The Weapons Systems and Political Stability Theory

Statement of the theory

Quigley spent the last twelve years of his life on a single book-length manuscript, Weapons Systems and Political Stability: A History, left unfinished at his death in January 1977 and edited for posthumous publication by Harry J. Hogan, Carmen Brissette-Grayson, and Dean Peter Krogh of Georgetown's School of Foreign Service (WS 7-9). The book opens with an analytical introduction — "The Human Condition and Security," "Security and Power," "The Elements of Power," "The General Pattern of Weapons History" — before turning to a chronological history of weapons from prehistory to the European Dark Ages. Across this material runs a single argument: "Throughout history, society's decisions regarding its weapons systems have been decisive in shaping human social, economic and political decisions" (WS 7). Power, in Quigley's analysis, decomposes into three elements — "(1) force; (2) wealth; and (3) persuasion" (WS 33) — of which force is "the most fundamental (and becoming more so) in our society" (WS 33). The weapons system of an age is the material organization of force, and as that material organization shifts, the political forms it can sustain shift with it.

The five-stage Western weapons sequence

The book's most-quoted result is the five-stage periodization of Western weapons systems and their corresponding political forms, set out in Hogan's foreword (WS 7-8):

| Dates | Weapons | Politics | |---|---|---| | 970-1200 | knight and castle | feudalism | | 1200-1520 | mercenary men-at-arms and bowmen | feudal monarchy | | 1520-1800 | mercenary muskets, pikes, artillery | dynastic monarchy | | 1800-1935 | mass army of citizen soldiers | democracy | | 1935- | army of specialists | managerial bureaucracy |

The table is the core of the theory in compressed form. Each weapons system creates a class of people who hold the decisive instruments of force, and the political form that emerges is the one within which that class can be accommodated. Feudalism is what you get when the dominant weapon is the armored mounted knight; democracy is what you get when the dominant weapon is the rifle in the hands of the citizen-soldier; managerial bureaucracy is what you get when the dominant weapon is the strategic-bomber wing or nuclear arsenal, neither of which the citizen can own or wield.

Specialist weapons and citizen participation

Behind the periodization is a more general claim that political participation tracks the distribution of effective weapons across the population. "The dominance of democracy in the 20th century is attributable to the acceptance in the 19th century of a weapons system that favored democracy, the hand gun and rifle" (WS 8, summarizing Quigley). Conversely, the contemporary American slide toward what Quigley calls managerial bureaucracy is a function of nuclear and high-technology weapons, which "a technologic society produces" but which are "both irrelevant to the domestic need for order and threatening, in its requirements for corporate decision-making, to individual self-interest democracy" (WS 8). The same logic governs his treatment of Classical civilization: chapters V and VI of Weapons Systems are structured around the sequence "Fighters by Birth: The Age of the Nobles, 900-650 B.C." → "Fighters by Wealth: The Age of the Tyrants, 650-500 B.C." → "Citizen-Soldiers: The Age of Democracy, 500-323 B.C." → "Growing Offensive Power and Decreasing Political Participation, 323 B.C. to A.D. 69" (WS 5-6). The Greek city-state's democracy is read as a phalanx-and-trireme phenomenon; its decay accompanies the rise of professional mercenary armies and the Roman legion.

Power, security, and persuasion

Underneath the weapons-politics correspondence sits Quigley's general theory of power, set out in the introductory chapters of Weapons Systems. "Power is simply the ability to obtain the acquiescence of another person's will" (WS 33). It operates on three levels — full cooperation, obedience to specific orders, and bare acquiescence — and decomposes into three elements: force, wealth, and persuasion (WS 33). Persuasion, he emphasizes, is widely misunderstood: "It does not consist of an effort to get someone else to adopt our point of view or to believe something they had not previously believed, but rather consists of showing them that their existing beliefs require that they should do what we want" (WS 34). The American propaganda apparatus, he adds, "has been so woefully unsuccessful despite expenditures of billions of dollars" precisely because it ignores this distinction (WS 34). Force and wealth, however, are the elements that the weapons-systems theory bears upon: who has effective force, and at what cost, determines who has political voice.

The 1935 turning point and the warning

The 1935 boundary in Quigley's table is not arbitrary. It marks the transition from the mass-army-of-citizen-soldiers system of 1800-1935 (the system that produced the political democracies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) to the army-of-specialists system that has prevailed since — air power, mechanized armor, nuclear weapons, and now strategic systems and signals intelligence. The political consequence in Quigley's reading is the gradual hollowing out of democratic participation: "In the consequent tilt toward an atomistic society, loyalties to the once strong social structures of family, church and workplace break down. With the immediate availability of weapons to alienated individuals, violence then becomes endemic" (WS 8). The same period he treats in Tragedy and Hope as the institutionalization of monopoly into financial capitalism (T&H 50-72) — and the parallel is not coincidence. The weapons-systems theory is the military-political face of the same institutionalization process that the instrument-of-expansion theory describes economically. Both warn that Western civilization's third Age of Expansion ended around 1929-1935 and that the political forms which served that expansion (democracy, the citizen-army) are not stable in the era that follows.