"History in the objective meaning of the word, is the process of change; in the subjective meaning, it is the study of how and why one situation changes into another."
Few works of history had such a precise and romantic origin as Arnold Joseph Toynbee's “A Study of History.” The 3½‐million word, 12‐volume story of mankind, which took 40 years to complete, was begun on Saturday, Sept. 17, 1921, when the author was traveling west from Istanbul on the fabled Orient Express. He had spent the day watching the awesome Thracian countryside slip by and pondering the region's glorious and gory past.
“That evening I was still standing at the window, overwhelmed by the beauty of the Bela Palanka Gorge in the light of the full moon, as our train bore down upon Nish,” he recalled, adding:
“If I had been cross‐examined on my activities during that day, I should have sworn that my attention had been wholly absorbed by the entrancing scenes that were passing continually before my outward eye. Yet, before I went to sleep that night, I found that I had put down on half a sheet of notepaper a list of topics which, in its contents and their order, was substantially identical with the plan of this book as it now stands.”
- New York Times (obituary)
Toynbee began his Study of History in 1922, inspired by seeing Bulgarian peasants wearing fox-skin caps like those described by Herodotus as the headgear of Xerxes’ troops. This incident reveals the characteristics that give his work its special quality—his sense of the vast continuity of history and his eye for its pattern, his immense erudition, and his acute observation.
I love that opening from the New York Times. "Precise and romantic" indeed.
Britannica says 1922. A rounding error. I wish today to convey not the importance of nitpicking details to death, but the general tenor of Toynbee's work. I will say little and quote much, as that seems appropriate.
Oh, and I checked:
TOYNBEE'S APPROACH
Toynbee presented history as the rise and fall of civilizations, rather than the history of nation-states or of ethnic groups. He identified 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.
Key point: Toynbee described the growth of civilizations in terms of "challenge and response": As long as a civilization responds successfully to the challenge, it grows. An unsuccessful response leads to decline, and the challenge repeats. Seems like almost a truism. Contrast Spengler:
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.
Unlike Spengler in his The Decline of the West, Toynbee did not regard the death of a civilization as inevitable, for it may or may not continue to respond to successive challenges.
Again: "challenge and response".
DESCRIPTION of the WORK
A Study of History (1934–61) put forward a philosophy of history, based on an analysis of the cyclical development and decline of civilizations
Instead of narrating episodes or telling the story of this or that nation or people, Mr. Toynbee ranged over all recorded history in dazzlingly erudite detail. Taking a panoramic view, he was fascinated by the rise and fall of civilizations, of which he counted 26 from ancient times to the present.
He suggested that spiritual rather than material forces controlled the course of history and that individuals played a creative (or destructive) role in the unfolding of events.
A Study of History is the 12-volume magnum opus of Arnold J. Toynbee, finished in 1961. In it he traces the birth, growth and decay of some 21 to 23 major civilizations in the world. These are: Egyptian, Andean, Sinic, Minoan, Sumeric, Mayan, Indic, Hittite, Hellenic, Western, Orthodox Christian (Russia), Far Eastern (Korea/Japan), Orthodox Christian (main body), Far Eastern (main body), Iranic, Arabic, Hindu, Mexic, Yucatec, and Babylonic. There are four 'abortive civilisations' (Abortive Far Western Christian, Abortive Far Eastern Christian, Abortive Scandinavian , Abortive Syriac) and five 'arrested civilisations' (Polynesian, Eskimo, Nomadic, Ottoman, Spartan); thirty in all.
Toynbee applies his model to each of these civilizations, painstakingly detailing the stages through which they all pass: genesis, growth, time of troubles, universal state, and disintegration.
You'll find discrepancies in the count of civilizations. It's not critically important. If you remember the five stages of civilization, and "challenge and response", you've got the outline of the grand story Toynbee told.
CRITICISM of the WORK
By the time the war broke out, he had achieved his first burst of fame for his masterwork, six volumes of which had been published by 1939. Oddly, that fame began in the United States, for Mr. Toynbee was virtually ignored by professional historians in Britain. Indeed, The English Historical Review, the major journal, did not review “A Study of History” until 1956.
One explanation for that coolness was the author's attack on parochial histories and on the prestigious “Cambridge Modern History,” a joint Work of Many specialists. A further explanation was that Mr. Toynbee's one‐man attempt at a historical synthesis was thought presumptuous.
Toynbee has been severely criticized by other historians. In general, the critique has been leveled at his use of myths and metaphors as being of comparable value to factual data and at the soundness of his general argument about the rise and fall of civilizations, which relies too much on a view of religion as a regenerative force. Many critics complained that the conclusions he reached were those of a Christian moralist rather than of a historian. His work, however, has been praised as a stimulating answer to the specializing tendency of modern historical research.
Volume XII was occasioned by the clangorous disputation that was set off by “A Study of History” virtually from the outset, for Mr. Toynbee had ventured what few historians dared: an interpretation of history as well as a chronicling of it. He had, moreover, sought to recount the events of thousands of years in an unconventional fashion.
Defending himself and his views on his 75th birthday in 1964, he said:
“I have never made the choice between being a historian of politics, economics, religion, the arts, science and technology: my conscious and deliberate aim has been to be student of human affairs studied as a whole, instead of their being partitioned into the so-called ‘disciplines.’”
The Times obituary makes it sound as if Toynbee was snubbed by British historians, his work ignored from 1934 to 1956. That's hard to imagine, if you've read as little as two pages of the Study.
Toynbee does say that historians "generally illustrate rather than correct" the ideas of their times. I guess you could take offense at that, as a historian, if you tried.
The rise of the "would-be self-sufficient national sovereign state has led historians to choose nations as the normal fields of historical study," Toynbee writes. I guess you could consider that an "attack on parochial histories", if you chose not to be open to Toynbee's ideas.
Toynbee says that "the conversion of the English from the religion of the so-called Heroic Age to Western Christianity" was "an act which merged half a dozen isolated communities of barbarians in the common weal of a nascent Western Society." In other words, it was the start of Western Civilization. I might be put off by that, if I was a historian born and raised on the continent. But I think not. I think I'd have turned and looked for similar rudimentary beginnings in the nation of my birth. I expect I'd have found them.
Take another look at that long paragraph on page two of the abridged Study. Toynbee touches on the conversion, the barbarians, the Feudal System, the Norman Conquest, the Danish invasions, France, the Renaissance, Northern Italy, the Reformation, and the new worlds overseas. All of that is the stuff of history. The paragraph takes almost the whole page -- and it's the abridged version! Toynbee is not taking potshots at other historians; he's assembling history into one big picture. How could anyone take offense at that? How could anyone not be fascinated?
It was thought presumptuous? Come on! And there seems to be a problem with "his use of myths and metaphors as being of comparable value to factual data". But I don't see why that would be a problem. Economists do it all the time.
Another criticism of Toynbee's Study is that it "relies too much" on religion. I can see that. I remember just skimming over a lot of the religion stuff. But it was easy to keep the picture of history that Toynbee had so painstakingly assembled, and just ignore the "Christian moralist" crap. I had no trouble keeping the bathwater and tossing that baby.
What I was left with was a full picture of human civilization that I could use in toto as a background for the massive business cycle that I call the Cycle of Civilization.
LINKS
Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Volumes I-VI by D.C. Somervell
Full Text of A Study of History, Abridgement Volumes I-VI
Theodore A. Sumberg, Toynbee and the Decline of Western Civilization, 1947
Ashley Montagu, editor. "Toynbee And History: Critical Essays And Reviews", 1956
Full text of "Toynbee And History: Critical Essays And Reviews"
The New York Times, "Arnold Toynbee, Historian, Dies at 86", 23 October 1975
Full text of The New York Times, Thursday, October 23, 1975
The New York Times, Headliners, 26 October 1975
Krishan Kumar, The Return of Civilization—and of Arnold Toynbee?, 2014
Krishan Kumar, The Return of Civilization—and of Arnold Toynbee?, PDF
Greg Lewicki, Return of Toynbee. European Union as universal state, Muslims as internal proletariat, 2017
