Thucydides as the Pelopponesian War broke out in 431 BC. At least till religious themes came to the fore in the last four volumes, A Study of History can be called an development of this conception.
Toynbee thus placed himself in a school of thought inclined to look for overarching patterns in history. His most recent predecessor in that effort, highly influential in the early 20th century, was Oswald Spengler, who had set forth his views in a book provocatively entitled The Decline of the West. Spengler took an organicist, Hegelian idealist, and determinist view of history: to him, civilizations were entities born with a fixed lifetime and predetermined fate (Engel-Janosi, 1961, p. 67).
Toynbee rejected this view at the most fundamental level. To him a civilization in its creative phase of growth (not necessarily geographical) had no fixed course or limits, but could go on from challenge to challenge. Only when it failed some challenge did it enter breakdown, and thence into a more nearly predetermined course toward eventual dissolution. Even then, a broken-down
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