I spent most of yesterday sidetracked on Carroll Quigley. All I wanted was to get a small reference about Milner’s Kindergarten because I realized that I had come up with an idea for changing the world that suspiciously resembled it. In one of the more rational articles, “From Mesopotamia through Carroll Quigley to Bill Clinton: World Historical Systems, the Civilizationist, and the President” (David Wilkinson, Journal of World-Systems Research, 1[1]: 1995), I found several word I actually had to look up. Adventitious appeared in the following:
A theoretical defense of free trade could certainly have been couched in Quigleyan terms (as promoting increased per capita production); so could a polemic (against vested interests preferring their own sectoral prosperity to the general interest). Clinton avoided such discourses, preferring a populist rhetoric of “jobs” and an inspirational rhetoric of fearlessness. But these were adventitious, and do not seem to reflect the reasoning process which led him to favor NAFTA in principle, and free trade in principle. [emphasis added]
Image Credit: Manhattan Bridge under construction-1909. Library of Congress collection.