num_pages: 442
description: Carroll Quigley was a legendary teacher at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. His course on the history of civilization was extraordinary in its scope and in its impact on students.Like the course The Evolution of Civilizations is a comprehensive and perceptive look at the factors behind the rise and fall of civilizations. Quigley examines the application of scientific method to the social sciences then establishes his historical hypotheses. He poses a division of culture into six levels from the abstract to the more concrete. He then tests those hypotheses by a detailed analysis of five major civilizations: the Mesopotamian the Canaanite the Minoan the classical and the Western.Quigley defines a civilization as a producing society with an instrument of expansion. A civilizations decline is not inevitable but occurs when its instrument of expansion is transformed into an institutionthat is when social arrangements that meet real social needs are transformed into social institutions serving their own purposes regardless of real social needs.
language: English
title: The Evolution of Civilizations
publisher: Liberty Fund