Toynbee's Study of History

In 1952, British historian Arnold Toynbee published the last of the ten planned original volumes of A Study of History, a immense work on which he had been engaged since the 1920s, and the first four volumes of which had appeared in the 1930s. Two final volumes were published in 1961, one an atlas and gazeteer (not consulted for this essay), and a volume of Reconsiderations, at once answering his critics and re-evaluating aspects of his own work.

The title of the whole work was simple, sweeping, and in a way misleading. A Study of History was neither a narrative world history like H.G. Well's or William H. McNeill's nor a treatise on historiography, though it had elements of both. In its initial intent it was an inquiry into the overall dynamics of history: why civilizations emerge and rise, and why most of them have eventually declined and collapsed. Toynbee claimed to have discerned general laws of history, not rigidly deterministic, but none the less shaping the course of civilizations. By the end of the project, however, it became nearly a work of apologetics, primarily for Christianity but also for religion in general (Coulborn, 1956, pp. 155-56).

For a time in the middle 1950s, Toynbee and A Study of History enjoyed an immense popular reputation, especially in the United States. Several thousand copies of the whole great work wre sold by 1955, and several hundred thousand copies of an abridgement (Ashley-Montagu, 1956, p. vii). One list of "World's Immorta

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mpts to stave off collapse only deepen its predicament, just as Toynbee suggests of a civilization in disintegration. The Galactic Empire itself is a Toynbeean Universal State on the grandest scale. Even more striking is the dynamic of the rising Foundation. In Toynbee's scheme, a still-growing civilization is periodically confronted by crises, which it must surmount to continue in growth. This is Toynbee's theme of challenge and response. If the response is successful, the civilization continues to grow; if it fails, the civilization enters "breakdown," and thenceforth follows a deterministic sequence till its eventual dissolution. (Toynbee modified but did not abandon the latter in his 1962 Reconsideration.) Although the rise of the Foundation is itself deterministic in a way preplanned by Seldon himself, the succession of Seldon Crises is a neat formalization of Toynbee's conception of the successive challenges faced by a growing civilization. Finally, Seldon himself is a fictional heir to Toynbee. It is true that the methodology of the two theories is entirely different. Arnold Toynbee offered no theory to account for the deterministic fate of civilizations in breakdown. His argument is purely descriptive; he tr

Category: History - T