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 Immortals" at the time ranked him higher than Marx, Muhammad, or Voltaire (Catlin, 1956, p. 167). The work's professional reception was never comparable.
His severest critics have felt that his Study has interrupted the positive direction of historical
writing. At the same time, scholars moved by
Toynbee's efforts have not been wanting. These sympathizers, however, have refused conversion to
his system of history (Gargan, 1961, p. 1).
Wit...