not only abandons the concept of enlargement as a criterion of 
real growth of society, but states: “More often geographical 
expansion is a concomitant of real decline and coincides with a 
‘time of troubles’ or a universal state—both of them stages of 
decline and disintegration.”

     Toynbee expounds the principle that times of trouble or 
rapid change produce militarism, and it is militarism that 
produces empire and expansion. The old Greek myth which 
taught that the alphabet produced militarism (“King Cadmus 
sowed the dragon’s teeth, and they sprang up armed men”) 
really goes much deeper than Toynbee’s story. In fact, 
“militarism” is just vague description, not analysis of causality 
at all. Militarism is a kind of visual organization of social 
energies that is both specialist and explosive, so that it is 
merely repetitive to say, as Toynbee does, that it both creates