"In studying the growths of civilizations we found that they could be analysed into successions of performances of the drama of challenge-and-response and that the reason why one performance followed another was because each of the responses was not only successful in answering the particular challenge by which it had been evoked but was also instrumental in provoking a fresh challenge, which arose each time out of the new situation that the successful response had brought about. Thus the essence of the nature of the growths of civilizations proved to be an elan which carried the challenged party through the equilibrium of a successful response into an overbalance which declared itself in the presentation of a new challenge. This repetitiveness or recurrency of challenge is likewise implied in the concept of disintegration, but in this case the responses fail. In consequence, instead of a series of challenges each different in character from a predecessor which has been successfully met and relegated to past history, we have the same challenge presented again and again. For example, in the history of the international politics of the Hellenic World, from the time when Solonian economic revolution first confronted the Hellenic Society with the task of establishing a political world order, we can see that the failure of the Athenian attempt to solve the problem by means of the Delian League led on to Philip of Macedon's attempt to solve it by means of the Corinthian League, and Philip's failure to Augustus's attempt to solve it by the Pax Romana, upheld by a Principate. This repetition of the same challenge is in the very nature of the situation. When the outcome of each successive encounter is not victory but defeat, the unanswered challenge can never be disposed of, and is bound to present itself again and again until it either revives some tardy and imperfect answer or else brings about the destruction of the society which has shown itself inveterately incapable of responding to it effectively." (pp. 417-418)
in Arnold Toynbee's "A Study of History, Volume 1"
