This class struggle dominates public life in the urban centers of every civilization.  The rich offer petty reforms and minor benefits to the impoverished, semi-employed city masses.  At the same time the urban oligarchy breaks up into rival factions:  the Ins and the Outs.  The Ins hold public jobs, spend public money, award contracts and pass around favors.  The Outs wait and maneuver for their turn at the public pie-counter.  Both Ins and Outs appeal for mass support.

Oppositions and confrontations lead to conflicts which have studded the life of every civilization.  Conflicts include wars which may be divided into six groups:  (1) Wars of expansion, conquest, colonization directed toward the enlargement of the territories included in the civilization. (2) Wars of survival among adjacent nations and empires. (3) Wars fought to suppress unrest and revolt in the colonies and dependencies of an empire or civilization. (4) Wars fought to repel the invasion of migrating peoples attempting to occupy territory over which an empire or a civilization claims jurisdiction. (5) Peasant, serf and slave revolts and rebellions against the authority of empires or civilizations. (6) Civil wars to determine the leadership of particular empires; wars of leadership succession; conflicts and power seizures within particular oligarchies.

In every civilization final decisions regarding domestic and foreign issues have been made by an appeal to arms.  There were laws and legal institutions in many civilizations under which confrontations might have been prevented and armed conflict avoided.  Where these legal means failed to provide solutions, contestants turned to armed force as the final arbiter.

Competitive survival struggle has played a prominent role in the life of every civilization known to history.  Competition at its highest level employs armed force as its instrument of policy.  War, domestic and foreign has, therefore, dominated the history of every civilization.  Walter Bagehot called war a state maker.  In the same context, war may be referred to as a civilization maker.

Conflict, including war, has played a major role, often a determining role in building and maintaining civilizations.  It has also been a major and perhaps the major factor in undermining and destroying civilizations.  Arnold Toynbee contends that war has been a “proximate cause” of the overthrow of one civilization after another.  No observer of current western civilization can fail to note the determining part played by war during the first half of the present century.

Every completed civilization known to historians has passed through a sociological life cycle:  origin, growth, expansion, maturity, violent premature dismemberment and death in the competitive survival struggle or gradual decline and eventual dissolution.

Every completed civilization has had small, local beginnings, on an island like Crete, or a group of islands like the Japanese Archipelago, or a tiny spot like Latium on the Tiber River, or an isolated area like the desert-surrounded Nile River Valley in Africa.  The seed ground or nucleus of each civilization has been a small, well-knit group of vigorous, energetic people, well-led, living in an easily defended, limited area, enjoying relative isolation, but also having ready access to the outside world.