THE EVOLUTION OF CIVILIZATIONS, by Carroll Quigley

The foreign policy of the United States in the second half of the twentieth century owes a great deal to Carroll Quigley. As a professor of history at Georgetown University, Quigley was noted for his clear and forceful communication of history. (Though he might have preferred to describe his his approach as "scientific" or "analytical.")

Quigley expressed his methods and conclusions in his book The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis. In a direct (and sometimes acerbic) way, he presented the argument for an objective analysis of history. Neither Spengler's resigned pessimism nor Toynbee's determined optimism made sense to Quigley; for him, history should be perceived and analyzed without being directed by wishful thinking, or by being interpreted so as to support some cherished hypothesis of human nature.