Arnold Toynbee
Discussion
Krishan Kumar:
"There are signs today that “civilization” is making something of a comeback both as a concept and mode of analysis. Might that offer the opportunity to revive and reconsider Toynbee? Of all twentieth-century scholars, Toynbee was the greatest historian and analyst of civilization. He was superior in style and erudition to Oswald Spengler, his closest rival. Toynbee's biographer, the great world historian William McNeill, compares him to Herodotus, Dante, and Milton, remarking, “Toynbee should rank as a twentieth century epigon to his poetic predecessors, for he, like them, possessed a powerful and creative mind that sought, restlessly and unremittingly, to make the world make sense” (1989: 287).
Toynbee's greatest popularity and influence occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, when he was courted by presidents, prime ministers, and princes. He lectured at universities all over the world, and at the height of his popularity, in the mid-1950s, could attract hundreds and even thousands of listeners. At the University of Minnesota in the winter of 1955 he addressed an overflow audience of ten thousand people, many of whom had come hundreds of miles through the snow to hear him (ibid.: 243). Nor was he, at that time, disdained by his colleagues in the historical profession. Not only did he hold a professorship at the University of London, but Cambridge University in 1947 offered him the Regius Professorship of History, one of the two premier chairs of history in the United Kingdom (ibid.: 208). Numerous universities in the United States also offered him distinguished positions, and he twice gave the Lowell Lectures at Harvard.
Nevertheless, at some point in the 1950s some very prominent and influential figures in the discipline of history began the attacks on Toynbee that in the ensuing decades led to the eclipse of his reputation among historians and, increasingly, among other scholars as well.1 Right up to his death in 1975 Toynbee continued to enjoy great popularity in several quarters of the globe, notably in Japan (ibid.: 268–73), but his scholarly reputation waned. Students of history were discouraged from reading him, and references to him, in all the scholarly disciplines, were likely to be treated with contempt. These days, so it seems, few people read Toynbee, and if they do, it is most likely to be in the form of D. C. Somervell's skilful and highly successful two-volume abridgement of A Study of History (1947), rather than the full twelve volumes.
Does the return—if such it is—of an interest in civilization suggest that people are more likely now to be sympathetic to Toynbee's work, which was basically a comparative study of civilizations?"