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Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975)

Toynbee compared the histories of some two dozen civilisations to find the pattern of their rise and fall, and gave the answer in twelve volumes of A Study of History (1934–61). Civilisations arise when a society meets a hard challenge with a creative response, grow for as long as each response brings a new challenge that is also met, and break down when the creative minority that led them hardens into a dominant one that the rest no longer follow. By his own account in Civilization on Trial (1948), he conceived the comparison in 1914, reading Thucydides and finding the Peloponnesian War contemporary with his own; when he read Spengler in 1920 he found much of it anticipated, and parted from him over the fixed span: civilisations are not organisms with a fixed span, and their course depends on how they respond. In the later volumes the purpose of the study moved from civilisations to the higher religions that grow out of their disintegration. The work made him one of the most widely read historians of the mid-twentieth century and drew fierce criticism from other historians.

Arnold Joseph Toynbee was born in London on 14 April 1889, the nephew of the economic historian Arnold Toynbee. He was educated at Winchester and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a first in classics, and became a fellow and tutor in ancient history at Balliol in 1912. During the First World War he worked on intelligence and propaganda for the government, and he attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 as a member of the British delegation. From 1919 to 1924 he was Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History at King’s College London, resigning after the controversy over the pro-Turkish sympathies of The Western Question in Greece and Turkey (1922). In 1925 he became director of studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House, a post he held until 1955, and edited its annual Survey of International Affairs, while holding a research professorship of international history at the London School of Economics. In the Second World War he directed the Foreign Research and Press Service that Chatham House ran for the Foreign Office. The abridgement of the Study by D. C. Somervell (1946) made him a public figure, and Time put him on its cover in 1947. He died in York on 22 October 1975.

Key concepts

The civilisation as the unit. Toynbee held that national histories are not intelligible units, since no nation’s history can be understood on its own, and that the smallest field of study that is intelligible is a civilisation. He counted nineteen or twenty-one full civilisations, with further arrested and abortive ones, and traced their relations of affiliation, a younger civilisation arising from the disintegration of an older one, as the Western and the Orthodox Christian arose from the Hellenic.

Challenge and response. A civilisation is born when a society meets a challenge, of a hard environment, new ground, attack or pressure, with a response that creates something new, and it grows when each successful response leads to a fresh challenge that is also met. The challenge must be neither too weak nor too severe. Growth is led by a creative minority, whose innovations the majority take up by imitation, which Toynbee called mimesis, and it often follows a movement of withdrawal and return, in which creative individuals or groups step aside from society and come back with something new. Growth, on his account, consists less in expansion than in etherialisation, a transfer of energy from outward conquest to inner development.

Breakdown and disintegration. Civilisations break down when the creative minority fails and becomes a dominant minority that rules by force rather than attraction. Society then splits into the dominant minority, an internal proletariat, the people inside the civilisation who no longer identify with it, and an external proletariat of the peoples beyond its frontier. A time of troubles follows; a universal state, like the Roman Empire, gives a respite, and the civilisation’s end is marked by the rise of a universal church in the internal proletariat, which may carry what it valued into a successor.

Religion as the point of history. In the volumes published from 1954 Toynbee reversed his order of priorities: civilisations served the growth of the higher religions, which were the true bearers of progress, rather than churches serving as chrysalises between civilisations. He argued for a convergence of the world’s religions.

Where Toynbee stops

The Dutch historian Pieter Geyl pressed the method from the start, most publicly in their BBC debate of 1948, Can We Know the Pattern of the Past?: Toynbee’s laws, Geyl argued, rest on examples selected to fit, and the historical record, examined case by case, does not bear them out. Hugh Trevor-Roper’s “Arnold Toynbee’s Millennium” (Encounter, 1957) attacked the later volumes as prophecy rather than history, a religious programme presented as the conclusion of an empirical study. Toynbee answered his critics at length in the twelfth volume, Reconsiderations (1961), revising his scheme of civilisations and conceding a number of points.

His description of post-biblical Jewish society as a “fossil” of an extinct Syriac civilisation drew charges of antisemitism, answered most publicly by the Israeli ambassador Abba Eban in 1955; Toynbee revised the characterisation in Reconsiderations.

Key works

See also: Evolution · Civilisation as morphology · Philosophy of history · Spengler