294 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

If there is thus no indication of there being any uniformity in the num-
ber of the chapters in the history of social growth as between one civili-
zation and another, there is also no evidence of there being any standard
length to which the Time-spans of the successive chapters conform.

If, with an eye to this latter point, we look once again at the history of
the growth of the Western Civilization, it might appear, perhaps, at
first glance, as if each of the interlocking rounds of Challenge-and-Re-
sponse through which the process of growth had been achieved in this
episode had had something like a regular wave-length running to ap-
proximately four hundred years. This was in fact the Time-interval
between the date of the emergence in the Western World of the nation-
state, round about the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of the
Christian Era, and the foregoing emergence of the Hildebrandine Papacy
round about the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries; and this
earlier landmark in the history of the Western Civilization's growth is
likewise separated by an interval of about four hundred years from the
date of the emergence of the Western Civilization itself round about the
turn of the seventh and eighth centuries. This appearance of uniformity
of wave-length as between successive rounds of Challenge-and-Response
in the growth-phase of Western history is belied, however, by an omi-
nous absence, round about the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, of anything resembling the emergence of an effective Western
political organization on the oecumenical scale in response to the chal-
lenge presented to the Western Civilization by its own previous success
in providing itself with an efficient parochial form of polity on the nation-
state scale. If the growth-process were in truth not merely cyclic but also
periodic in the sense of proceeding through cycles with a uniform wave-
length, the Western Society's current problem of establishing some kind
of oecumenical order on the political plane ought to have been visibly on
the way to solution by the year A.D. 1952; and the Western Civilization's
actual failure to solve this problem up to date must indicate either that
the appearance of a uniform four-hundred-years-long wave-length in the
growth-process was an illusion or else that, by A.D. 1952, the Western
Civilization had broken down.

The former of these two possibly alternative, but not necessarily in-
compatible, inferences was borne out by the irregularity of the date at
which the Medieval Western renaissance of the Hellenic city-state had
occurred. So far from being separated in Time by an interval of any-
thing of the order of four hundred years from the antecedent emergence
of the Hildebrandine Papacy and from the subsequent emergence of the
nation-state, the renaissance of the Hellenic city-state in the Western
World followed hard at the heels of the epiphany of the Hildebrandine
Papacy and was indeed one of its immediate incidental effects, consider-
ing that a temporary Balance of Power in the struggle between a waxing
Papacy and a waning Holy Roman Empire was the constellation of forces
that gave the Medieval Western city-states in an intervening no-man's-
land in Northern and Central Italy their opportunity to raise their heads.1
Our reconnaissance of the history of the growth of the Western Civili-

* See III. Hi. 345-6; IV. iv. 534; and p. 340, n. 2, above.