its crisis was defeat in the Moon landing race. Soviet regime collapsed around 1990, but the civilization did not, which is evident in strong economic performance in China throughout 90-s (which can be viewed as Quiglean "geographic circumvention") and the fact that Russia, despite some religious revival, remained overwhelmingly secular and didn't revert to many previous monarchic and religious traditions. After a period of painful reforms it will have the potential for the new "Age of Expansion", probably based on some western and some of its own ideas.

"Tragedy and Hope" is a sprawling history of the world during approximately the period 1890-1960. If one is looking for the details of some half-forgotten international incident during this period, he is likely to find them somewhere in this book. Reading "Tragedy and Hope" is a good refresher course for anyone wishing to understand twentieth-century history, especially the two World Wars, the events leading up to them, and their consequences. Unfortunately the index is sketchy and not always helpful in this process. Furthermore, footnotes and a bibliography are entirely lacking. Although the author, Carroll Quigley, was an eminent academic, this is not an academic textbook, and it is hard to tell just what was its intended audience.

The archetype of "Tragedy and Hope" is the work of Procopius, a courtier in the time of the Byzantine emperor Justinian, whose official history, the " De Aedificiis," celebrated the accomplishments of his monarch - but who supplemented it with a secret history, the "Anecdota," in which he spilled the dirt on the emperor and his wife Theodora. Much of the interest in Quigley's book centers around his dirt-spilling account of the machinations of international bankers and of the organizations they formed to exert influence behind-the-scenes on political and diplomatic activity, such as the Round Table, the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the Council on Foreign Relations. While his discussion of these matters occupies a fairly small number of the book's 1300-odd pages, it has drawn the attention of so-called "conspiracy theorists," mostly on the political right (e.g. the John Birch Society) but also some on the left, such as the sociologist G. William Domhoff, who pursue much the same theme - that the domestic and international policy of the United States (and other countries) are manipulated by a "power élite" in a way that makes their supposed democracy largely a sham.

Quigley falls neither into the right- or left-wing camps, and was in fact a liberal internationalist who held views essentially sympathetic to those of the supposed conspirators. He did, however, object to the secretiveness with which they pursued their goals. His book went out of print after its first run despite popular demand. He attributed this to an attempt to suppress it by the forces he "exposed," which have been paranoia on his part, or evidence of an easily bruised academic ego - but certainly encouraged the conspiratorial view among others. Bill Clinton's public acknowledgment of Carroll Quigley as his mentor touched off renewed conspiratorial theorizing.

A broad view of human societies can do nothing but confirm the truth that élites are and have always been an inevitable feature of them all. That there has been an élite in western Europe and North America, made up of a mixture of financiers, industrialists, high-ranking government officials, and the social upper crust; and that this élite has exerted an influence disproportionate to its numbers, should hardly come as a surprise. If all these people were to have been eliminated in one fell swoop, they would simply have been replaced by another élite, differently constituted and differently motivated. What Quigley makes clear is that the élite he describes acted with a curious blend of altruism, self-interest, and often, naïveté. Their best-laid plans many times were based on misinformation and came disastrously a-cropper. The impression one gets is more often one of bumbling rather than of sinister genius.

Two points emerge from Quigley's presentation of this history. First is that he believes in the rule of experts - that people with proper knowledge and understanding (like his) would not have committed the errors he describes. Academics and professionally-trained managers are to be preferred to members of the big business haute-bourgeoisie and the decaying landed aristocracy. This book first appeared in the era of "the best and the brightest," and Quigley shows himself to be a creature of its zeitgeist. How ironic that managerial bureaucrats of the Robert McNamara type proceeded to steer us into the Vietnam quagmire and "stagflation"!

Second, one of Quigley's repeated strictures on the old Eastern establishment is that it was "Anglophile." It is important to understand what this meant at the time the establishment described by Quigley was in its ascendancy. Then the sun never set on the British empire, and London was the world's financial center. New York was the American satellite of that sun, and exerted a degree of financial dominance over the rest of the United States we have not experienced in many years. There was, in the great American heartland, a strong suspicion of this arrangement, as expressed by such conservative figures as Sen. Robert Taft and Col. Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. This view is most superfically and inadequately dismissed as "isolationism." Much of the history Quigley recounts suggests that the United States entered World War I as a result of the Anglophilia of the Eastern establishment, and the conclusion to which that war came as a consequence of American intervention set the stage for World War II. Although this in many ways confirms the suspicions of the "isolationists," Quigley cannot bring himself to say anything good about such unspeakable Midwestern yokels and hayseeds. Yet he does not approve of the "Anglophilia" of the Eastern establishment.

How much of Quigley's point of view was determined not by his academic studies but by something much closer to the heart - his identity as an Irish Catholic? From his office on the Georgetown campus he looked to the west and saw hordes of unwashed Methodists and Baptists, disgusting to his Roman Catholic sensibilities; Norman Rockwell America, but with Klan robes in its closet. Looking to his east he saw the hated Sassenach, hereditary enemy of the Irish, allied to an "Anglophile" and Protestant - mainly Episcopalian - eastern-seaboard American establishment that aped English manners and tastes. He could not stomach either group, and so he wrote this book.

This book is huge, 1310 pages, but worth the time and effort to read it. One will get a glimpse into the higher circles of power, a deeper understanding of world finance and a completely different view of British, German and Russian cultures as they affected world events in the 20th century than one usually gets elsewhere. Quigley was said to be Bill Clinton's mentor, but much of what Quigley describes was probably known by Clinton many years before. One of the best works on modern history I have yet read.

You must read this book because in its pages are the words of President Clinton's Mentor, who Clinton mentioned in his inauguration NO LESS. Quigley is regarded as the last great Macro historian, a child prodigy who graduated from Harvard at a very earlier age. Quigley's book was heavily suppressed to the point that demand for it grew rapidly in the early 80s. Quigley himself became distraught at the suppression of this great book as expressed in some of his writings. The powers that attempted to suppress it actually created greater demand for it, so now it is available, realizing that trying to suppress it actually caused more people to read it.