Arnold J. Toynbee

:This page is about the universal historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee; for the economic historian Arnold Toynbee see this article. For further Toynbees and related topics see the disambiguation page Toynbee.

Toynbee's ideas and approach to history

Taking an organismic approach similar to the one used by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West, Toynbee presented history as the rise and fall of civilizations, rather than the history of nation-states or of ethnic groups. He identified his 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.

Related Topics:
Oswald Spengler - Roman Empire - Russia - Balkans - Greco-Roman civilization

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Toynbee rejected Spengler's deterministic view that civilizations rise and fall according to a natural and inevitable cycle. Toynbee expressed great admiration for Ibn Khaldun and in particular the Muqaddimah, the preface to Khaldun's own universal history, which notes many systemic biases that intrude on historical analysis via the evidence.

Related Topics:
Ibn Khaldun - Muqaddimah - Systemic bias

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Toynbee presented the history of each civilization in terms of challenge-and-response. Civilizations arose in response to some extremely difficult set of challenges, when "creative minorities" devised solutions to these challenges that reoriented their entire society. Some 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. Toynbee argued that "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder."

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Rightly or not, critics attacked Toynbee's theory for emphasizing religion over other aspects of life when assessing the big pictures of civilizations. In this respect, the debate resembles the contemporary one over Samuel Huntington's theory of the so-called "clash of civilizations".

Related Topics:
Samuel Huntington's - Clash of civilizations

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Toynbee's ideological approach— "metaphysical speculations dressed up as history" is a commonplace modern assessment http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=12965— was subjected to an effective critique by Pieter Geyl, and, to his credit, Toynbee did not evade the public dialogue, which appeared in print (1949, reprinted in 1968) in The Pattern of the Past: Can We Determine It?. The book linked essays by Toynbee and Geyl to an analysis of Toynbee's philosophy of history, contributed by Pitirim A. Sorokin. An article written by Hugh Trevor-Roper, "Arnold Toynbee's Millennium" - describing Toynbee's work as a "Philosophy of Mish-Mash" - dramatically undermined Toynbee's reputation. In the September 1956 issue of Commentary Magazine, the social scientist Ashley Montagu assembled it and over thirty other historians' articles to form a symposium on Toynbee's A Study of History, which was published as a book (1956)

Related Topics:
Pieter Geyl - Hugh Trevor-Roper - Millennium - Commentary Magazine - Ashley Montagu

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