WEAPONS SYSTEMS AND POLITICAL STABILITY: A History
1983511770University Press of America 1983. First Edition. Hardcover. FINE. First Printing. 1043pp. 9x6' sewn binding in publisher's navy buckram with silver gilt lettering. Sans DJ as issued. FINE copy--entirely clean and sharp. Scarce first edition of this tragically incomplete would-be magnum opus by one of the great political and military analysts of modern times. The incomplete manuscript was edited and published posthumously by the author's colleagues. 'Carroll Quigley historian and teacher at Georgetown University died January 5 1977 leaving unfinished a manuscript on Weapons Systems and Political Stability: A History upon which he had been working for the preceding twelve years. His colleagues and friends upon reviewing the manuscript decided to press forward with its publication. Although the manuscript is frustratingly incomplete in time sequence--it ends its narrative in the 15th century--it carries further toward completion the uniquely anthropological holistic analysis of history which is the theme of his earlier works Tragedy and Hope and Evolution of Civilizations. In Quigley's social analysis the dominance of democracy in the 20th century is attributable to the acceptance in the 19th century of a weapons system that favored democracy the hand gun and rifle. In the consequent tilt toward an atomistic society loyalties to the once strong social structures of family church and workplace break down. With the immediate availability of weapons to alienated individuals violence then becomes endemic. Yet weaponry such as the nuclear bomb which a technologic society produces is both irrelevant to the domestic need for order and threatening in its requirements for corporate decision-making to individual self-interest democracy. The temptation to explore further Quigley's speculations on the themes of history is difficult to resist. But the reader must undertake that responsibility and in so doing will join Quigley's friends in realizing their loss.' From Harry Hogan's Introduction. University Press of America hardcover
Arches Bookhouse · États-Unis385,00 $US≈ 325,75 €
