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.
//
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.
