Quigley Lectures

Compiled Georgetown lecture material, including the 1976 Oscar Iden Lectures

Also known as: Lectures, The Oscar Iden Lectures, Public Authority and the State in the Western Tradition

Quigley Lectures is a compilation of Carroll Quigley's public-lecture material from his Georgetown teaching career, anchored by the three Oscar Iden Lectures of 1976: 'Public Authority and the State in the Western Tradition: A Thousand Years of Growth, A.D. 976-1976.' The lectures cover the historical arc of Western Civilization as a political-administrative project — the rise of the state from medieval community to modern individual — and reads as a spoken-word complement to The Evolution of Civilizations.

Scope

The compilation's centerpiece is the three Oscar Iden Lectures delivered at Georgetown in 1976 under the title 'Public Authority and the State in the Western Tradition: A Thousand Years of Growth, A.D. 976-1976.' Lecture I ('The State of Communities,' 976-1576) covers the medieval and Renaissance era; Lecture II ('The State of Estates,' 1576-1776) covers the early modern absolutist and constitutional period; Lecture III ('The State of Individuals,' 1776-1976) covers the modern era from the eighteenth-century revolutions to the present. Quigley opens by recounting his abandoned 1930s ambition to write 'the definitive history of the growth of public authority and the development of the European state' — the unwritten book that his doctoral thesis was meant to seed (Quigley Lectures 1). The lectures are the closest he came to that book.

Structure

Three lectures with an introduction by Dean Peter F. Krogh. Lecture I (The State of Communities, A.D. 976-1576) treats the medieval polity as a layered system of communities (manor, village, guild, town, monastery, kingdom) in which the central authority is one actor among several. Lecture II (The State of Estates, A.D. 1576-1776) treats the early-modern transition in which the state begins to claim sovereignty over and against the medieval estates, culminating in the absolutist and then constitutional formations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Lecture III (The State of Individuals, A.D. 1776-1976) treats the modern era — the dissolution of the intermediate communities, the rise of the individual-state opposition, and the resulting crisis when the state confronts a society of atomized individuals and giant corporations with no intermediate associations to mediate between them. The compilation also includes shorter lecture-derived material on related themes.

Method — Quigley as Lecturer

The Oscar Iden Lectures are unusually candid about Quigley's intellectual biography: he opens by complaining that 'for the last century, discussion of political actions, and especially the controversies arising out of such actions, have been carried on in terms of only two actors, the government and the individual,' whereas in fact 'the area of political action in our society is a circle in which at least four actors may intervene: the government, individuals, communities, and voluntary associations, especially corporations' (Quigley Lectures 2). The lectures are also where Quigley most explicitly stages his disagreement with the over-specialization of mid-twentieth-century historiography — his complaint that his doctoral thesis was rejected because 'over-specialized experts who read the version revised for publication persisted in rejecting the aspects of the book in which they were not specialists' (Quigley Lectures 2). Reading the lectures alongside The Evolution of Civilizations gives a clear picture of how Quigley adapted the same analytical machinery for a popular audience.

Key Arguments

The lecture cycle argues that Western Civilization's political genius has been its ability to maintain a distinction between state and society, between public authority and the layered network of intermediate communities through which most actual social life is conducted. The medieval polity assumed that distinction; the early-modern state began to dissolve it through sovereignty claims; the modern era has now reduced the citizen to an isolated individual confronting both a hypertrophied state and unaccountable corporations, with the intermediate communities — town, parish, guild, family — emptied out. On this reading, the contemporary crisis is not primarily economic or military but structural: a civilization that has lost the layered intermediate associations on which its earlier expansion depended. The diagnosis parallels The Evolution of Civilizations's claim that the West entered an Age of Conflict around 1900 because its instrument of expansion (monopoly capitalism) had hardened into an institution.

Reader's Guide

The lectures are short, accessible, and a recommended entry point for readers who find the bulk of Tragedy and Hope or the methodological density of The Evolution of Civilizations forbidding. Begin with Lecture I to see how Quigley reconstructs medieval political life; read Lecture III for his diagnosis of the present; read Lecture II second as the bridge. Pair with the relevant chapters of The Evolution of Civilizations (chs. 4-5 on historical analysis and the seven stages) for the underlying theory. The lectures are also the best place to encounter Quigley's distinctive lecturing voice — by all accounts the most memorable of his classroom skills.

Cited in

quigley-lectures · p. 1 Quigley 1976-10-13
Public Authority and the State in the Western Tradition: A Thousand Years of Growth, A.D. 976-1976 — by Carroll Quigley Ph.D. — Introduction by Peter F. Krogh — I: 'The State of Communities,' A.D. 976-1576; II: 'The State of Estates,' A.D. 1576-1776; III: 'The State of Individuals,' A.D. 1776-1976.
quigley-lectures · p. 1 Quigley 1976-10-13
For a decade after 1931, my chief intellectual concern was the growth of the European state in the Old Regime, before 1789. I dreamed that at some date in the future, perhaps thirty years in the future, I would write the definitive history of the growth of public authority and the development of the European state.
quigley-lectures · p. 2 Quigley 1976-10-13
The area of political action in our society is a circle in which at least four actors may intervene: the government, individuals, communities, and voluntary associations, especially corporations. Yet, for the last century, discussion of political actions... have been carried on in terms of only two actors, the government and the individual.
quigley-lectures · p. 2 Quigley 1976-10-13
My doctoral dissertation on the Public Administration of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy (Harvard, 1938) was never published because over-specialized experts who read the version revised for publication persisted in rejecting the aspects of the book in which they were not specialists.