Are we talking about Quigley the professor, Quigley the author of books on the "Anglo-American Establishment" or Quigley, the icon of right wing conspiracism as reinterpreted by Skoussen and others?
:-)
Carroll Quigley's 1966 Tragedy and Hope saw US history after the Civil War as shaped by a power struggle between international finance capital and industrial capitalism. Quigley saw British influence, especially Rhodes scholarships, as crucial to understanding role of foundations and politicians in shaping US policy.
Two authors affiliated with the John Birch Society adapted and extended Quigley's work. Cleon Skousen's The Naked Capitalist was self-published in 1970. Gary Allen wrote several books, including None Dare Call it Conspiracy, published in 1971, which sold over 5 million copies.
According to Frank P. Mintz, in The Liberty Lobby and the American Right: Race, Conspiracy, and Culture (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985), both Skousen and Allen "wedded Tragedy and Hope to the tradition of rightist populism of the interwar period and the radical rightist conspiracist literature of the 1950s and 1960s, but avoided the familiar rightist sources as much as possible."
I think the idea of a struggle between bad parasitic internationalist "finance" capital and good productive nationalist "industrial" capital is the basis for the producerist narrative of right wing populism, and lends itself easily to antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish banking circles.
This concept is what puts Ralph Nader in bed with the Milliken family, owners of southern textile mills, notorious anti-union stalwarts, and major funders of the John Birch Society. Ah, but they oppose WTO so let's play with them, and Pat Choate, and the US Business and Industrial Council. And let's refuse to speak out against the JBS magazine or even Liberty Lobby's Spotlight newspaper when they are distributed at our meetings, because we are all a big happy anti-globalist anti-corporatist family. Meanwhile they are sharpening their knives for the long good night.
There is no secret international finance capital conspiracy, and business nationalists are hardly friends of the left. There are clearly tensions between various factions of capitalism, but "finance" v. "industrial" is too crude a framework.
So I think Quigley was wrong, and wandering into an old Anglophobic critique; and I think his acolytes on the right took his thesis and wove it into even more explicitly conspiracist narratives, where today it plays a major role on the US right, even though few have actually read Quigley in the original (long and boring) form.
He was apparently a terrific professor. Just ask Clinton...
-Chip Berlet
----- Original Message ----- From: bill fancher <fancher at pacbell.net> To: LBO <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Tuesday, November 16, 1999 9:05 PM Subject: Carroll Quigley
>
> Given Quigley's relevance to so many of the current topics (Clinton,
> Militias, Fascists, Guns, Democratic Money, Big Bourgeoisie,
> Anti-semitism,...), I'd be most interested in people's take on him.
>
> Surely Chip Berlet, if no one else, has heard of him and read his books.
>
> --
> bill
>
> "... a movement to realize the conceivable better state of the world
> must deny itself the advantages of secret methods and tactical
> insincerities. It must leave that to its adversaries. We must declare
> our end plainly from the outset and risk no misunderstandings of our
> procedure." H.G. Wells