Toynbee and Latouche

Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History. The complete abridgement: 1960.

Robert Latouche (1961): The Birth of Western Economy. Online I find the 2005 edition as a Google Book with 42 preview pages (of 376 pages); but page xiii (from which I quote below) is not one of them. Also online I find the 2013 edition as a Google Book with 58 preview pages, including the text that I quoted -- but the pages are not numbered. The relevant page is the first page of the Introduction, with text that begins "ANY ATTEMPT TO TRAGE the origins ..."

If I was Latouche I'd be ouTRAGEd.

From the Introduction of Robert Latouche's The Birth of Western Economy (page xiii in the 1961 edition):

Any attempt to trace the origins of medieval economic life in the West must inevitably raise in its most material form the problem, often debated but never solved, of the transition from the ancient world to the Middle Ages...

The whole conception of a middle age is gradually breaking down, or at least is in process of changing. The idea of inserting this vast period between the ancient world and modern times sprang first from the imagination of seventeenth-century scholars, and it was not until 1838 that its chronological limits were officially laid down...

Latouche goes on to say that the purpose of his book is "to trace the gradual development of economic life in Western Europe during the period ending with the eleventh century". The book's subtitle, by the way, is "Economic Aspects of the Dark Ages". And in the Foreword Philip Grierson mentions "those centuries of European history which are usefully if now somewhat unfashionably known as the Dark Ages." 

The Dark Ages: "often debated but never solved", Latouche says. And now we mostly just bicker about what to call that era. 

There can be little doubt we are experiencing the decline of our own civilization.


The Toynbee quote below begins on page 38 in the introductory chapter of the abridgement.

The illusion of progress as something which proceeds in a straight line is an example of that tendency to over-simplification which the human mind displays in all its activities. In their 'periodizations' our historians dispose their periods in a single series end to end, like the sections of a bamboo stem between joint and joint or the sections of the patent extensible handle on the end of which an up-to-date modern chimney-sweep pokes his brush up the flue. On the brush-handle which our modern historians have inherited there were originally two joints only -- 'ancient' and 'modern', roughly though not exactly corresponding to the Old Testament and the New Testament and to the dual back-to-back reckoning of dates B.C. and A.D. ... 

As time has gone on, our historians have found it convenient to extend their telescopic brush-handle by adding a third section, which they have called 'medieval' because they have inserted it between the other two...

That's just what Latouche was talking about.

But we have strayed from the point, which is that an equation of Hellenic and Western history with History itself -- 'ancient and modern' if you like -- is mere parochialism and impertinence.

I can't say for sure whether by "impertinence" Toynbee means rudeness or irrelevance.


I found it interesting that both Toynbee and Latouche found the parceling-out of historical time interesting enough to bring it up in their opening thoughts.