Sit and have a beer with A.J.

Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975)

Toynbee and History (1956), a collection of essays edited by Ashley Montagu, includes three pieces by Arnold Toynbee. The first of these is A Study of History: What I Am Trying to Do.

In it, Toynbee tells the history of history -- something that was in the back of his mind while he was writing the "3½‐million word, 12‐volume story of mankind" we looked at yesterday -- and he gets a few zingers in along the way.

I've shortened the essay and added paragraph breaks. It's still long for a blog, but if you don't drink too fast one beer should be enough:

The particular generation into which I was born happens to be a revolutionary one. In less than one lifetime the face of the World has changed almost out of recognition, and the West’s position in the World has undergone the greatest change of all.... As soon as one looks at the new panorama of history, one sees that it bursts the bounds of the current framework within which our Western historians have been doing their work for the last 250 years...

The traditional pattern in the West down to the end of the seventeenth century had been the Israelite pattern, which Christendom and Islam had taken over with modifications in their own favour. In this Jewish-Christian-Muslim view, history had appeared to be an act of God beginning at the Creation and destined to end in the Last Judgement, while Israel (or Christendom or Islam) had been singled out as being the people chosen by God for carrying out His purposes.

The last great Western exponent of this Jewish-Christian-Muslim pattern of history had been Bishop Bossuet. His eighteenth-century successors made the Late Modern Western pattern of history, on which we have been working since Bossuet’s death, by cutting God out of the picture and dealing with the Christian Church as the Church had dealt with Israel.

Bossuet’s successors appropriated the role of being ‘the Chosen People’ from the Christian Church, as the Church had appropriated it from Israel; and they transferred this role, partly to ‘Europe’, but mainly to the particular West European nation to which a particular historian happened to belong: to France, Britain, Italy, Spain, and so on, as the case might be.

This eighteenth-century Western view of history as a movement in a straight line, leading up to a twentieth-century ‘Europe’, ‘Britain’, or ‘Nicaragua’, instead of leading up to a future Last Judgement, simply cannot take in the new panorama that the twentieth century has now opened out before our eyes. In that antiquated Late Modern Western picture there is no room at all for China or India, and hardly any room even for Russia or America. And where are we to find in it so much as a niche for the Mayans or for the Hittites? In the light of our new knowledge, we are compelled to discard this pattern, as our eighteenth-century predecessors discarded Bossuet’s. Once again, we have to look at history with new eyes, as our eighteenth-century predecessors did.
...
In this age our Western Civilization has collided with all the other surviving civilizations all over the face of the planet — with the Islamic civilization, with the Hindu, with the Chinese, with the Aztec, and so on, — and we can take a comparative view of the effects of these simultaneous collisions upon the parties to them. This comparative treatment can be extended to the whole of history; and it is, in fact, the method of the human sciences: the theory of knowledge, psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics. The human sciences like the natural sciences, make a comparative study of their data in order to discover the structure of the facts and the events; and I believe that here the historians ought to take their cue from the scientists.
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Some Western historians in the post-Bossuet age have denied that there are any regularities in the course of human affairs and have declared, with evident sincerity, that they have no such patterns in their own minds. Yet the use made by these very historians of such patterns as ‘Europe’ and ‘Britain’ shows that they are mistaken in their belief about the nature of their own mental operations. A pattern is still there; it is, as we have seen, the classical Jewish-Christian-Muslim pattern thinly disguised in secular modern dress. The difference between these post-Christian Western historians and their Christian predecessors is that the moderns do not allow themselves to be aware of the pattern in their minds, whereas Bossuet, Eusebius, and Saint Augustine were fully conscious of it.
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One of my aims in A Study of History has been to try out the scientific approach to human affairs and to test how far it will carry us. Of course, no one would seriously contend that there are no patterns at all in historical thought, for thought itself is a mental pattern, and no historian could think one thought or write one line without using such mental patterns as ‘society’, ‘state’, ‘church’, ‘war’, ‘battle’, and ‘man’.

The real question at issue is not whether mental patterns exist but whether they cover the whole field of human affairs or only part of it; and my own belief is that there are some things in human affairs that have no pattern because they are not subject to scientific laws. One such thing, I believe, is an encounter between two or more human beings. I believe that the outcome of such an encounter would not be predictable, even if we had a complete knowledge of all the antecedent facts.

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