Needed, A New Revolution in Thinking
Late-career essay calling for a cognitive shift to match the twentieth-century crisis
Also known as: A New Revolution in Thinking, Needed: A Revolution in Thinking
A short 1968 essay in which Carroll Quigley argues that the disorders of the twentieth century reflect a crisis in cognitive systems — a mismatch between inherited rationalist categories and the actual complexity of social life — and calls for a new way of thinking adequate to the new conditions. The piece is the clearest short statement of Quigley's cognitive-systems framework and of the worry, returned to throughout his late work, that the West may be losing the epistemological discipline that has supported its repeated reform.
Scope
Six pages. Quigley opens with the bedrock observation that 'every event, every human experience, is unique. It occurs at a certain place, at a certain moment, to persons at a specific age and condition' — and that humans deal with this stream of unique events both by action and by classification. The act of classification, naming, and valuing produces what Quigley calls a 'cognitive system' — 'the most important thing we can know about any society and the most difficult to learn' (Needed New Revolution 1). The essay then argues that contemporary Western cognitive categories — inherited from the Enlightenment and Newtonian science — no longer match the social reality they are used to interpret, and that this mismatch is the deepest cause of the twentieth-century crisis.
Structure
A short continuous essay without formal section breaks. Quigley moves through (1) the uniqueness of events and the necessity of classification; (2) the definition of 'cognitive systems' as society-wide schemes of categories and values; (3) the experience of 'cultural shock' as the path to cognitive sophistication; (4) the diagnosis of contemporary cognitive crisis — the experience of a single society whose own categories no longer fit its experience; (5) the prescription: a deliberate, conscious, comparative inspection of one's own cognitive system as the precondition for revising it. The piece closes by linking the cognitive question to the political question — the inability of mid-twentieth-century institutions to cope with their problems is, on Quigley's reading, downstream of a cognitive failure.
Method — Cognitive Systems as Analytical Frame
The essay is the most accessible statement of Quigley's cognitive-systems theory — a framework he developed across his late career, partly in dialogue with anthropological work on culture-and-personality, partly in extension of his own civilizational analysis. The idea is that every society maintains an organized system of categories — what counts as 'the same as,' 'different from,' 'good,' 'bad,' 'real,' 'unreal' — and that this system is normally invisible to its bearers ('it is not easy even to take the first step to recognize that we ourselves have a cognitive system,' Needed New Revolution 1). The system is most easily seen when it fails: in cross-cultural friction, or in periods of rapid internal change when 'the old ways of looking at actuality handicap rather than help in dealing with the society's problems' (Needed New Revolution 2). Quigley's claim is that the late-twentieth-century West is in just such a period.
Key Argument
The essay's positive proposal — articulated more fully in the unwritten book on Changing Cognitive Systems that Quigley planned but did not finish — is that the West needs a cognitive system organized around several features: holism rather than reductive specialization; ecological and systems thinking; non-determinism; recognition of multiple causes and feedback loops; humility about the limits of any single categorical scheme. This proposal is the methodological complement to the political diagnosis in Tragedy and Hope and the civilizational diagnosis in The Evolution of Civilizations: the West's late-twentieth-century crisis cannot be solved by better policies inside the existing cognitive frame because the existing frame is itself part of the problem. The piece sits next to Quigley's book reviews of futurology (collected in Book Reviews) as part of a coherent late-career argument for cognitive renewal.
Reception and Significance
Needed, A New Revolution in Thinking is one of the more frequently cited of Quigley's short pieces, partly because it states in plain language what The Evolution of Civilizations states more technically and Tragedy and Hope states only by implication. For readers approaching Quigley's work for the first time, the essay is a recommended early read: it is short, lucid, and exposes the late-Quigley diagnosis of Western Civilization without requiring the reader to first absorb the seven-stage model or the Anglo-American Establishment apparatus.
Cited in
- needed-new-revolution-thinking · p. 1 Quigley 1968-01-01
Needed: A Revolution in Thinking — By CARROLL QUIGLEY, Professor of History, Georgetown University, Washington, DC. (Originally published in 1968).
- needed-new-revolution-thinking · p. 1 Quigley 1968-01-01
Every event, every human experience, is unique. It occurs at a certain place, at a certain moment, to persons at a specific age and condition and in an arrangement of all these which will never be repeated.
- needed-new-revolution-thinking · p. 1 Quigley 1968-01-01
Each society has such a system of categories and of valuations of categories. This is known as the society's 'cognitive system.' It is the most important thing we can know about any society and the most difficult to learn.
- needed-new-revolution-thinking · p. 2 Quigley 1968-01-01
Even within a single society or group, cognitive sophistication is necessary whenever the experiences of that society are changing so rapidly that the old ways of looking at actuality handicap rather than help in dealing with the society's problems.