by Carroll Quigley
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Product Description
A comprehensive and perceptive look at the factors behind the rise and fall of civilizations. Quigley defines a civilization as "a producing society with an instrument of expansion". A civilization's decline is not inevitable but occurs when its instrument of expansion is transformed into an institution-that is, when social arrangements that meet real social needs are transformed into social institutions serving their own purposes regardless of real social needs.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 A must-read book, 2008-10-16
Quigley is the master of history and this book doesn't disappoint.
It's a MUST READ for anyone interested in, well, anything. Quigley doesn't limit his discussion to only the stages of civilization. He writes brilliantly even about subjects such as logic and religion.
This book also finally cleared up many confusions for me about Greek history.
I loved this book. It's a bit of a hard read sometimes (keep a dictionary handy and you'll be fine), but if you can get through it, you will be more enlightened than you might imagine possible.
I would also recommend Tragedy and Hope, Quigley's other book.
Get this book. Read it. HIGHLY recommended.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
History through a Scientist's Eyes, 2008-05-06
I am a professional historian and one-time student of Carroll Quigley. Rereading "The Evolution of Civilizations" after 40 years, I heard his voice speaking across time and felt once again the uncanny penetration of his analytical mind. I suppose that he was the most remarkable person I have ever met.
This book makes a major contribution to the study of civilizations, previously the preserve of writers of a literary or philosophical bent. Quigley was through and through a scientist who strove to analyze the rise and fall of civilizations and develop explanations of their dynamics that went well beyond the descriptive treatments of Toynbee and others.
Quigley's seven stages of the rise and fall of civilizations, his six dimensions of analysis (military, political, economic, social, religious, and intellectual), and his application of the concept of institutionalization of once-productive "instruments" of society to explaining the stages of Expansion and Conflict are superior to any competing framework of analysis I have encountered. They deserve careful scrutiny for what they can tell us about the interaction of civilizations in our globalizing world.
I found especially interesting Quigley's analysis of how climate change shaped prehistorical population movements, his discussion of the philosophical struggles of classical antiquity, and his explanation of the economic factors driving European expansion and conflict.
That this book has never received much attention from professional historians should not surprise us. Quigley was operating in a mode that led him to diverge from the mainstream and to upset more than a few specialists.
While this book certainly contains high value for students of world history, its teachings can be applied in other fields as well. I have found the analytical techniques and the explanation of science and epistemology in this book repeatedly fruitful in my own historical, scientific, and criminal detective work.
For more on Quigley, try a Google or Yahoo search under "Carroll Quigley: Theorist of Civilizations".
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Rise & Fall of Empires, 2007-07-11
This is an amazing scientific analysis of the past, present and future simply the rise and fall of civilizations written by an outstanding history professor in the early 20th century. Mr. C.Quigley a very knowledgeable and logical deep thinker with a clear vision has made it very simple for a new reader like me to clearly come to understand how empires come and go thru a logical and sensible life cycle. A totally un-bias analysis with acute meanings, not a single word or sentence is considered a waste or page filler.
9 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
 Parsimonious Nonsense, 2007-04-28
Not recommended. This simplistic attempt to create a "scientific" approach to the understanding of history is useless except as an example of an outdated mode of thinking which did not take into account the principles of chaos, complexity, and uncertainty. Human history is among the most complex and chaotic of systems. Keep in mind that Quigley wrote this book during the era (the 1950s and early 1960s) when it was widely believed that within a few decades, "science" would enable us to perfectly predict and control another complex system, the weather.
The understanding of history is best approached through the lens of moral philosophy, not through the kind of pseudoscience presented in this book.
7 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
Have any of you morons ever heard of Spengler?, 2005-12-20
O.K., as far a birth/life/death cycle in history,
there is some one named Vico,(which the illiterate might want to look into when making such fallacious statements like how this hack author was the first to offer such a theory)....This book is a cardboard knock-off of real historians and historical-philosophers.
I advise you idiots to read beyond the celebrity-read-it sphere, more often you'll find that you know zelch when it comes to the foundations that this banal guy has stolen from.
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