Politics & Power Quote by Carroll Quigley

There is a cold, almost conspiratorial clarity in Quigley’s framing: civil service reform, usually sold as the antidote to machine politics, is recast as an investment strategy. The loaded phrase “business interests” does the heavy lifting. It refuses to name names, but it also refuses to let “reform” float as a moral good. In Quigley’s hands, reform is a mechanism for stabilizing influence, not purifying government.

The key word is “expected.” He’s not claiming omnipotence; he’s describing a governing class with a theory of the state: if you professionalize the bureaucracy and weaken patronage networks, you reduce the volatility of electoral swings. Spoils systems made politics messy and expensive; civil service systems make it legible, routinized, and easier to manage through expertise, credentials, and policy continuity. That’s the subtext: democracy is unpredictable, administration is controllable.

The context is the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, passed after the assassination of James Garfield and amid public disgust with patronage. Quigley implies that outrage created the cover story, while elite interests supplied the design. By calling it the “first installment,” he nudges readers to see reform as incremental capture: each “good government” fix can also be a structural reallocation of power from party machines to permanent institutions where capital and influence tend to have longer memories.

“Both political parties equally” is the real sting. Quigley is arguing that the highest ambition isn’t partisan victory but bipartisan dependence: a system where elections change the rhetoric while the underlying management remains, reliably, negotiable.