An Addendum to Quigley's Evolution of Civilizations.

In the Evolution of Civilizations, Quigley models organizations in the following way: he argues that organizations have social missions, and they are called ‘instruments’ to the extent that organizations fulfill their social missions. However, if they stray from their mission and become ineffective due to organizational entropy, it leads to tension, tension that can be resolved 3 ways: reaction, reform, circumvention. This organizational entropy is called institutionalization, which shows up as vested interests, rigidity of procedure and loss of incentive. And ineffective organizations are called institutions as opposed to instruments.

Reaction is when vested interests succeed in keeping their privileges and the societal mission continues to be less and less effectively carried out over time, with chronic social tension. Reform is when the institution is re-constituted such that it becomes effective again. And circumvention is when a new effective organization is set up to fulfill the societal mission, while the old institution continues to operate in a relatively more ceremonial manner e.g. SpaceX vs NASA.

My addendum is a fourth possibility, in addition to reaction, reform & circumvention; there can be a liquidation. This is when vested interests lose control, the institution is broken apart, yet no effective replacement instrument emerges. The original institution disintegrates; the social need goes unmet; and the vacuum accelerates broader civilizational decline. This is when the vested interests fail to keep their privileges, but the reformers either fail, or else they don’t even attempt to reform, but just to destroy.

This is distinct from civilizational collapse. Under the Quigley model, entire civilizations can get stuck in a decay phase, after which an outsider force comes knock the whole thing down.

This possibility came to mind, as a result of some recent actions of the Trump administration. Like the rolled back ‘reciprocal’ tariffs, and like the attempt to cancel all foreign student visas at and scientific grants to Harvard. These actions, already either overruled by the courts or rolled back, can be thought of as failed attempts at liquidation. I was inspired by these actions to recognize the possibility of this failure mode of populism. Instead of reform you get a nihilist burn it down approach towards institutions that ought to be either reformed or circumvented. In other words a negative agenda, devoid of a positive partner.

However, liquidation need not necessarily arise out of populists full of resentment. Historical examples perhaps can include de-industrialization in the midwest, the outsourcing of factories led by financial engineer managers. It can also include failed attempts at genuine reforms like those attempted by the late soviet union.

Curious if other readers of Quigley’s Evolution of Civilizations have any feedback on this narrow addendum to Quigley.

Very interesting anon, I think you are on to something. However I'd like a point of clarification. You say that
>there can be a liquidation. This is when vested interests lose control, the institution is broken apart, yet no effective replacement instrument emerges. The original institution disintegrates; the social need goes unmet; and the vacuum accelerates broader civilizational decline.

I am unsure if I follow along from the examples you list
>perhaps can include de-industrialization in the midwest, the outsourcing of factories led by financial engineer managers.

These needs weren't unmet where they in the broader scheme of things ? Industrialization was outsourced. As an addendum, I like to think of civilizations as a broader network, necessarily as a “world system” and not one discreet unit, so to answer the claim that the needs were unmet within a particular civilization (the West). My reason for quibbling is I don't think those were good examples but fail to come to with my own. Maybe the roots of decline aren't in this liquidation and failed meeting of needs you seem to allude to.

Fair comment. The examples were an afterthought and I didn't do a good job of articulating them. Let me attempt to elaborate. But first, to take a step back, the narrow point I want to make is that in the Quigley formula critics either fail (reaction), or succeed in creating a positive alternative (circumvention & reform). This straightforwardly misses another option, what I called liquidation. The case when critics succeed, but no positive alternative replaces the failed institution. And the social need is unmet. I have to confess I needed help from chatgpt to name this phenomenon I thought of because I struggled to come up with a suitable one word name and I don't think liquidation is perfect either. Notwithstanding the commonality of historical examples, I'm fairly confident that the original three possibilities weren't comprehensive.

To go over my examples:
1) I think this is rather straightforward with Populist Nihilism. Given that academia is woke, and given that a large chunk of publications don't replicate; does that justify defunding academia? NIH and NSF funding, per the Trump budget proposal is to be cut by 40-60%. In a hypothetical future where NSF and NIH budgets are cut, and foreign students are revoked, basic science in many areas would decline.

2) De-industrialization in the US: I had in mind the situation that instead of fixing the root causes of de-industrialization, we just outsourced our factories. But I think you are right that this is best classified as circumvention rather than 'liquidation'.

So what can be better examples?

1) In the US we can point to closing of mental institutes and/or the ending of the war on drugs due to certain libertarian sensibilities. The closing of the mental institutes was not merely Reagan's doing, there was bipartisan consensus that depriving mentally ill people of their liberty was immoral. And yet half a century later, the consequences are unfortunately visible in the Tenderloin, among other places.

2) We can point to firing all Iraqi soldiers and the liquidation of the Iraqi army by the civilian authorities after the US invasion in 2003, which created a security vacuum in the country.

3) We can point to the cultural revolution in China, which was a broad liquidation of all Chinese institutions.

4) We can point to the failures of the post-Apartheid regimes in South Africa & Rhodesia. And de-colonization generally has many more examples I suppose.

But you're that perhaps I'm still thinking at a more micro level than Quigley. But then again, I think the classification scheme should apply at the level of institutions.

An important feature of the theoretical approach in The Evolution of Civilizations is that it looks at changes over very long timescales, and glosses over anything which doesn't endure for at least half a century.

So from this perspective, if you dismantle the military then you have a security vacuum, and the thing about vacuums is that air rushes in to fill them, so within a decade of fighting someone comes out on top and you have a military again. From the zoomed-out perspective that Quigley takes in this book, that's a reform of the military institution.

Or if you have a problem of "society needs a way to manage dysfunctional people who become vagrants in cities and cause problems for the strangers around them", and you solve it with mental institutions, and then you dismantle those mental institutions... then temporarily there's a vacuum, but before long you see something else come in to manage the vagrants: in this case, the NGOs providing "homelessness services". (In some cities we also saw the police backing vagrants in asserting claims to public space, although that seems to have been quietly wound down at least here in San Francisco). My mom would consider this a circumvention, i.e. a new instrument supplanting the old and doing a better job of handling the social issue. Personally I disagree, and consider this a case of reaction—as you put it, "vested interests [here the NGO bureaucrats] succeed in keeping their privileges and the societal mission continues to be less and less effectively carried out over time, with chronic social tension". But this disagreement is about ends, not about historical fact.

You could dissolve academia, shut down the universities and the NSF and NIH and the whole apparatus. These institutions are solving the problem of investigating the natural world and producing technology. If you dissolve the whole lot then people will still try to do those things, and one or another of the different approaches will claim the legitimacy which the academic system holds today. Maybe corporate labs would take the lead, maybe it would be autist bloggers doing some kind of Republic of Letters thing, maybe something else entirely. Maybe it would be better than the current mess or maybe it would be worse.

From the perspective of a mere decade, dissolution is very much a thing that can happen. But on the timescale of a civilizational lifecycle, you can hardly blink before *something* will arise to fill the newly-abdicated function. A gutter abhors a crown as nature abhors a vacuum.