Mexican National Character and Circum-Mediterranean Personality Structure
Quigley essay extending his Pakistani-Peruvian Axis framework to Mexican personality structure
Also known as: Mexican National Character
A short comparative essay in which Carroll Quigley responds to Martin Needler's 'Politics and National Character: the Case of Mexico' (1971) by extending the personality-structure analysis to a much broader cultural area he calls the 'Pakistani-Peruvian Axis' — a band of Circum-Mediterranean and Latin American societies whose personality traits cluster around restricted kinship loyalty, patriarchal honor culture, and weak public-spirited association. The piece is one of the clearest short statements of Quigley's culture-and-personality work.
Scope
Six pages responding to a single article (Needler 1971) on Mexican political culture. Quigley's correction: 'Mexico is a peripheral and very distinctive example of the Latin American cultural area which is itself a peripheral and somewhat distinctive example of the Mediterranean cultural area' (Mexican National Character 1). Needler attributes 'Mexican national character' to 'a combination of the Indian's fatalism and the proud self-assertion of the Spaniard'; Quigley argues the underlying pattern is much wider, drawing in 'south Italian personality' (Silverman), Spanish village ethnography (Pitt-Rivers, Kenny), Greek (Campbell, Kavadias, Kanelli), and Near Eastern and North African studies. The unifying frame is what Quigley elsewhere calls the 'Pakistani-Peruvian Axis' (developed in Tragedy and Hope pp. 1112-1122 and reprinted 1968:452-463).
Structure
A short, single-section essay. Quigley opens by stating Needler's claim and his correction. He then enumerates the personality traits at issue — 'low self-esteem, fatalism, defeatism, distrust of all persons outside a narrow kin group, pessimism, preoccupation with death, self-assertion, and machismo' — and the cultural correlates that should accompany them — low respect for agricultural work, urban-bias and rural neglect, honor as a life aim, distinctive dietary patterns (proteins and vegetables mixed in a starch nest). He then identifies two organizing axes: (1) restriction of trust and loyalty to the kinship group, with consequent inability to extend it to wider associations; and (2) the combination of patriarchal social tendencies with female inferiority. He closes by situating his analysis in the wider 'culture-and-personality' literature.
Method — The Pakistani-Peruvian Axis
The essay is a compact illustration of Quigley's civilizational comparative method applied to a culture-and-personality question. The 'Pakistani-Peruvian Axis' is Quigley's name for a wide cultural band running from South Asia through the Near East, the Mediterranean, North Africa, and across the Atlantic into Iberia and Latin America. The claim is not racial or biological; it is that a recurring cluster of personality traits and social institutions has been transmitted along this band by a long history of pastoralist-conquest, urbanization, and Mediterranean commerce. Quigley's evidence is the ethnographic literature of the 1950s-60s: Banfield on southern Italy, Pitt-Rivers and Kenny on Spain, Campbell on Greece, plus the Latin Americanist literature on Mexico, the Andes, and the Caribbean. The piece reads as a sequel to the Tragedy and Hope passages on the 'two great cultural axes' and as a methodological complement to The Evolution of Civilizations's chapters on the two-level civilizational model.
Significance
The essay is small but methodologically distinctive. Quigley is rarely cited as a culture-and-personality theorist, but the Pakistani-Peruvian Axis framework is a real and durable hypothesis that combines macro-historical claims (about the long-distance transmission of cultural patterns) with micro-level evidence (village ethnography). For readers interested in the methodological range of Quigley's project — from the high-political analysis of the Anglo-American Establishment down to the village-level analysis of honor and kinship — the essay is a useful corrective to the impression, given by Tragedy and Hope alone, that Quigley operates only at the level of states and elites.
Cited in
- mexican-national-character · p. 1 Quigley
Mexican National Character and Circum-Mediterranean Personality Structure — CARROLL QUIGLEY, Georgetown University.
- mexican-national-character · p. 1 Quigley
Mexico is a peripheral and very distinctive example of the Latin American cultural area which is itself a peripheral and somewhat distinctive example of the Mediterranean cultural area. Some time ago I identified the whole cultural area and the personality structure it tended to produce as aspects of 'the Pakistani-Peruvian Axis'.
- mexican-national-character · p. 1 Quigley
This Mediterranean personality type is marked by various traits mentioned by Needler: low self-esteem, fatalism, defeatism, distrust of all persons outside a narrow kin group, pessimism, preoccupation with death, self-assertion, and machismo.
- mexican-national-character · p. 2 Quigley
The restriction of personal trust and loyalty within the kinship group (usually the extended or nuclear family) with a consequent inability to offer loyalty, trust, or personal identification to residential groups (villages, neighborhoods, parishes), voluntary associations, religious beliefs, or the secular state.