Politics & Power Quote by Carroll Quigley

Quigley is doing that unnerving thing a certain class of mid-century historian loved to do: taking what sounds like a partisan accusation and recasting it as a matter-of-fact description of how power actually routes itself. The sentence stacks its mechanisms like an accountant stacking ledgers: financing, personal influence, then the ominous catchall of "other pressures". That last phrase is the tell. It invites the reader to imagine leverage that stays off the books - media relationships, credit squeezes, coordinated market moves, the quiet threat of withholding liquidity - without Quigley having to litigate each example.

The specific intent is less to rant than to normalize a structural claim: governments are not only lobbied, they are conditioned. By foregrounding "in addition to", he suggests this isn't a scandalous exception but an additive system of control, one that remains effective even when formal channels are regulated. The subtext is cynical but not conspiratorial in the tinfoil sense; it's the cooler cynicism of institutional analysis. Bankers don't need to seize the state because they can shape the state's options, narrowing what seems "responsible" or "possible" through financial dependency.

Context matters. Quigley wrote in a century when central banking, wartime finance, and postwar international institutions fused public policy with private credit at unprecedented scale. Read against that backdrop, his line isn't just anti-banker animus; it's an observation about modern governance: when a government runs on borrowed oxygen, the people who control the tanks get a vote, whether or not they ever stand for election.