Tragedy and Hope
Quigley's 1,300-page magnum opus on twentieth-century power networks (1966)
Also known as: T&H, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, TRAGEDY AND HOPE
Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966) is Carroll Quigley's magnum opus — a 1,363-page survey of world history from roughly 1880 to 1964 organized as the story of how Western Civilization passed from its Age of Expansion into its Age of Conflict, and of the cluster of financial, governmental, and academic networks that managed that transition. It is the book that made Quigley posthumously famous for documenting the Anglo-American Establishment, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the international banker networks tied to J.P. Morgan and the Bank of England.
Scope
Tragedy and Hope is a history of the world from roughly the 1880s to 1964 — twenty chapters and an index, opening with the late expansion phase of Western Civilization and closing in the early 1960s with what Quigley reads as the end of the postwar era. Its narrative spine is the rise of an Atlantic system organized around the United States and the British Commonwealth, the two world wars that punctuated it, and the The Cold War that followed. But the book covers far more than a conventional political history: chapters are devoted to the Russian Empire and the Soviet experiment, the 'buffer fringe' of Eastern Europe and the Near East, finance and commercial policy 1897-1947, the structure of German history from Kaiser to Hitler, the policy of appeasement, the rise of nuclear weapons, and an extended concluding chapter on 'The Future in Perspective.' Quigley calls the work 'an interpretation of the present as well as the immediate past and the near future' — the explicit attempt of a Georgetown professor to write contemporary history at book length, against the advice of more cautious colleagues who held that 'what is contemporary is not history, and what is history is not contemporary' (T&H ix).
Structure
The book is built in twenty chapters that move roughly chronologically but are organized by theme rather than by year. Chapter I sets out the civilizational framework: cultural evolution, cultural diffusion within Western Civilization, and Europe's shift into the twentieth century. Chapters II-IV survey the pre-1914 world — Western Civilization to 1914, the Russian Empire to 1917, the 'Buffer Fringe.' Chapter V handles the First World War, Chapter VI the Versailles system and the return to 'normalcy,' Chapter VII finance and commercial policy 1897-1947. Chapters VIII-XII handle the interwar period: international socialism and the Soviet challenge, Germany 1913-1945, Britain and the background to appeasement, changing economic patterns, and the policy of appeasement 1931-1936. Chapters XIII-XV cover the disruption of Europe and the two halves of the Second World War. Chapters XVI-XIX cover the postwar world, the Cold War, and 'The New Era, 1957-1964.' Chapter XX, 'Tragedy and Hope: The Future in Perspective,' is the analytical capstone — the chapter that gives the book its title and the chapter to which the The Milner Group and 'international banker' material in Chapter VII is in service.
Method
Quigley's preface insists that the book's value 'rests on its broad perspective' (T&H ix). He combines conventional secondary sources with — on a smaller number of subjects — 'fairly intensive personal research (including research among manuscript materials).' He names four such subjects explicitly: 'the nature and techniques of financial capitalism, the economic structure of France under the Third Republic, the social history of the United States, and the membership and activities of the English Establishment' (T&H x). The English-Establishment claim is the one that has drawn the most attention since: Quigley was given limited access to The Milner Group papers for the parallel monograph The Anglo-American Establishment, and the same archival access underlies the famous passages about the Council on Foreign Relations and its banker patrons in chapters VII and XX. Methodologically the book also tries to look at events 'from as wide and as varied points of view as I am capable' — political, economic, military, technological, social, intellectual — and to use Quigley's civilizational framework from The Evolution of Civilizations as the underlying analytic.
The Politics of the Book — Reception and Suppression
Tragedy and Hope was published by The Macmillan Company in 1966 and went through a first printing — and then, in Quigley's own later account, became almost impossible to find. The plates were destroyed, second printings did not materialize on the schedule promised, and the book entered an underground life in conservative and conspiracy-oriented circles, especially after the John Birch Society's pamphlet None Dare Call It Conspiracy (1971) cited roughly 25 pages from chapters VII and XX as evidence of a 'power-mad clique that wants to control and rule the world.' Quigley spent the rest of his life trying to distance himself from this reading without disavowing the underlying research. As the Washingtonian profile The Professor Who Knew Too Much reports, Quigley believed the Birch reading 'blackened my reputation amongst scholarly historians who are going to say, oh, he's one of those right-wing nuts.' The book was reissued in a bowdlerized form in 1975 by GSG & Associates, and a complete edition has circulated through several small presses since; the original 1966 Macmillan first printing is now a collector's item.
Where to Begin
Most readers who attempt Tragedy and Hope cover-to-cover stall in the long chapters on interwar Europe. A more rewarding path: start with the Preface and Chapter I (the civilizational framing); then Chapter VII ('Finance, Commercial Policy, and Business Activity, 1897-1947') for the famous treatment of the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve, and the international banker network — the chapter most often cited in the secondary literature; then Chapter XX ('The Future in Perspective') for the explicit account of the Council on Foreign Relations and the 'Anglo-American Establishment' as Quigley names it; then loop back through the appeasement chapters (X-XII) which apply the network analysis to a specific policy episode. Readers who want the underlying theory first should read The Evolution of Civilizations before Tragedy and Hope rather than after; readers who want the Milner Group documentation in full should read The Anglo-American Establishment as the monograph companion.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 8 Quigley
TRAGEDY AND HOPE — A History of the World in Our Time — Carroll Quigley — First published in 1966 by The Macmillan Company, New York.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 13 Quigley
The expression 'contemporary history' is probably self-contradictory, because what is contemporary is not history, and what is history is not contemporary... having covered, in an earlier book, the whole of human history in a mere 271 pages, I now use more than 1300 pages for the events of a single lifetime.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 14 Quigley
More than twenty years have gone into the writing of this work... some portions are based on fairly intensive personal research (including research among manuscript materials). These portions include the following: the nature and techniques of financial capitalism, the economic structure of France under the Third Republic, the social history of the United States, and the membership and activities of the English Establishment.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 11 Quigley
I. INTRODUCTION: WESTERN CIVILIZATION IN ITS WORLD SETTING — II. WESTERN CIVILIZATION TO 1914 — ... — XX. TRAGEDY AND HOPE: THE FUTURE IN PERSPECTIVE 1197 — INDEX 1313.
- professor-who-knew-too-much · p. 1 Quigley
In 1966, Macmillan Company published the history of the world between 1895 and 1965 as seen through the cool, gray eyes of Carroll Quigley... The 1,348-page tome, called Tragedy and Hope, was a commanding work, 20 years in the writing, that added to Quigley's considerable national reputation as a historian.
- professor-who-knew-too-much · p. 3 Quigley
It blackened my reputation, Quigley said, amongst scholarly historians who are going to say, 'Oh, he's one of those right-wing nuts.'