Study of History

* Book: A Study of History. Arnold Toynbee.

URL = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_of_History

Description

"“English historian whose 12-volume A Study of History (1934–61) put forward a philosophy of history, based on an analysis of the cyclical development and decline of civilizations, that provoked much discussion.” [1]

1. From the Wikipedia:

"A Study of History is a 12-volume universal history by the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, published from 1934 to 1961. It received enormous popular attention but according to historian Richard J. Evans, "enjoyed only a brief vogue before disappearing into the obscurity in which it has languished."[1] Toynbee's goal was to trace the development and decay of 19 or 21 world civilizations in the historical record, applying his model to each of these civilizations, detailing the stages through which they all pass: genesis, growth, time of troubles, universal state, and disintegration.

The 19 (or 21) major civilizations, as Toynbee sees them, are: Egyptian, Andean, Sumerian, Babylonic, Hittite, Minoan, Indic, Hindu, Syriac[disambiguation needed], Hellenic, Western, Orthodox Christian (having two branches: the main or Byzantine body and the Russian branch), Far Eastern (having two branches: the main or Chinese-Korean body and the Japanese branch), Persian, Arabic, Hindu, Mayan, Mexican and Yucatec. Moreover, there are three "abortive civilizations" (Abortive Far Western Christian, Abortive Far Eastern Christian, Abortive Scandinavian) and five "arrested civilizations" (Polynesian, Eskimo, Nomadic, Ottoman, Spartan), for a total of 27 or 29."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_of_History)

2. From Encyclopedia.com:

"Arnold Toynbee's multi-volume A Study of History is one of the major works of historical scholarship published in the twentieth century. The first volume was published in London in 1934, and subsequent volumes appeared periodically until the twelfth and final volume was published in London in 1961. A two-volume abridgement of volumes 1-10 was prepared by D. C. Somervell with Toynbee's cooperation and published in 1947 (volume one) and 1957 (volume two) in London.

A Study of History in its original form is a huge work. The first ten volumes contain over six thousand pages and more than three million words. Somervell's abridgement, containing only about one-sixth of the original, runs to over nine hundred pages. The size of the work is in proportion to the grandeur of Toynbee's purpose, which is to analyze the genesis, growth, and fall of every human civilization ever known. In Toynbee's analysis, this amounts to five living civilizations and sixteen extinct ones, as well as several that Toynbee defines as arrested civilizations.

Toynbee detects in the rise and fall of civilizations a recurring pattern, and it is the laws of history behind this pattern that he analyzes in A Study of History.

From the outset, A Study of History was a controversial work. It won wide readership amongst the general public, especially in the United States, and after World War II Toynbee was hailed as a prophet of his times. On the other hand, his work was viewed with skepticism by academic historians, many of whom argued that his methods were unscientific and his conclusions unreliable or simply untrue. Despite these criticisms, however, A Study of History endures as a provocative vision of where humanity has been, and why, and where it may be headed."

(https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/culture-magazines/study-history)

Contents

From the Wikipedia:

Publication of A Study of History

1. Vol I: Introduction: The Geneses of Civilizations, part one (Oxford University Press, 1934)
2. Vol II: The Geneses of Civilizations, part two (Oxford University Press, 1934)
3. Vol III: The Growths of Civilizations (Oxford University Press, 1934)
4. Vol IV: The Breakdowns of Civilizations (Oxford University Press, 1939)
5. Vol V: The Disintegrations of Civilizations, part one (Oxford University Press, 1939)
6. Vol VI: The Disintegrations of Civilizations, part two (Oxford University Press, 1939)
7. Vol VII: Universal States; Universal Churches (Oxford University Press, 1954) [as two volumes in paperback]
8. Vol VIII: Heroic Ages; Contacts between Civilizations in Space (Encounters between Contemporaries) (Oxford University Press, 1954)
9. Vol IX: Contacts between Civilizations in Time (Renaissances); Law and Freedom in History; The Prospects of the Western Civilization (Oxford University Press, 1954)
10. Vol X: The Inspirations of Historians; A Note on Chronology (Oxford University Press, 1954)
11. Vol XI: Historical Atlas and Gazetteer (Oxford University Press, 1959)
12. Vol XII: Reconsiderations (Oxford University Press, 1961)

• Abridgements by D. C. Somervell:
  • A Study of History: Abridgement of Vols I–VI, with a preface by Toynbee (Oxford University Press, 1946)[4]
  • A Study of History: Abridgement of Vols VII–X (Oxford University Press, 1957)

* A Study of History: Abridgement of Vols I–X in One Volume, with new preface by Toynbee & new tables (Oxford Univ. Press, 1960)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_of_History)

Discussion

The Civilizational Cycle

From the Wikipedia:

Genesis and Growth

"Toynbee argues that civilizations are born out of more primitive societies, not as the result of racial or environmental factors, but as a response to challenges, such as hard country, new ground, blows and pressures from other civilizations, and penalization. He argues that for civilizations to be born, the challenge must be a golden mean; that excessive challenge will crush the civilization, and too little challenge will cause it to stagnate. He argues that civilizations continue to grow only when they meet one challenge only to be met by another, in a continuous cycle of "Challenge and Response". He argues that civilizations develop in different ways due to their different environments and different approaches to the challenges they face. He argues that growth is driven by "Creative Minorities": those who find solutions to the challenges, who inspire (rather than compel) others to follow their innovative lead. This is done through the "faculty of mimesis." Creative minorities find solutions to the challenges a civilization faces, while the great mass follow these solutions by imitation, solutions they otherwise would be incapable of discovering on their own.

In 1939, Toynbee wrote,

"The challenge of being called upon to create a political world-order, the framework for an economic world-order … now confronts our Modern Western society."

Breakdown and Disintegration

Toynbee does not see the breakdown of civilizations as caused by loss of control over the physical environment, by loss of control over the human environment, or by attacks from outside. Rather, it comes from the deterioration of the "Creative Minority", which eventually ceases to be creative and degenerates into merely a "Dominant Minority".

He argues that creative minorities deteriorate due to a worship of their "former self," by which they become prideful and fail adequately to address the next challenge they face.

Results of the breakdown

The final breakdown results in "positive acts of creation;" the dominant minority seeks to create a Universal state to preserve its power and influence, and the internal proletariat seeks to create a Universal church to preserve its spiritual values and cultural norms.

Universal state

He argues that the ultimate sign a civilization has broken down is when the dominant minority forms a "universal state", which stifles political creativity within the existing social order. The classic example of this is the Roman Empire, though many other imperial regimes are cited as examples. Toynbee writes:

"First the Dominant Minority attempts to hold by force—against all right and reason—a position of inherited privilege which it has ceased to merit; and then the Proletariat repays injustice with resentment, fear with hate, and violence with violence when it executes its acts of secession. Yet the whole movement ends in positive acts of creation—and this on the part of all the actors in the tragedy of disintegration. The Dominant Minority creates a universal state, the Internal Proletariat a universal church, and the External Proletariat a bevy of barbarian war-bands."

Universal church

Toynbee developed his concept of an "internal proletariat" and an "external proletariat" to describe quite different opposition groups within and outside the frontiers of a civilization. These groups, however, find themselves bound to the fate of the civilization.[5] During its decline and disintegration, they are increasingly disenfranchised or alienated, and thus lose their immediate sense of loyalty or of obligation. Nonetheless an "internal proletariat," untrusting of the dominant minority, may form a "universal church" which survives the civilization's demise, co-opting the useful structures such as marriage laws of the earlier time while creating a new philosophical or religious pattern for the next stage of history.

Before the process of disintegration, the dominant minority had held the internal proletariat in subjugation within the confines of the civilization, causing these oppressed to grow bitter. The external proletariat, living outside the civilization in poverty and chaos, grows envious. Then, in the social stress resulting from the failure of the civilization, the bitterness and envy increase markedly.

Toynbee argues that as civilizations decay, there is a "schism" within the society. In this environment of discord, people resort to archaism (idealization of the past), futurism (idealization of the future), detachment (removal of oneself from the realities of a decaying world), and transcendence (meeting the challenges of the decaying civilization with new insight, e.g., by following a new religion). From among members of an "internal proletariat" who transcend the social decay a "church" may arise. Such an association would contain new and stronger spiritual insights, around which a subsequent civilization may begin to form. Toynbee here uses the word "church" in a general sense, e.g., to refer to a collective spiritual bond found in common worship, or the unity found in an agreed social order."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_of_History)

Discussion

Evaluating its impact

By Krishan Kumar:

"TOYNBEE AND CIVILIZATION

It was in this climate that Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1991 [1918–1922]) appeared, which goes a long way toward explaining its enormous impact and popularity in the immediate postwar period (Hughes 1952: 89–97). Spengler accepted the multiplicity of civilizations, and also that Western civilization had been among the most creative. But now he saw Western civilization in its death-throes, following the cycle of birth, rise, and decline that he discerned in all civilizations. Using the German terms that had been established by Kant, Herder, and others in the late eighteenth century (Elias 1994: 3–28), Spengler distinguished between the creative Kultur of a society, and its hardening and descent into mere Zivilisation. But he gave the distinction his own special twist by employing them to indicate successive phases of social evolution. “The Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture, and in this principle we obtain the viewpoint from which the deepest and gravest problems of historical morphology become capable of solution. Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable.… They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again” (1991: 24). We have it in Arnold Toynbee's own words that the appearance of Spengler's book almost stopped him in his tracks, as apparently answering a question that he had been pondering for many years. What had led a few societies in humanity's whole history to transcend the level of “primitive human life” to embark upon “the enterprise called civilization? What had roused them from a torpor that the great majority of human societies had never shaken off? This question was simmering in my mind when, in the summer of 1920, Professor [Lewis] Namier … placed in my hands Oswald Spengler's Untergang des Abendlandes. As I read those pages teeming with firefly flashes of historical insight, I wondered at first whether my whole inquiry had been disposed of by Spengler before even the questions, not to speak of the answers, had fully taken shape in my own mind” (Toynbee 1948: 9).

Toynbee was perhaps relieved—as any scholar might be—to discover on closer examination of Spengler's book that it did not really answer the question of the geneses of civilizations at all, adopting instead “a most unilluminatingly dogmatic and deterministic” approach, according to which “civilizations arose, developed, declined, and foundered in unvarying conformity with a fixed time-table, and no explanation was offered for any of this” (ibid.: 10). Moreover, though there are interesting correspondences between Spengler's and Toynbee's works, and though Toynbee quotes Spengler many times, it is clear that Toynbee had arrived at his basic conception of civilizations, and of their dynamics, before he read The Decline of the West. This had a lot to do with Toynbee's training as a classicist, because it was fundamentally from classical literature and classical history, the literature and history of what he called Hellenism, that Toynbee drew his inspiration for his understanding of the pattern of all civilizations.

Already in May 1920, before he knew of Spengler's work, Toynbee in a lecture to Oxford students, entitled “The Tragedy of Greece,” had sketched out some of the main ideas that were to govern his great Study in subsequent decades. He declared, “civilization is a work of art,” and that an understanding of it can be derived as much from literary and artistic sources as from more conventional historical ones. Toynbee then proceeded to argue that the study of the history of Greek civilization has particular advantages over that of others, especially the modern West, because “in Greek history the plot of civilization has been worked out to its conclusion” (1921: 5, 10). The history of Hellenism—the history of Graeco-Roman civilization—had to be seen, he said, as a unified one: “The first emergence of the Greek city-state in the Aegean and the last traces of municipal self-government in the Roman empire are phases in the history of a single civilization.… You cannot really draw a distinction between Greek history and Roman history.… The Roman Empire was essentially a Greek institution … the pulse of the Empire was driven by a Greek heart” (ibid.: 17–18, 20).

Thus seen, Greek history had to be considered a “tragedy” in three acts, each producing its characteristic mood and expression, and each contributing to the tragic denouement, the decline and fall of Greek civilization. Toynbee was particularly concerned with the third and final act because it was in considering its course that he hit upon the idea that civilizations do not merely die, but rather in the process of their dying they throw up their successors. The Roman Empire, which was “the decline and fall of Greek civilization,” the third act in the Greek tragedy, was highly oppressive of the Roman proletariat, but in such a way as to give rise to “a rival civilization of the proletariat—the Christian Church” (ibid.: 35, 37). “Thus the empire of which Marcus [Aurelius] and Paul [of Tarsus] were citizens was more than the third act in the tragedy of Ancient Greece. While it retarded the inevitable dissolution of one civilization it conceived its successor.… By the seventh century after Christ, when Ancient Greek civilization may be said finally to have dissolved, our own civilization was ready to ‘shoot up and thrive’ and repeat the tragedy of mankind” (ibid.: 41).

Certainly at least up to the appearance of volume six of the Study, in 1939, this classical conception seems to have undergirded the structure of the whole massive enterprise. While all the relevant terms are not in the 1920 lecture, it is clear that Toynbee had by then convinced himself that in the vicissitudes of Graeco-Roman civilization he could discern the “tragic” course of all civilizations. “Hellenic Society” (or Civilization18) had the further advantage of showing unambiguously something else that came to loom large in the Study: the way civilizations are often “apparented” and “affiliated” to each other—how one civilization might derive from an earlier one while in turn giving rise to a later one. Thus Hellenic Society is seen as affiliated to an earlier Minoan-Mycenean Society, while subsequently being “apparented” to later Western Society. Hellenism demonstrated for Toynbee, in a highly satisfactory way, both the distinctiveness and the connections between civilizations. It was this that enabled him to distance himself further from Spengler, with the latter's much stronger insistence on the separation of civilizations.

It is easy to see, when observed on the larger canvas of the Study, the way in which Toynbee converted the local and particular phases of Hellenic civilization into the key terms for his analysis of civilization tout court. Civilizations, he argues, begin with a heroic and hard-won response to a challenge from the environment, at first the physical environment but then increasingly a social and political one. This response, carried out by “creative minorities,” hardens over time to rule by less adaptable and less creative “dominant minorities” (see Spengler on the move from Kultur to Zivilisation). This in turn generally leads to a “Time of Troubles,” in which the different states composing the civilization war with each other, leading to a peace of exhaustion in the creation of a “Universal State.” Meanwhile, large sections of the population withdraw into the status of an “internal proletariat,” while outside the frontiers of the civilization an “external proletariat” of “barbarians” threatens. The internal proletariat throws up a “Universal Church” that offers hope and the promise of salvation. The Universal Church then becomes the chrysalis of a new civilization that is thereby “affiliated” to the old.19

Hellenic civilization, in Toynbee's understanding of it, had gone through precisely this course. Thus an original, creative response in the Greek city-states is consolidated by Alexander in his empire (at the cost of the independence of the city-states). The break-up of Alexander's empire leads in turn to a “Time of Troubles” in which warfare convulses the Hellenic world. Eventually Rome emerges as the dominant force, with a “dominant minority” that creates a “Universal State” in the Roman Empire. At the same time an “internal proletariat,” made up of peoples from all parts of the empire, emerges, to develop the “Universal Church” of Christianity. On the borders of the empire are the barbarian tribes, the “external proletariat,” which eventually break through only to be absorbed by the emerging new civilization of Western Christendom. The Roman Empire is also “apparented” to a second new civilization, that of Orthodox Christianity, which rises with the Byzantine Empire and is continued within the body of the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere, such as Russia (1962–1964: I, 52–63).20

Such was the conception that underlay Toynbee's vast undertaking, the labor of a lifetime. Over a period of forty years—the work as a whole was first conceived, he tells us, in 1921—he produced a succession of volumes amounting in the end to the twelve volumes of A Study of History. Volumes I–III appeared in 1934, IV–VI in 1939, and VII–X—interrupted by war work—in 1954. A Historical Atlas and Gazetter, published as XI, appeared in 1959, followed finally by a volume of Reconsiderations, published as XII in 1961. Oxford University Press from 1962 into 1964 published a paperback edition of all twelve volumes (conveniently, pagination was the same as for the hardback edition).

A Study of History is, by any measure, a stupendous achievement. There is really nothing comparable to it in any other language or society. Even its severest critics, such as Pieter Geyl, remark on its “miraculous learning,” the “wealth of its examples,” “its splendid, full and supple style.” They commend it for the range of disciplines it draws upon—anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, theology, biology, and literature. For all his criticisms, says Geyl, “I shall ever remain grateful to the author for profound remarks, striking parallels, wide prospects, and other concomitant beauties” (1955: 91, 97). William McNeill, Toynbee's more sympathetic biographer, writes, “After more than half a century reading Toynbee's pages still remains an adventure. The dazzling range of his information, the boldness of his comparisons, the perspicacity of his reflections … all combine to make his volumes worth anyone's attention” (1989: 165).

These observations are important, since they point toward the possibility that, even if readers were to be unconvinced by the overall framework of Toynbee's Study, they might still find much to admire and learn from it. It is all the more regrettable then, that, discouraged by the dismissal of Toynbee by most professional historians, few people read him today. They therefore do not discover for themselves the “firefly flashes of historical insight”—what Toynbee found of value in Spengler—that are to be found scattered throughout the twelve volumes, and which make them worth the attention of anyone, however unfashionable Toynbee's general approach has become. Toynbee can be read for the parts as well as the whole; it is possible that the parts are indeed better—more instructive, more interesting—than the whole.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to attempt an assessment of the general features of Toynbee's analysis of civilizations. It is probably here that Toynbee has come in for the most severe criticism.21 Critics have not been persuaded by the model of “challenge and response” as the source of civilizational genesis and growth. They have accepted that Toynbee differs from Spengler in not working with the analogy between the individual and the social organism, each with their cycles of birth, youth, maturity, and decline into old age. But they see similar weaknesses in the common pattern that Toynbee discerns of growth and decline through the sequence of a creative minority becoming a dominant minority, a Time of Troubles leading to a Universal State and a Universal Church, and the emergence of a new civilization on the basis of the Universal Church created by the internal proletariat. For many critics, while some of the concepts work for the particular pattern of Hellenic Society, they are highly unconvincing when transposed across all twenty-one civilizations.

I share some of these concerns. Toynbee's overall framework can often seem Procrustean; the intricate relationships of “apparentation-and-affiliation” between civilizations often seem too ingenious to be convincing; the fondness for analogies and metaphors drawn from the mechanical, physical, and life sciences often seems to lead to fanciful comparisons. Moreover, civilizational analysis, especially of the comparative kind, is always going to be problematic, given enduring disagreements about definitions and units of analysis. Thus Toynbee's listing of twenty-one civilizations might seem highly questionable; many of his critics have come up with very different lists, equally convincing (or not).

But to say this is not to dismiss Toynbee—far from it. A Study of History is far more than a schematic account of civilizational rise and fall in the manner of earlier “conjectural histories” or evolutionary “philosophies of history.” It is far more, in other words, than the sum of its parts. Its strength lies precisely in “the parts”—in the examination of particular civilizations, in tracing the links between them, in providing illuminating insights into all manner of historical questions that have preoccupied historians and others for a long time. None of this, probably, would have been possible, for Toynbee at least, if he had not approached his study from a lofty and philosophical height. But whatever our feelings about the project as a whole, it is open to us to find in this vast study many particular gems, discussions of particular issues that throw light on subjects of major importance. Toynbee had an encyclopedic knowledge and a penetrating mind. His way of thinking about history provides him with a vantage point from which to look at some familiar questions in a quite unfamiliar way."

(https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/comparative-studies-in-society-and-history/article/return-of-civilizationand-of-arnold-toynbee/FE6F858900CBB1843DD7C0D3DD5BE360)

More information

Sorokin’s summary of Toynbee: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1874765

John David Ebert recommends

1. the 2-volume abridged version, which was approved by Toynbee.
2. a one volume abridged and illustrated version, written by Toynbee himself in 1972, 3 years before he died.

Online version at https://archive.org/details/studyofhistory0005toyn

* Article: The Return of Civilization—and of Arnold Toynbee? By Krishan Kumar. Cambridge University Press: 03 October 2014

URL = https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/comparative-studies-in-society-and-history/article/return-of-civilizationand-of-arnold-toynbee/FE6F858900CBB1843DD7C0D3DD5BE360

"This paper considers the history of the concept of civilization, and argues for the continuing importance and relevance of Toynbee's multi-volume A Study of History within that tradition. The claim is that, whatever the weaknesses of Toynbee's general approach, the civilizational perspective he adopts allows him to cast an illuminating light on many important historical questions. Moreover his belief in the “philosophical contemporaneity” and equal value of all civilizations should make him peculiarly attractive to those many today who reject Eurocentrism and who are increasingly persuaded of the need to consider the total human experience from earliest times up to the present."