Book Reviews
Collected book reviews by Quigley across his career
Also known as: Reviews, Collected Reviews
Book Reviews is a compilation of Carroll Quigley's published book reviews — typically of historical, sociological, and political works by his contemporaries, appearing in journals such as American Society of International Law publications, The Futurist, and various academic and policy outlets. Useful for tracking Quigley's running commentary on the historiography of his time and his judgments of fellow scholars, including substantive engagements with the Cuban Missile Crisis legal literature, futurology, and political-science methodology.
Scope
The collection spans several decades of Carroll Quigley's reviewing work, from short notices to extended essays. The opening review — Abram Chayes's The Cuban Missile Crisis: International Crises and the Role of Law (1974) — is characteristic of the collection's tone: a careful methodological autopsy of a senior insider's account, asking what the author claims, what the author actually shows, and what the gap reveals about the field. Other entries take up futurology (Victor C. Ferkiss's The Future of Technological Civilization), historiography of the Truman Doctrine (a review noting that 'the Truman Doctrine emerged from one incidental sentence buried in a late paragraph of a presidential speech which had been assembled from paragraphs submitted by a number of writers,' Book Reviews 73), and various works in social science and political analysis.
Structure
The compilation is organized as a sequence of independent reviews, each headed with the book under review (author, title, publisher, year, price). Reviews range from two to ten pages. They are not ordered chronologically in the extracted file; readers looking for a particular review should search by author. The 164 pages span roughly 1955-1976, with concentration in the late 1960s and 1970s when Quigley was at the height of his public visibility after Tragedy and Hope.
Method — Quigley as Reviewer
Quigley's reviews are characteristically sharp and methodological. He focuses less on whether the author's conclusions are correct than on whether the author's apparatus actually establishes them. The Chayes review is a case in point: Quigley grants that the Cuban Missile Crisis can be analyzed legally, but argues that Chayes 'smuggles in a legal element by blurring distinctions through verbal ambiguities' — using 'authorization' rather than 'rationalization,' calling a political blockade a legal 'quarantine.' The reviewer's job, on Quigley's practice, is to test whether the text under review does what it claims to do. The same technique is on display in his reviews of futurology, of foreign-policy memoirs, and of social-science methodology. The voice is recognizably the Quigley of The Evolution of Civilizations chapter 1 ('Scientific Method and the Social Sciences'): empirical, comparative, intolerant of fuzzy categories.
Key Themes
Several recurrent themes thread through the reviews: (1) Skepticism toward Cold War-era foreign-policy memoirs and apologetics — Quigley reads them for what their authors do not realize they are revealing. (2) Interest in futurology and 'world crisis' literature as symptoms of the late Western cognitive crisis Quigley diagnoses in Needed, A New Revolution in Thinking. (3) Critique of social-science methodology that mistakes vocabulary for analysis. (4) Repeated returns to the question of how decisions are actually made at the top of American institutions — a question Tragedy and Hope addresses at narrative length but that the reviews probe at the level of individual case. (5) Side-glances at the The Milner Group and Council on Foreign Relations when the book under review touches their members.
Reader's Guide
Useful as a citation source rather than as a single-sitting read. Specific reviews worth singling out: the Chayes review (the lead piece, on the legal apparatus of the Cuban Missile Crisis); the review of Halle's Cold War history that supplies the famous Truman-Doctrine quotation (Book Reviews 73); the Ferkiss review on technological civilization; the reviews on European historiography that complement The Evolution of Civilizations's methodological chapters. For readers tracking Quigley's evolving view of the post-1945 world, the reviews are a finer-grained record than the books are.
Cited in
- book-reviews · p. 1 Quigley
The Cuban Missile Crisis: International Crises and the Role of Law. By Abram Chayes. Published under the auspices of the American Society of International Law. New York: Oxford University Press. 1974.
- book-reviews · p. 1 Quigley
The process by which he reaches this conclusion is more revealing of the corruption of contemporary legal thinking than of the events of October 1962.
- book-reviews · p. 2 Quigley
Those who think this volume adds little to history will find it more valuable for evidence on the sociology of law at the highest levels of our society today.
- book-reviews · p. 73 Quigley
According to Halle, the 'Truman Doctrine' emerged from one incidental sentence buried in a late paragraph of a presidential speech which had been assembled from paragraphs submitted by a number of writers.