Abstract
Arnold Toynbee may be considered one of the most remarkable historians of the previous century, not only because of the impressive achievement of his work, but also for the many, often heated, debates it has aroused. He is especially known for his chief work A Study of History, a world history comprising no less than ten volumes (1934–1954). Toynbee differentiates 21 civilizations, of which 5 still exist: the Western, Orthodox Christian, Islamic, Hindu, and Far Eastern. A brief outline is given of the design of this study and its underlying theory, explaining the rise of civilizations from primitive societies, followed by the growth, breakdown, subsequent disintegration, and final collapse of civilizations. In the first two decades after the Second World War Toynbee’s Study of History brought him fame with the general public, and initially it also attracted attention in the scholarly world. Eventually, however, his study did not convince his fellow historians. Toynbee was criticized on both matters of content and the theories involved in his study. The Dutch historian P. Geyl has been the most outspoken critic of Toynbee on both points. His arguments are discussed, making use, among other things, of his private notes. Notwithstanding the criticism levelled against Toynbee in the scholarly world, he remained for quite some time immensely popular with the general public. This discrepancy between a popular adulation on the one hand and a professional hostility on the other is remarkable. At present, the situation is different, however, since Toynbee has almost fallen into oblivion, both with the general public and the scholarly world. This is inopportune in the sense that Toynbee’s approach of envisaging history globally is currently of more topical interest than ever.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
- 1.
The year 1889 has been a memorable year for the next century. For, besides Toynbee, it is the year of birth of, among others, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, R.G. Collingwood, Gabriel Marcel, and Charlie Chaplin as well.
- 2.
D.C. Somervell ed., Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History. Abridgement of volumes i-vi (London, 1946); idem, Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History. Abridgement of volumes vii–x (London, 1957).
- 3.
The details of Toynbee’s life and career are to be found in the excellent and scholarly biography by William H. McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee. A Life (Oxford, 1989). The book is well-documented, in particular the extensive correspondence with his family being most valuable. It is fortunate that McNeill is the biographer of Toynbee, since he has written himself a well-known world history, being in this sense Toynbee’s successor (The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago, 1963)).
- 4.
Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. x (London, 1954), 213.
- 5.
The programme of Greats has generated many prominent scholars, like Gilbert Murray, H.A.L. Fischer, Ernest Barker, Alfred Zimmern, George Clark, R.G. Collingwood, Gilbert Ryle, I.A. Richmond, Isaiah Berlin, and Bernard Williams.
- 6.
Toynbee, Study, vol. x, 136.
- 7.
Ibid., 94.
- 8.
The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon (London, 1916).
- 9.
Toynbee, Study, vol. vii, x.
- 10.
Toynbee, Study, vol. x, 232.
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
Initially the notions ‘society’ and ‘civilizations’ are used interchangeably by Toynbee. Part C of vol. i, for instance, entitled ‘The comparative study of civilizations’, begins with a chapter on ‘A survey of societies of the [human] species’, in which a description is given of the various civilizations (51).
- 13.
‘societies … (unlike their articulations called states) are independent entities in the sense that each of them constitutes by itself an “intelligible field of historical study”, but which at the same time are all representatives of a single species’ (ibid.).
- 14.
Toynbee, Study, vol. i, 149–71.
- 15.
Ibid., 151.
- 16.
Ibid., 157. Though Toynbee does not refer in this respect to Hegel, the latter’s Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte is the most well-known and extensively elaborated exemplification of the unitary view of civilization. For in Hegel’s view the process of civilization passed from the East to the West, culminating in Western civilization. In his work Hegel indeed sees the historical process as a movement in a straight line, expressing as well the common clichés about the Orient.
- 17.
Ibid., 299.
- 18.
Toynbee, Study, vol. iii, 192.
- 19.
Toynbee was introduced to the philosophy of Bergson by the philosopher A.D. Lindsay (1879–1952), who was not only a don at Balliol College in Oxford, when Toynbee studied there, but also became a close friend to him (McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, 25). In 1911 Lindsay published The Philosophy of Bergson. McNeill says that ‘from 1906 to 1916, Alexander Lindsay exercised a powerful influence on Toynbee … inasmuch as Lindsay’s version of Bergsonian evolutionary thinking helped to wean Toynbee away from his inherited Anglican faith’, saying elsewhere that ‘Toynbee’s most ambitious and systematic thought remained under the sway of this sort of vague Bergsonianism (mediated and no doubt coloured by Lindsay) until after 1920’ (McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, 25–6, 303). In his A Study of History Toynbee extensively quotes from Bergson’s Evolution Créatrice and Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion. His friendship with Lindsay shattered, however, when Toynbee resigned his fellowship at Balliol in 1916 (McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, 85).
- 20.
Toynbee, Study, vol. vi, 283.
- 21.
Toynbee, Study, vol. vii, 393.
- 22.
Ibid., 422.
- 23.
Ibid., 423.
- 24.
Ibid., 513. At present Toynbee distinguishes four higher religions: Christianity, Islam, Hindu, and Mahayana-Buddhism.
- 25.
See note 3.
- 26.
McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, 227.
- 27.
Ibid., 162.
- 28.
Ibid., 177. R.G. Collingwood wrote Toynbee privately on 12 October 1939: ‘Like everybody else who is at all interested in history (I suppose) I have been reading your last three volumes, and I must write you a word of congratulation. It is astonishing to me that anyone should possess such a body of sheer historical learning, … hardly less so that anybody who does possess it should be able to wield it instead of merely lying down under it’ (ibid.). This positive comment by Collingwood is curious, because in his lectures on philosophy of history, delivered in 1936 and published posthumously in The Idea of History (1946), he gives a critical assessment of the principles used by Toynbee in the first three volumes of his Study of History (159–165), saying that it represents ‘a restatement of historical positivism’ (161). But he also maintains that ‘[i]n the detail of his work, Toynbee shows a very fine historical sense and only rarely allows his actual historical judgements to be falsified by the errors in his principles’ (164). It is interesting to note that for his part Toynbee has levelled a serious criticism at Collingwood’s philosophy of history (‘R.G. Collingwood’s view of the historian’s relation to the objects that he studies’, in: A Study of History, vol. ix, 718–37). For references to Toynbee’s interpretation of Collingwood’s philosophy of history, see Jan van der Dussen, History as a Science. The Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood (Dordrecht, 2012), 74–5, 86–7, 292.
- 29.
History and Theory 4 (1965), 212–233.
- 30.
This is made possible by a complete bibliography, compiled by S. Fiona Morton, which appeared in 1980, and comprises all of Toynbee’s publications and the commentaries on his work (S. Fiona Morton, A Bibliography of Arnold J. Toynbee (Oxford, 1980)).
- 31.
NRC/Handelsblad, 14-10-1975.
- 32.
At an advanced age, he still wrote a major study on Hannibal (Hannibal’s Legacy: The Hannibalic War’s Effects on Roman Life (London, 1965)).
- 33.
Pieter Geyl, ‘Toynbee’s System of Civilizations’, Journal of the History of Ideas 9, nr. 1 (1948), 93–124. The article is a translation of a lecture delivered by Geyl in November 1946 at Utrecht, the Netherlands; reprinted in: Pieter Geyl, Debates with Historians (London and Glasgow, 1962), 112–54. This edition will be used here.
- 34.
‘Can We Know the Pattern of the Past? Discussion between Pieter Geyl and Arnold J. Toynbee’, in: Pieter Geyl, Arnold J. Toynbee, and Pitirim A. Sorokin, The Pattern of the Past: Can We Determine It? (Boston, 1949), 73–94.
- 35.
H.R. Trevor-Roper, Men and Events. Historical Essays (New York, 1957), 306.
- 36.
Toynbee, Study, vol. xii, Reconsiderations, 575.
- 37.
There is also a special reason for paying attention to Geyl’s comments on Toynbee. For the present author possesses his copy of A Study of History, which is full of notes and comments.
- 38.
Geyl, Debates with Historians, 119.
- 39.
See note 37.
- 40.
The translations of the notes are by the present author.
- 41.
Toynbee, Study, vol. vi, 149–68.
- 42.
Geyl, Debates with Historians, 187–210.
- 43.
Ibid., 188.
- 44.
Ibid., 201.
- 45.
Ibid., 203.
- 46.
Ibid., 208.
- 47.
McNeill calls it ‘the cruelest and wittiest attack of all’ (Arnold J. Toynbee, 239).
- 48.
Trevor-Roper, Men and Events, 299–324, there 299.
- 49.
Ibid., 313–14.
- 50.
In the same vein, Geyl declares that he regards Toynbee’s prophecy ‘as a blasphemy against Western Civilization’ (Debates with Historians, 210).
- 51.
McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, 206.
- 52.
Ibid., 216, 226.
- 53.
‘Chambers simply set out to make Toynbee’s ideas “communicable” – and he succeeded, beyond anyone’s expectations’, McNeill observes (ibid., 217). A remarkable illustration is a reaction to the editors of Time Magazine saying: ‘In these days when Americans are called upon to make decisions of direct consequence to the whole world, they should understand something of the nature and course of civilization. Time and Toynbee have helped to fill that need’ (ibid., 215).
- 54.
McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, 246.
- 55.
For a discussion of the turmoil triggered by the Reith lectures, see McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, 223–4.
- 56.
McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, 240.
- 57.
Ibid., 268.
- 58.
Arnold Toynbee and Daisaku Ikeda, Choose life. A dialogue, Richard L. Gage ed. (London, 1976).
- 59.
Ibid., 9–10.
- 60.
McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, 239.
- 61.
Ibid., 286.
It is interesting to note that R.G. Collingwood developed the same viewpoint in his essay The Historical Imagination, published in 1935 and reprinted in: R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946, revis. ed. 1993), 231–49. Speaking of the historian’s ‘web of imaginative construction’, he says that it ‘cannot derive its validity from being pegged down … to certain given facts … So far from relying for its validity upon the support of given facts, it actually serves as the touchstone by which we decide whether alleged facts are genuine’. He ends his essay with qualifying the idea of the historical imagination ‘as a self-dependent, self-determining, and self-justifying form of thought’ (ibid., 244, 249).
- 62.
Ibid.
Elsewhere McNeill maintains: ‘To be sure, historical writing is always poetic. Toynbee’s work was unusual only in making the poetic dimension of his achievement more transparent than the conventions of academic history, as defined in German seminars of the late nineteenth century, had allowed’ (ibid. 162).
- 63.
Distinguishing historical narratives from novels, Collingwood maintains: ‘the historian’s picture stands in a peculiar relation to something called evidence. The only way in which the historian or any one else can judge, even tentatively, of its truth is by considering this relation; and, in practice, what we mean by asking whether an historical statement is true is whether it can be justified by an appeal to the evidence: for a truth unable to be so justified is to the historian a thing of no interest’ (Collingwood, The Idea of History, 246).
- 64.
Toynbee, Study, vol. x, 232.
- 65.
McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, 185.
- 66.
An excellent analysis of nationalism is given in Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983). Gellner not only gives a typology of the various forms of nationalism, but also argues, among other things, that nationalism plays a prominent part in the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society.
- 67.
McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, 170.
- 68.
It should be noted, however, that his work includes much more than this magnum opus, comprising an overwhelming amount of publications on the most diverse subjects. This is evidenced by the extensive bibliography of Toynbee (see note 30), which illustrates the impressive scope of Toynbee’s work, parts of it having been translated into 27 languages.
- 69.
McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, 284–5.
- 70.
This idea was prevailing in the nineteenth century and adhered to until well into the twentieth century. Collingwood gives a notable example of it, when he observes: ‘An American lady whom I met in Bali [Collingwood visited Bali in December 1938] on first seeing the mud-walled and grass-thatched villages of that country, asked me “How long do you think it would take to civilize these people?” but a few hours later when she had heard a Balinese orchestra and seen Balinese dancing, was sorry she had spoken’ (R.G. Collingwood, ‘What “Civilization” Means’, in: idem, The New Leviathan, revis. ed., David Boucher ed. (Oxford, 1992), 480–511, there 485).
- 71.
Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York, 1996).
- 72.
Ibid., 40.
- 73.
See note 50.
- 74.
Trevor-Roper, Men and Events, 321.
- 75.
‘Eastern Asia preserves a number of historical assets that may enable it to become the geographical and cultural axis for the unification of the whole world’, Toynbee maintains. He subsequently mentions eight assets to illustrate his viewpoint, but then continues to focus on the part to be played by China, ending this passage with saying: ‘In fact, China, for most of the time since the third century B.C., has been the center of gravity for half the world. Within the last 500 years, the whole world has been knit together by Western enterprise on all except the political plane. Perhaps it is China’s destiny now to give political unity and peace not just to half but to all the world’ (Toynbee and Ikeda, Choose Life, 231–3). Leaving aside his belief in a global political unity and peace, Toynbee shows a noticeable foresight as regards the increasingly important part to be played by China in the world.
- 76.
Geyl, Toynbee, Sorokin, The Pattern of the Past, 82.
- 77.
See note 3.
- 78.
McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, 285.
- 79.
Geyl, Toynbee, Sorokin, The Pattern of the Past, 82.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
van der Dussen, J. (2016). Toynbee and his Critics. In: Studies on Collingwood, History and Civilization. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20672-1_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20672-1_8
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-20671-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-20672-1
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)