In his seminal work The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington reinvented Arnold Toynbee's understanding of history as driven not only by impersonal material structures—territory, capital, population, and natural resources—but equally by interpersonal ideational structures. This perception seemed supported by empirical observation, and soon filled the intellectual and political lacunae which had attained particular salience in the wake of the implosion of Soviet-backed communism.