Study The Evolution Of Civilizations: An Introduction To Historical Analysis By Carroll Quigley Accessible As EPub

was an incredible book, I can't wait to read Quigley's other books, I would advise anyone to read any of his books, Quigley gives great information on how Civilizations form and how they fall, He goes into how institutions are formed and why they cease to serve their original purpose, He explains historical analysis. It isn't just knowledge, but understanding what it means, Although, I would urge that if you are not good at analysis, you might want to get some extra understand about Quigley and his perspective.
This book, by those who arrived here from Tragedy and Hope, and who know who Quigley is and his signifience, should regard this book as his methodology of studying and presenting history, and I am not saying that this is not a history book , many parts from Tragedy and Hope become much more clear and are treated in detail here as well.

But what Quigley dose here is an attempt to transform history into a social science as economy is today, This hase nothing to do with Marxist scientific interpretation of history ! That being evident from the author who points out constantly that his method is subjective and reality is much more complex.

Hisstages are not to be seen as dogmatig phases, but rather as general tendencies, just like in economics, he argues that what he offers is a framework for the student of history to increase understanding out of knowledge.
To make more sense out of the events of history, to consider causes and forces that lead to specific events,
Now this book was written some time ago, The author mackes some mistakes, wich I ascribe to the curent level of knowlwdge and data of that period and a little ti his bias.
Like the ice ages and the movements of people acourding to the four ice ages, One big mistake is to consider the soviet union part of the civilization he calls orthodox, . . I agree with the distiction betwean weastern and eastern civilizations, but I would argue that they are in a way the closest and most interconected.
Instruments of expansion timegt selfserving institution The books I consulted told me that a quartz crystal should be a hexagonal prism with a regular hexagonal pyramid at the 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

Later, when I studied science in school and college, I found that most scientific "laws" were of this idealized character.


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,

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, length ens the circle of surrounding darkness.


two rules must be followed: a the hypothesis must explain all the observations and b the hypothesis must be the simplest one that will explain them.


The belief that the world is a flat surface did not prevent men from moving about on its surface successfully,

on Monday I drink whiskey and water and get drunk on Tuesday I drink gin and water and get drunk on Wednesday I drink vodka and water and get drunk on Thursday I think about this and decide that water makes me drunk, since this is the only common action I did every day.
This perversion of scientific method is the exact opposite of a scientific experiment, In scientific method we establish all conditions the same except one, and attribute causation to the one factor that is different,

a rock, dropped from a high window, will fall even if everyone in the world expected it to rise or wanted it to rise.


a material needs, such as food, clothing, shelter
b sex
c gregarious needs, such as companionship and
d psychic needs, such as a world outlook, psychological security, or the desire to know the "meaning" of things.
recommended: Unpacking the MetaCrisis, QampA with Jordan Hall YouTubesitelink youtube. com/watchvcmQT The Evolution of Civilizations is a book written by Carroll Quigley, a historian and philosopher, The book is an analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations throughout history, with a particular focus on the Western world, Quigley argues that civilizations follow a predictable pattern of development, and that they are characterized by certain distinct phases, including the genesis, growth, climax, and disintegration phases.
He contends that the Western world is currently in the disintegration phase, and that it is facing a number of challenges, including the rise of globalism and the decline of national identities.
Despite this, Quigley believes that the Western world has the potential to create a new synthesis and to continue to play a leading role in global affairs.


GPT Views societal changes based on the human potentialities of Military, political, economic, social, religious, and intellectual perspectives, Man has an innate drive to achieve his potentialities that drives civilations forward through the continuum based evolutionary process of what Quigley calls cultural morphology.
Quigley argues that all Societies go through evolutionary steps from birth through decline and failure and then examines many of the greatest societies i, Our history through this framework, This work by Quigley may be overyears old but his insights are very eye opening to the global trends the world economies and people are going through today.
Is the US on the inevitable decline due to the institutionalization of the instrument of expansion leading to a unmotivated populous Quigley said all Civilizations must inevitably go through decline and fall but can anything be done to prolong the fall It would have been interesting to get his view on how the internet has impacted and morphed society through all of the potentialities and if the connected world will alter the trajectory of failure the US must inevitably follow.
His idea that struck me he strongest was that none of us holds the full truth but that we evolve through thought , investigation, and social interaction at grappling with ideas to attain a closer approximation of the truth through a continually evolving process.

Sorry about the low rating, For the time it was written I should of been more generous but not to be boring:

I prefer stories that show the human condition as a result of events.
This work is very wide in scope and narrow at the same time, We know the corpulent rich do terrible things but lets go a little deeper into the problems they cause,

These groups we know have little to do with the big innovations of our times but do have great influence over the control of those innovations.


Maybe we need to look into lower echelons and the poverty stricken to make a way to manage by objectives from the bottom to the top.
I thing the coined phrase MBOBT is a scary notion for the rich and powerful, While the work cites problems it did little else,

This book was brilliant in many different ways, Its notions of why societies succeed and fail rings very true, As does its criticisms of the current analysis of the study of history, The brilliance of this book is self evident and I highly recommend you read it, however, there are several issues with the author's analysis, His analysis of Classical Civilization is especially perceptive,

He views all civilizational development as self contained as opposed to viewing it as based upon military and political events, He views the Carthaginian, Aztec and Inca civilizations as destroyed by their own decadence rather than foreigners with much better militaries seizing power, killing their ruling classes and settling large numbers of foreigners in, which will kill even a healthy civilization.


He ignores political effects inside the civilizations, He views the West's success as dependent upon Christianity and its philosophic ideals rather than the permanent state of military competition between the European states and between European classes, which seems to be the far more likely alternative.
He tries far too hard to fit Europe into his theory, creating artificial boundaries between eras of growth and decay, I understand viewing theth century as a period of decay, but theth! Theth century was an era of enormous technological, intellectual and social progress.
Also, theth century was equally an era of immense progress in many fields rather than an era of decay in anything except religion, art and philosophy.


His primary examples are from ancient history, in which our records are so poor that people can express whatever sentiment they want onto them.
When Enlightenment philosophers wanted to say government was bad, they made obscure tribal peoples without government into saints, while ignoring they all actually had the vices of civilization like slavery, sexism, war and genocide.
Similar processes took place when the postWWarchaeologists tried to claim the Mayans or Sumerians were peaceful intellectual societies, what they wanted, only to discover literal genocide lists and rooms filled with corpses.
Quiggley uses predominantly obscure civilizations like the Canaanites, Minoans and Sumerians, of which we know practically nothing so he can gerrymander the evidence into fitting his theory.
I see no evidence of social decline in the either Canaanite or Minoan society before they were conquered by alien societies,

Worst of all, this theory in no way accounts for Asian civilizations like China and India that have survived stably and with relatively few changes for,years.
These have seen nothing like the cycles Quiggley describes and he gives this no explanation,

I think Quiggley's theory has application in theory but he overemphasizes its actual descriptive ability, I think it is overly multistepped, rather than like a choose your own adventure, with multiple choices that allow different results, If Roman Civilization had been able to reform in Caesar's time, which seems plausible, it would break Quiggley's model,


Having read, "Tragedy and Hope," by the same author I had high expectations and indeed they were met, Anyone with a passing interest in wanting a new perspective regarding the world in which we live and our history needs to give this author a chance.
Not an easy read in that he makes you stop and think, so you will be a better informed person as a result, His audience was high functioning so the author challenges the reader with ideas and insights in commensurate fashion, Quigley is the favorite author of numerous past US Presidents for good reason, His revelations and way of analyzing our world lends itself to those wanting a deeper insight into how things work in the context of nations and history.
William Carroll Quigleywas professor of history at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, where he taught an influential course, "The Development of Civilization" summarized in his book The Evolution of Civilizations.


Quigley proposed an original and welldefined model of civilizations and the distinct stages through which they evolve,

In this model, a civilization is "a producing society that has writing, city life, and an economic instrument of expansion",

It evolves through seven stages, calledmixturegestationexpansionage of conflictuniversal empiredecay, anddestruction usually by outside invaders,

Quigley enumerates and names sixteen civilizations in history that fit this model, more or less, Samuel P. Huntington drew upon Quigley's concepts in his book The Clash of Civilizations and Remaking of World Order, The copy I own of this is areprint, but I read most of the materials from earlier editions while I was taking a class with Quigley innot his legendary course on the ”Evolution of Civilizations” but a related course on "Science, Christianity, and the Western Intellectual Tradition".
This book, along with Quigley's other work on theth century, was my first exposure to someone presenting a broad macroscopic and interpretive view of history.
In this book, the focal point is civilizations about a broad a unit as you can get, What is most memorable to me was the introduction of a framework for analyzing history, Quigley's focuses on six sometimes seven categories into which most of the dynamics of history can be fit and analyzed military, political, economic, social, religious, and intellectual.
Psychological was also included in some versions, Showing the value of frameworks for structuring one's thinking was a very powerful gift to give to young inquisitive undergraduates, Quigley sometimes foster believers or adherents not what he would have wanted, I never felt that way, Some of his generalizations are questionable to me and I have spent a good part of my subsequent education figuring out what was reasonable and what was unreaasonable in what he taught us.
That is not a bad legacy to leave to students,

Quigley should have received a broader audience and he did in part once one of his former students, Bill Clinton, became POTUS, However, Quigley also got picked up by some conservative advocacy groups, which I think hurt his reputation among mainstream historians, This book is a must read and yet is a difficult read, Carroll Quigley was undoubtedly a brilliant historian, He sets out a compelling analysis of all major civilizations by showing that each passes through seven identifiable stages:, Mixture. Gestation. Expansion. Age of conflict. Universal Empire. Decay. Invasion. Like Darwinism itself, the idea that all civilizations evolve and die is nihilistic, However, this book is a great example of an idea that Quigley reinforces in his conclusion: there is a big difference between knowledge which simply requires memory and time and understanding.
This book attempts to provide the reader with an understanding of the history of civilizations which is an order of the tallest degree, .