Civilization, edited: "The unit of historical study"

Toynbee, Arnold J.  A Study of History. Volume One at archive.org. The complete multi-volume abridgement at archive.org. If you read it, read it like you don't have television and social media to occupy your time.

John Maynard Keynes waited till chapter four to make clear his choice of units:

It is my belief that much unnecessary perplexity can be avoided if we limit ourselves strictly to the two units, money and labour, when we are dealing with the behaviour of the economic system as a whole; ...

In the Somerville abridgement, Arnold J. Toynbee does units first, before anything else. He considers "the unit of historical study" in the Introduction. Here, slightly shortened, his first two sentences:

... the development in the last few centuries, and more particularly in the last few generations, of the would-be self-sufficient national sovereign state has led historians to choose nations as the normal fields of historical study. But no single nation or national state of Europe can show a history which is in itself self-explanatory.

The first sentence describes historians' standard practice^[1]; the second describes the problem with that practice. The task Toynbee sets himself is to offer an alternative to standard practice.

He takes as an example Great Britain and lists the "principal chapters" of its history. These chapters take us from the industrial system "(since the last quarter of the eighteenth century)", back to the conversion of the English to Western Christianity in the sixth century. On page 2 Toynbee writes:

This glance backwards from the present day over the general course of English history would appear to show that the farther back we look the less evidence do we find of self-sufficiency or isolation. The conversion, which was really the beginning of all things in English history, was the direct antithesis of that; it was an act which merged half a dozen isolated communities of barbarians in the common weal of a nascent Western Society.

English history is not self-contained or self-explanatory, he says. It begins with the formation of a larger community, a larger society. Then, over time, differences emerge and we end up with a large society that contains several smaller ones: a civilization containing several nation-states. Toynbee writes:

With reference to the parliamentary system Lord Acton says: ‘General history naturally depends on the action of forces which are not national but proceed from wider causes. The rise of modern kingship in France is part of a similar movement in England. Bourbons and Stuarts obeyed the same law though with different results.’ In other words the Parliamentary System, which was the local result in England, was the product of a force which was not peculiar to England but was operating simultaneously in England and France.

This stuff floored me when I first read it. It still does. On page 3, Toynbee summarizes:

The chapters which caught our eye in our glance backward over the course of English history were real chapters in some story or other, but that story was the history of some society of which Great Britain was only a part, and the experiences were experiences in which other nations besides Great Britain were participants. The ‘intelligible field of study’, in fact, appears to be a society containing a number of communities of the species represented by Great Britain — not only Great Britain herself but also France and Spain, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries and so on — and the passage quoted from Acton indicates the relation between these parts and that whole. 

The forces in action are not national but proceed from wider causes, which operate upon each of the parts and are not intelligible in their partial operation unless a comprehensive view is taken of their operation throughout the society. Different parts are differently affected by an identical general cause, because they each react, and each contribute, in a different way to the forces which that same cause sets in motion.

 

I'm leaving out a lot, but I turn now to the unabridged Volume One of Toynbee's Study of History, to the section titled Some Provisional Conclusions which begins on page 44. Here he begins to flesh out the concept of civilization and how a civilization differs from the "political communities" it contains.

The first stage of our inquiry has now reached its term, and it may be convenient to sum up our provisional conclusions. They can be stated as follows:
(a) The ‘intelligible fields of historical study’, whose limits we have roughly established by working outwards and backwards from the standpoint of our own country in our own day, are societies which have a greater extension, in both Space and Time, than national states or city-states, or any other political communities.
(b) Such political communities (national states, city-states, and the like) are not only narrower in their spatial extension and shorter-lived in their Time-extension than the respective societies to which they belong, but their relation to these societies is that of inseparable parts to indivisible wholes. They are simply articulations of the true social entities and are not independent entities in themselves. Societies, not states, are ‘the social atoms’ with which students of history have to deal.
(c) The societies of which national states like Great Britain or city-states like Athens are parts, while they are (unlike their parts) independent entities in the sense that each of them constitutes, by itself, an ‘intelligible field of historical study’, are at the same time related to one another in the sense that they are all representatives of a single species of society.
(d) No one of the particular societies which we have been studying embraces the whole of Mankind or extends spatially over the whole habitable and navigable surface of the Planet or is coeval with the species of which it is one representative. Our Western Society, for example, which is still alive, was not conceived until the Hellenic Society had passed its maturity, while the Hellenic Society — even if (as is not the case) it proved, on being traced back, to be one of the original representatives of the species — has been extinct for twelve and a half centuries, so that in any case its complete life-span would fall short of the still uncompleted lifespan of the species by that much already.
(e) While the continuity between the histories of one society and another is very much slighter in degree than the continuity between different chapters in the history of any single society (indeed, so much slighter as virtually to differ in kind), yet in the Time-relation between two particular societies of different age — namely, the Western and the Hellenic — we have observed features which we may describe metaphorically as ‘apparentation’ and ‘affiliation’.

Toynbee continues:

In the light of these conclusions on matters of historical fact, we can draw certain other conclusions regarding History as a humane study. Its true concern is with the lives of societies in both their internal and their external aspects...

This view of history may be supported by a further quotation from Lord Acton, one of the greatest minds among modern Western historians...

After another page of text I'm omitting, Toynbee gets to this second quote from Lord Acton:

In his letter to the contributors to The Cambridge Modern History, dated the 12th March 1898, Acton gave this glimpse of the vision that was in him: 

‘By Universal History I understand that which is distinct from the combined history of all countries, which is not a rope of sand, but a continuous development, and is not a burden on the memory, but an illumination of the soul. It moves in a succession to which the nations are subsidiary. Their story will be told, not for their own sake, but in reference and subordination to a higher series, according to the time and degree in which they contribute to the common fortunes of Mankind.'

Toynbee shares that vision with Acton, and since I first read the abridgement in the 1990s I have shared it as well.

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NOTE [1]: Volume One of Toynbee's Study was published in 1934. The "standard practice" was, let's say, standard at that time -- or earlier, when Toynbee observed it and perhaps made a mental note. The omitted words that start the first sentence may be considered insulting to historians who kept to standard practice; this may explain why the Study may not have been generally well received among historians.