"Public Authority and the State in the Western Tradition: A Thousand Years of Growth, A.D. 976 - 1976"

by Carroll Quigley Ph.D.

I: "The State of Communities", A.D. 976 - 1576

by Carroll Quigley Ph.D.

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[Introduction by SFS Dean Peter F. Krogh]

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Dean Krogh, Ladies and Gentlemen, .... and the people who laughed at that.

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          For a decade from 1931 to 1941, my chief intellectual concern was with the growth of public authority and the development of the European state.  I dreamed at that time that, at some date in the future, perhaps thirty years in the future, I would write the definitive history of the growth of the European state.  But in 1941, I had to postpone indefinitely, and gradually abandoned, that project.  I no longer after 1941 had adequate libraries (and it would take a very extraordinary library for the purpose, of which there are only a couple in the United States, perhaps).  I was much too busy with my teaching -- which I enjoyed thoroughly. 

0:05:15

          But above all, I discovered that other historians were so specialized in their studies, and were so lacking in basic historical concepts (such as:  What does "state" mean?  In what way is "state" different from many other things, such as "public authority", "government", and so forth?) that they could not understand what I had to say.  And I had a bitter experience which revealed that, namely in my doctoral dissertation, which was on "The Public Administration of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy," which I wrote between 1936 and 1938.

0:06:11

          I will not go into the story, I will simply say there was only one man who read it, who had the slightest idea what it was all about.  And that was the great University of Florence historian, Salvemini, who at that time was a refugee in this country.  But most historians knew only one country.  They knew England, or they knew France, or they might have known Italy, they might have known Germany.  And most historians knew only certain periods    And, of course, the period I was writing about, the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, was technically from 1805 to 1814.  And anyone who knew that period, I discovered, really didn't know anything about, had, what the situation had been like before the Revolution, the French Revolution of 1789.

0:07:06

          So, instead of writing that, I got into what, I suppose, was really my much stronger activity:  the creation of the necessary conceptual paradigms, structures, frameworks, for understanding historical processes.  Because I discovered that people could not, historians could not even understand their own specialties, because of their lack of concepts.

0:07:44

          Let me give you two examples of this, one very contemporary, i.e., it's last last hundred years, which for me is contemporary.  There is an area of political activity, and for about a hundred years, and in all political argument and controversy to-day, there is a basic assumption that only two kinds of interests or entities operate in the area of political action, i.e., individuals and the government.  There have been numerous books published, whith such titles as Man vs. the State.  I know of two of those.  They both appeared, I think, in 1906.  We hear about Big Government as a threat to the individual, and so forth and so forth.  Conservatives now are telling us that we must curtail government, cut government spending, cut government powers, reduce government personnel, for the sake of making individuals more free.  Liberals, on the other hand, are still telling us, as they have for a long, long time, that, in order to make individuals free, we must destroy communities.  By communities, I mean villages, ghettoes in cities, ethnic groupings, religious groupings, anything which is segregated.  We must destroy them, so that all individuals would be, if possible, identical, including boys and girls. 

0:09:51

          But the area of political action, and I won't draw it on here, but just assume a circle of political action, in which you have:  government, individuals, acting in there.  But you also have at least two other groups, really three others:  voluntary associations, which I'll say no more about, corporations, and communities.  And if the Liberals destroy communities for the sake of the individual; and the Conservatives destroy state government for the sake of individuals, you're going to have an area of political action in which irresponsible and immensely powerful corporations are engaged upon, in opposition to individuals who are socially naked and in[deed] defenseless.

0:11:00

          And what we get in history is never what anyone is struggling for.  What we get in history is the resultant of diverse groups studying, struggling; and, if Liberals and Conservatives are struggling for these things, that is what the result will be.  That's one example of a lack of a paradigm.  I have given you the paradigm.

0:11:27

          The next thing is more personal.  A number of years ago, an old friend of mine -- we were colleagues at Princeton in the History Department in 1936 and '37 -- wrote a book, The Age of the Eighteenth Century, the Democratic Revolution.  Now, since neither of the revolutions that he talked about were democratic. Neither the one in France nor the one in the United States were not intended to be, and did not turn out to be, democratic revolutions, people have changed this and talk about "The Eighteenth Century Revolution", but they talk as if the Eighteenth Century Revolution in, let us say, the United States, and France and in other places, was the same kind of a revolution.

0:12:28

          Now, Bob Palmer is a very industrious person, with a very agile mind, and a ready verbalizer; but he does not know what he means by "revolution" or by "democratic."   And he's totally wrong if he believes the Eighteenth Century Revolution in the United States, or the English-speaking world in general, was the same as the Eighteenth Century Revolution in France.  In fact, they were the opposite.  The revolution in France was a struggle by a government which did not have sovereignty to obtain sovereignty, which to us would be the essential, identifying characteristic of any state.  Sovereignty.  The English-speaking revolution, through the Eighteenth Century, and in the United States, very clearly was an effort by states who had sovereignty to curtail it, divide it up, hamper it, by such things as federalism, separation of powers, electoral colleges, and so forth and so forth. 

0:13:53

          Now this is what I mean by the need for paradigms.  The basic entity to understand is the civilization as a whole.  And although I give you the date that I'm going to talk about, the last thousand years, Western Civilization, of which we are a part, has been around for a considerable time longer than that.  I think that we might say, perhaps, that Western Civilization began around 600.  It came out of the ruins and wreckage of the preceding Classical Civilization.  And Classical Civilization's dates might well be 1100 B.C., through a Dark Age of 1000 B.C., and it ended by about 550 A.D., and was followed by a Dark Age around 850 or 876 [A.D.], a hundred years before the outline begins this lecture.

0:15:05

          Out of the wreckage of Classical Civilization, which was [on] the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.  That was Classical Civilization.  And it was held together by the fact that the ease of water transportation on the Mediterranean was so superior to the difficulties of land transportation away from the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, that the city of Rome could bring its food from Egypt when it could not bring food from Lombardy in Italy.  And anywhere in the Mediterranean Sea, even at the height of the Roman Empire, if you went into the interior a few hundred miles, you had left Civilization.  That civilization perished and out of the wreckage came four other civilizations:  Islam, Byzantium, Russia and Western.  And I think we might say they all were, sort of, around from 600 onward, and certainly by 950 they were around.

0:16:29

          Now, another paradigm that I want to establish is a difference between two kinds of civilizations, which means a difference between two kinds of governments in these.  Asiatic civilizations, generally, do not attempt to deal with individuals or with the problems of individuals.  I have always called that Class B Civilization.  Class A Civilization is the kind of civilization that's Classical Antiquity, Classical Civilization, turned into, the kind that we are moving toward, and have been from the beginning, or the kind that was found in the first Chinese Civilization, which was from 1800 B.C. to 400 A.D., and is distinguished from the Chinese Civilization which was from 400 [A.D.} until about 1930.  We call that earlier one Sinic  -- s-i-n-i-c -- from the Latin word for China, which is Sinia.  In those Class A Civilizations, although the civilization starts by being an area of common culture made up of communities, in our type of civilization there is a long term trend to destroy and break down communities.

0:18:14

          Now, the way I would like to express it would be, and this is all on the back, blackboard, by saying that a civilization, all civilizations start out as aggregations of communities.  Those communities are generally of two types, either local (such as parishes, neighborhoods, villages, manors, or whatever else they may be) or kinship communities ([such as] families, clans, or so forth).  And at, when a civilization begins with communities such as this, and ours in 600, let us say, there is no state and there is no atomized individual.  

0:19:04

          Now, I won't go into details of this, but in such communities everything is different.  There are no written laws; it's all customary.  All controls, or most controls are what I call internalized, i.e., they're built into your hormones and your neurological responses.  And you do what is necessary to remain a member of the community; because, if you weren't a member of the community, you would be nothing.  You would not be a man.  And as you may know, if you have ever studied linguistics, many of the names which primitive people have for, even not-quite-so-primitive people, have for themselves is their word for man.  That is, unless you were a member of their community, you were not a man.

0:19:59

          Now, what happens in the course of a civilization, if it's an A like ours, take a thousand or more years (It took fifteen hundred years to Sinic Civilization and it took about a thousand years with Classical Antiquity) is that those communities are broken up, and gradually break down in smaller and smaller groups, and may end up simply as what we call nuclear families, a father and a mother.   And then you will discover they lose all of their discipline and control of their own children.  And the only holder of the control is the XXXX isolated individuals, and so forth.  And what happens is, you end up with a state which is not only sovereign, but totalitarian, and it is filled with isolated individuals who face a totalitarian state. 

0:21:07