General Question
Could you tell me your opinion about the following quote of one of Carroll Quigley's works?
I’ll quote one of his books directly. I’ll cite below the source. Here is the text:
My doctoral dissertation The Public Administration of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy (Harvard, 1938) was never published because over-specialized experts who read the version revised for publication persisted in rejecting the aspects of the book in which they were not specialists. The only man who read it and had the slightest idea what it was all about was Gaetano Salvemini (1873–1957), the great historian from the University of Florence, who was a refugee in this country at the time. The book’s message could be understood only by an historian who knew the history of Italy, France, and Austria, and was equally familiar with events before the French Revolution and afterwards. But these national and chronological boundaries are exactly the ones that recent historians hesitate to cross, for the French were reluctant to admit that the late revolutionary and Napoleonic reforms in French government had been anticipated in Italy, while many Italian historians knew nothing about French government before 1789 and wanted to concentrate only on the Risorgimento after 1814. No one was much interested in my discovery that the French state as it developed under Napoleon was based largely on Italian precedents. For example, while the French state before 1789 had no budgets or accounts, Napoleon’s budgets in both France and Italy were strikingly similar to the budgets of the Duchy of Milan in the sixteenth century. Similarly, the unified educational system established by Napoleon in France in 1808 was anticipated in the Kingdom of Sardinia (Piedmont) in the 1720’s. Such discoveries form part of the history of the growth of the European state, but are not of much interest to the narrow and overspecialized controversies of the last half century. So instead of writing the history of public authority, I got into what was, I suppose, my much stronger activity: the creation of the necessary conceptual paradigms, structures, and frameworks for understanding historical processes.
- Carroll Quigley, The 1st Oscar Iden Lecture, October 13, 1976
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