As centers of civilization grew richer and more powerful they defeated neighboring peoples, brought some of them home as war captives and exacted from their defeated rivals promises to pay yearly tribute in the form of timber, metals, food and often of slaves.
Mobilization of energy resources had been proceeding on a small scale for ages. Successful civilizers made this one of their chief tasks, mobilizing energy forces and materials and using them to build palaces, temples, mausoleums and whole city complexes with appropriate defenses against marauders and other enemies.
Administrative networks, adequate to produce such results, planned and directed the construction and administered and policed the operations. Using elaborate techniques of communication, transportation, fabrication, beautification, accounting, planning, initiative, leadership, mobilization, maintenance and replacement of labor power, imposition and sharing of authority, discipline, adjustment to deviation and opposition, means for dealing with revolt and rebellion, the builders of civilization performed their necessary tasks.
As civilizations have matured they have grown at the nucleus, expanded abroad and experimented more or less successfully with various means of exploiting nature, man and human society. Most of the competitors for survival and supremacy dropped out or were forced out in the course of continuous survival struggles.
Survivors of the obstacle race dealt successively with personal rivalries; class conflicts; civil wars; dictatorships; tyrannies; with overhead costs that grew more rapidly than income; with empty treasuries, inflation, depression, economic stagnation; with increases in top-heavy bureaucracies; with parasitism; with hooliganism; with the growing role of the military in decision making and administration; sharing the honey-pot with migrants and invaders; with rivalry and power struggle at home and abroad; with division, fragmentation and eventual dissolution.
Any student of the sociology of civilization must turn from this analysis of function with the conviction that whatever the advantages of civilization as opposed to earlier phases of human association, the pattern of civilization in action is workable only to a very limited extent. Civilization is not an example of perpetual motion. Rather it is a social life cycle, with a beginning and an end, and a peck of troublesome contradictions and conflicts in between.
Civilization is an integrative process. During the course of its competitive survival struggle, potential building units of an expanding civilization are tested out and included or rejected in much the same way that a stone-mason checks and tests the individual stones of which his wall is being built. The analogy is not entirely accurate. A wall becomes a completed part of a total structure. A civilization is a process of existence from conception and birth to dissolution and death. At any point in the process there is a delicate balance between integration and disintegration. As a matter of fact, both integration and disintegration exist and act, constantly, side by side. If the integrative forces are in the ascendant, form is built and function is accelerated. If the disintegrative forces are dominant, form breaks down and function stagnates.
This shifting balance and/or imbalance with its resulting build-up and/or break-down exists geographically, biologically, sociologically. It can perhaps be best described as successive change. It cannot be referred to as evolution except in its integrative aspect. Disintegratively it becomes devolution.
Civilization is a result of sociological build-up at a certain cultural level. It has not been universal in all human societies, but exceptional, both in time and in geographical space.
What has caused the pattern of civilization to appear, disappear and reappear again and again during the period of written history?