Arnold J. Toynbee
This page is about the universal historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee; for the economic historian Arnold Toynbee see this article. For further Toynbees and related topics see the disambiguation page Toynbee.Arnold Joseph Toynbee CH (
April 14,
1889 –
October 22,
1975) was a British
historian whose twelve-volume analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations,
A Study of History, 1934-1961, was a synthesis of
world history, a
metahistory based on universal rhythms of rise, flowering and decline.
Toynbee was the nephew of the economic historian,
Arnold Toynbee, with whom he is sometimes confused. Born in
London, Arnold J. was educated at
Winchester College and
Balliol College, Oxford. He began his teaching career as a fellow of Balliol College in 1912, and thereafter held posts at
King's College, London (as Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History), the
London School of Economics and the
Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) in Chatham House. He was Director of Studies at the RIIA between
1925 and
1955.
He worked for the Intelligence department of the
British Foreign Office during
World War I and served as a delegate to the
Paris Peace Conference in 1919. With his research assistant,
Veronica M. Boulter, who was to become his second wife, he was co-editor of the RIIA's annual
Survey of International Affairs. During
World War II, he again worked for the
Foreign Office and attended the postwar peace talks.
Toynbee's approach may be compared to the one used by
Oswald Spengler in
The Decline of the West. He rejected, however, Spengler's deterministic view that civilizations rise and fall according to a natural and inevitable cycle.
Toynbee presented history as the rise and fall of civilizations, rather than the history of
nation-states or of
ethnic groups. He identified his civilizations according to cultural rather than national criteria. Thus, the "Western Civilization", comprising all the nations that have existed in
Western Europe since the collapse of the
Roman Empire, was treated as a whole, and distinguished from both the "Orthodox" civilization of
Russia and the
Balkans, and from the
Greco-Roman civilization that preceded it.
With the civilizations as units identified, he presented the history of each in terms of challenge-and-response. Civilizations arose in response to some set of challenges of extreme difficulty, when "creative minorities" devised solutions that reoriented their entire society. Challenges and responses were physical, as when the
Sumerians exploited the intractable swamps of southern
Iraq by organizing the neolithic inhabitants into a society capable of carrying out large-scale irrigation projects; or social, as when the Catholic Church resolved the chaos of post-Roman Europe by enrolling the new Germanic kingdoms in a single religious community. When a civilization responds to challenges, it grows. When it fails to respond to a challenge, it enters its period of decline. Toynbee argued that "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder." For Toynbee, civilizations were not intangible or unalterable machines but a network of social relationships within the border and therefore subject to both wise and unwise decisions they made. If leaders of the civilization did not appease or shut down the internal proletariat or muster an effective military or diplomatic defense against potential invading outside forces, it would fall.
He expressed great admiration for
Ibn Khaldun and in particular the
Muqaddimah, the preface to Khaldun's own universal history, which notes many
systemic biases that intrude on historical analysis via the evidence.
Toynbee's ideas have not proved overly influential on other historians; yet, his overall theory certainly was taken up by some scholars, for example,
Ernst Robert Curtius, as a sort of paradigm in the post-war period. Curtius wrote as follows in the opening pages of
European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953 English translation), following close on Toynbee, as he sets the stage for his vast study of
medieval Latin literature. Not all would agree with his thesis, of course; but his unit of study is the Latin-speaking world of
Christendom and Toynbee's ideas feed into his account very naturally:
The ideas Toynbee promoted enjoyed some vogue (he appeared on the cover of Time Magazine'' in 1947). They may have been early casualties of the
Cold War's intellectual climate.
Rightly or not, critics attacked Toynbee's theory for emphasizing religion over other aspects of life when assessing the big pictures of civilizations. In this respect, the debate resembled the contemporary one over
Samuel Huntington's theory of the so-called "
clash of civilizations". For Toynbee's ideas in context, see
development of religion.
Toynbee's ideological approach— "metaphysical speculations dressed up as history" is a commonplace modern assessment [
1]— was subjected to an effective critique by
Pieter Geyl. Toynbee engaged in the public dialogue, which appeared in print (1949, reprinted in 1968) in
The Pattern of the Past: Can We Determine It?. This book linked essays by Toynbee and Geyl to an analysis of Toynbee's philosophy of history, contributed by
Pitirim A. Sorokin.
An article by
Hugh Trevor-Roper, "Arnold Toynbee's
Millennium" — describing Toynbee's work as a "Philosophy of Mish-Mash" — was an assault on Toynbee's reputation.
The social scientist
Ashley Montagu assembled 29 other historians' articles to form a symposium on Toynbee's
A Study of History, published as {{cite book |
title = Toynbee and History: Critical Essays and Reviews |
publisher =
Extending Horizons Books,
Porter Sargent Publishers| location =
Boston |
edition = 1956 Cloth |
id = ISBN 0-87558-026-2 | The book includes three of Toynbee's own essays:
What I am Trying to Do (originally published in
International Affairs vol. 31, 1955;
What the Book is For: How the Book Took Shape (a pamphlet written upon completion of the final volumes of
A Study of History) and a comment written in response the articles by
Edward Fiess and
Pieter Geyl (originally published in
Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 16, 1955.)In an essay titled
The Chatham House Version (1970),
Elie Kedourie of the
London School of Economics, a historian of the
Middle East, attacked Toynbee's role in what he saw as an abdication of responsibility of the retreating
British Empire, in failing democratic values in countries it had once controlled. Kedourie argued that Toynbee's whole system and work were aimed at the British imperial role.
It is assumed that Arnold J. is the Toynbee referred to on the
Toynbee tiles. His ideas also feature in the
Ray Bradbury short story named "
The Toynbee Convector", and a lesser-known book called (among other titles)
Toynbee 22. He appears alongside
T.E. Lawrence as a character in an episode of
The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, dealing with the post-
WWI treaty negotiations at
Versailles.
