Biography
Article abstract: His challenge and response theory of history, set forth in his twelve-volume A Study of History, made Toynbee an important twentieth century philosopher of history.
Early Life
Arnold Joseph Toynbee was born into a lower-middle-class family, rich intellectually if not socially. His family—including his grandfather, uncles, and parents—was scholarly, humanitarian, and pious. One uncle, also named Arnold Toynbee, earned distinction as a historian, philosopher, and reformer. Toynbee himself credited his mother, a historian and one of the first women to receive a degree from a British university, with first turning his thoughts to history. At Winchester and at Oxford, from which he was graduated in 1911, he received a traditional classical education. A product of late Victorian and Edwardian eras, Toynbee learned from men such as James Bryce and Sir Lewis Namier. During 1911 and 1912, Toynbee traveled in Greece and studied at the British Archaeological School in Athens. In 1912 at twenty-three, he became a Fellow and tutor at Balliol College, Oxford, in the field of ancient history. In 1913, he published a scholarly article on Sparta, and both his teaching and scholarship demonstrated promise.
World War I interrupted his academic career. Though a medical condition kept him from military service, he served in the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office and engaged in propaganda activities. Toynbee’s generations—hopeful before 1914—experienced the trauma of World War I, and that event stimulated the writing of his first two books by the age of twenty-six. Both Nationality and the War (1915) and The New Europe (1915) wrestled with two important themes that troubled civilization at the time: nationality and economics. With idealism similar to that of President Woodrow Wilson, Toynbee viewed self-determination as the remedy for nationalism and the League of Nations as the means of international cooperation. His works also revealed his skill as a writer. In 1919, as a member of the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference as an expert on the Middle East, Toynbee encountered the rough-and-tumble of international politics.
In 1919, at the age of thirty, Toynbee became professor of Byzantine and modern Greek languages and history, an endowed chair at the University of London. This appointment recognized his reputation as a scholar and his ability to foster cultural ties between Great Britain and Greece. When fighting broke out between Greece and Turkey, Toynbee took a leave of absence and covered the war as a correspondent for The Manchester Guardian. The result was another book, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey (1922), a plea for understanding different civilizations. Toynbee’s fairness to the Turks angered the Greeks in Great Britain who funded his endowed chair, and as a result, in 1924 he left the position. Thus far in his life, Toynbee’s intellectual and professional interests focused on the ancient world and the Middle East, both of which shaped his view of history. His knowledge of the classics and his understanding of the world as it was since 1914 contributed to the broad conception of history evident in his later works.
Life’s Work
From 1925 until 1955 Toynbee served as Director of Studies for the Royal Institute of International Affairs and as Research Professor of International History at the University of London. In these capacities he made his most important contributions: his annual Survey of International Affairs and his monumental A Study of History (1934-1961). Beginning in the early 1920’s and continuing through World War II, Toynbee wrote either all or part of, or edited, yearly volumes in the Survey of International Affairs series. Neither catalogs nor chronologies, these works discussed broad themes...
(This entire section contains 2009 words.)
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and analyzed world events. Toynbee displayed his historical imagination in these works; given the importance of events from the 1920’s to the 1940’s, his commentary was significant. In the 1933 volume, for example, Toynbee criticized Nazism as a triumph of paganism over Christianity. Adolf Hitler himself was impressed by Toynbee’s grasp of world affairs, and in 1936, before he marched into the Rhineland, the führer conferred briefly with Toynbee.
The work for which Toynbee is most noted is A Study of History. Typically, he spent half the year working on the current volume of the Survey of International Affairs and the other half on A Study of History, and the material and themes for the two often overlapped. He began serious work on A Study of History in 1927; the first three volumes were published in 1934, and the final one in 1961. His analytical world history examined the origin, growth, and decline of civilization. In the tumult of the interwar years, Western civilization, with its inability to deal with crises, appeared bankrupt politically and spiritually, and Toynbee sought answers. He wanted a synthesis in history, not the compartmentalized scholarship of the specialist. Rather than focus on nations as the unit of historical study, Toynbee insisted on studying civilizations, classifying and comparing them, and he proceeded to identify different societies in world history. At first, he distinguished twenty-one, but by the end of his A Study of History, he added several more to his list.
Toynbee’s philosophy of history began with a discussion of the origins, or creation, of civilization. Rejecting race, God, and environment as explanations, he reasoned that societies emerged when a particular people responded successfully to a challenge, or adversity, such as climate or geography. The unpredictable human element was a major factor in this dynamic historical process of challenge and response. Next was the problem of a society’s growth, and this second stage was not automatic. A people must continue to respond to challenges and meet problem after problem. The key to growth, and this was a virtual law of history for Toynbee, was spiritual. By spiritual he meant more than Christian religion, because he pointed to the influence of the creative individual or the creative community on the uncreative majority in the civilization. This psychic, ethereal quality in a people brought growth. His ideas about the importance of the spiritual and the creative individual showed the influence of Henri Bergson on Toynbee.
Toynbee further examined the breakdown of civilizations in A Study of History. Decline occurred when the creative power in the minority failed and social unity fractured. The key was a failure of a people to respond, and therefore it was self-failure or suicide. Societies could stop at this stage, and the next stage, disintegration, did not necessarily follow. Nevertheless, if social and individual schisms developed, disintegration ensued; the proletariat withdrew support from the ruling elites, and these divisions ruined the society. Promiscuity and a sense of purposelessness characterized this social decline. Toynbee ended his description of the downward spiral with a spiritual challenge: Western civilization could survive only by returning to its Christian heritage. By 1939, Toynbee had finished the first six volumes of his A Study of History and in a unified manner had delineated the process of growth and decline for civilizations as well as offered a solution.
During the 1940’s and 1950’s, Toynbee’s stature as historian and prophet increased, and interest in his work mounted. Unwilling to rest on his achievements, he continued to write, but the remaining volumes of his work compared unfavorably with the previous ones. According to critics, the works were too long and offered little that was new. Toynbee began the seventh volume by discussing services that states provide, a pedestrian theme for his otherwise mystical tone. Yet with that volume, and through several of the remaining ones, he returned to the importance of religion. The chief purpose of history was the refinement of the higher religions; universal states provided universal churches, the highest type of civilization. Though a by-product of the disintegrating state, advancing religions always meant progress. Toynbee believed world religions eventually would achieve unity as one universal spiritual unit and man would come close to perfection. In this vein, Toynbee exhibited a Victorian view of progress. Ironically, after beginning his A Study of History on a very pessimistic note, he ended with an optimistic emphasis. His millennial view of history, which culminated with the kingdom of God, contrasted with the dark view of many modern thinkers.
In the last few volumes of A Study of History, Toynbee touched on miscellaneous topics. He analyzed the ways in which other civilizations have reacted to the West. In his examination of renaissances in European history—including those of Greece and Rome—he pointed to the origins of modern paganism, which led to war and dictatorships. On a personal note, in the tenth volume he acknowledged several influences on his own thinking: his mother, Edward Gibbon, Namier, Plato, Bergson, Saint Augustine, the Bible, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Carl Jung. In addition to A Study of History, Toynbee wrote numerous other books, including two which were autobiographical in nature: Acquaintances (1967) and Experiences (1969).
Summary
Because of the massive range of subjects he covered, Arnold Toynbee was vulnerable to criticism, particularly from specialists and conservatives who attacked his unorthodox view of Christianity as well as his pacifism and internationalism. Critics charged him with distortion of the past and an arbitrary interpretation that forced history to fit a pattern. Historians labeled his method unscientific and unsupported by the evidence, and his classification of civilizations subjective and artificial. Some detractors pointed to factual errors, while others focused on Toynbee’s overemphasis on religion and his moralizing conclusions. Scholars viewed Toynbee unfavorably because they distrusted simple generalizations about the past.
With Reconsiderations (1961), the last volume of A Study of History, Toynbee answered his critics. He defended his comparative historical method, his stress on religion, and his general laws, and stood by his interpretations. In a humble manner, however, he admitted errors and expanded his classification of civilizations to include several more. The best defense for Toynbee, however, remained the overwhelming mass and erudition of his writings. Though flawed, as critics proved, Toynbee ranks with the great historians for the impact of his provocative conclusions. In fairness to him, questions posed to Toynbee were issues for the entire historical profession. Like many intellectuals after World War I, he criticized Western secularism and rejected features of the modern world. Ironically, though an agnostic in his youth, he relied on religion in the end. He skillfully recognized the importance of myth in the historical process. In an age of scholarly specialization, Toynbee dared propose a total view of the past. His writings demonstrated his skill as a literary artist, as well as a historian. As a proponent of world unity, he revealed the romantic character typical of his life and work. Toynbee argued that history had meaning and was not irrational or deterministic. His challenge and response theory made him a major philosopher of history for the twentieth century.
Bibliography
Ashley-Montagu, M. F., ed. Toynbee and History. Boston: Sargent, 1956. A general evaluation of Toynbee’s work by thirty writers. Most are critical of his method, philosophy, and religious views.
Bagby, Philip. Culture and History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958. The author presents a theory of culture for understanding history. His comparative, anthropological approach to history is similar to Toynbee’s philosophy of history.
Geyl, Pieter. Debates with Historians. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956. Thirteen essays by the professor of history at the University of Utrecht on historians and historiography. Four critical essays on Toynbee.
Jerrold, Douglas. The Lie About the West. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1954. An attack on the thesis and evidence of Toynbee’s The World and the West (1953), an abridgment of volume 8 of A Study of History.
Samuel, Maurice. The Professor and the Fossil. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956. The author, a journalist and novelist, criticizes Toynbee for slighting Jewish civilization in his A Study of History. Asserts that Toynbee is guilty of factual errors and serious omissions.
Singer, C. Gregg. Toynbee. Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1974. A clear exposition and analysis of Toynbee’s philosophy of history from the perspective of orthodox Christianity.
Stromberg, Roland N. Arnold J. Toynbee: Historian for an Age in Crisis. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972. An excellent discussion of Toynbee’s career, writings, and philosophy, as well as an examination of criticisms of Toynbee.
Criticism by Arnold Toynbee
