Famous for its exposition of the workings of the Anglophile American establishment during the first half of the twentieth century, the book is reputed to have “named names” to such a degree that the hidden masters of the world tried to suppress the unabridged edition. It did not diminish the book’s reputation that Carroll Quigley (1910-1977), a historian with the Foreign Service School at Georgetown University, made a deep impression on US-president-to-be Bill Clinton during Clinton’s undergraduate years at that university. We have Mr. Clinton’s own word on this.
As Quigley acknowledges, there are insuperable problems of perspective in writing about one’s own time. On the other hand, the book’s prejudices are fascinating. It was written at the point in the 1960s just before the American liberal consensus began to unravel. Perhaps as important for Quigley, that was also the brief interval after the Second Vatican Council when “liberal Catholic” did not mean someone who rejected all dogma and tradition. Beyond its value as a period piece, however, the book occasionally transcends its time. Its remarks about the future, presumably a future more distant than our present, are close to becoming conventional wisdom today. Read the rest of this entry »
