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410 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1957
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About the author
Arnold J. Toynbee
691 books520 followersNot the same as Arnold Toynbee, economist and nephew of Arnold Joseph Toynbee
British educator Arnold Joseph Toynbee noted cyclical patterns in the growth and decline of civilizations for his 12-volume Study of History (1934-1961).
He went to Winchester college and Balliol college, Oxford.
During both world wars, he worked for the foreign office. He additionally published Nationality and the War (1915), The Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation (1915), The German Terror in France: An Historical Record (1917), and Turkey, a Past and a Future (1917). He attended the peace conference of Paris in 1919 as a delegate.
From 1919 to 1924, Arnold J. Toynbee served as professor of modern Greek and Byzantine at King's college, London. From 1925, Oxford University Press published The Survey of International Affairs under the auspices of the royal institute of international affairs, and Toynbee, professor, oversaw the publication. From 1925, Toynbee served as research professor and director at the royal institute of international affairs. He published The Conduct of British Empire Foreign Relations since the Peace Settlement (1928).
His first marriage to Rosalind Murray produced three sons and ended in divorce in 1946. Toynbee, professor, then married Veronica M. Boulter, his research assistant. He published Civilization on Trial (1948).
Toynbee served as research professor and director at the royal institute of international affairs until 1955.
People published best known lectures of Toynbee, professor, in memory of Adam Gifford as An Historian's Approach to Religion (1956). His massive work examined development and decay. He presented the rise and fall rather than nation-states or ethnic groups. According to his analysis, the welfare depends on ability to deal successfully with challenges.
He also published Democracy in the Atomic Age (1957), Christianity among the Religions of the World (1958), and Between Niger and Nile (1965).
He died in York, North Yorkshire, England.
British educator Arnold Joseph Toynbee noted cyclical patterns in the growth and decline of civilizations for his 12-volume Study of History (1934-1961).
He went to Winchester college and Balliol college, Oxford.
During both world wars, he worked for the foreign office. He additionally published Nationality and the War (1915), The Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation (1915), The German Terror in France: An Historical Record (1917), and Turkey, a Past and a Future (1917). He attended the peace conference of Paris in 1919 as a delegate.
From 1919 to 1924, Arnold J. Toynbee served as professor of modern Greek and Byzantine at King's college, London. From 1925, Oxford University Press published The Survey of International Affairs under the auspices of the royal institute of international affairs, and Toynbee, professor, oversaw the publication. From 1925, Toynbee served as research professor and director at the royal institute of international affairs. He published The Conduct of British Empire Foreign Relations since the Peace Settlement (1928).
His first marriage to Rosalind Murray produced three sons and ended in divorce in 1946. Toynbee, professor, then married Veronica M. Boulter, his research assistant. He published Civilization on Trial (1948).
Toynbee served as research professor and director at the royal institute of international affairs until 1955.
People published best known lectures of Toynbee, professor, in memory of Adam Gifford as An Historian's Approach to Religion (1956). His massive work examined development and decay. He presented the rise and fall rather than nation-states or ethnic groups. According to his analysis, the welfare depends on ability to deal successfully with challenges.
He also published Democracy in the Atomic Age (1957), Christianity among the Religions of the World (1958), and Between Niger and Nile (1965).
He died in York, North Yorkshire, England.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
December 9, 2023
Toynbee is not worth reading today. By the time this abridgement was published, the world had moved on. Even within this abridgement Toynbee acknowledges his approach he used before WW II needed a revision.
Toynbee fabricates a genus for the species of civilizations by taking the particular and generalizing them into a category by attaching characteristics on to each of the 26 civilizations (societies) he studies broadly. The pseudoscientific conclusions he reaches are always somewhat vapid and nebulous. I say pseudoscientific because there is no data I could provide to him that would refute his conclusions since he always deals with non-falsifiable assertions as part of his major thesis.
He thinks of the civilizations as living entities and each of the species are as individuals to him. In the earlier histories he studies them as a culture with broad characteristics including the religion they had and later he wants to study the religion as it relates and explains the civilization. Toynbee will say, Frazier in the “Golden Bough” used the present to get at the origins of religious certainties, and Toynbee will say Frazier has it backwards, that the superstitions of the past explain the present. Toynbee thinks of Western Christian civilization as the special one and writes his history as if it is the only one that matters and it is special, and wants to say that it will last and not die.
Toynbee believes that mimesis (imitation) will atrophy civilizations and that originality is necessary for continued growth until destruction from competing civilizations means surrender or victory. For Toynbee, civilizations lose innovation when internal proletariats allow external proletariats to dictate the culture and they wrongly look towards archaic ways or futurisms meshed with false utopian promises. Toynbee never comments on the fact that after the Normans conquered England in 1066 the external ruling proletariats never left England and they still rule in their stead as British Royality.
He topically latches on to the bogeyman of communism since he is writing in the 1950s and he prioritizes liberty over equality. For the first abridgement, Toynbee was feted by Nazis (and he was and accepted their praise) since Toynbee’s species of civilizations is easily applied to German self-identity specialness. Hitler, Spengler, Thomas Mann each believed in the specialness of German civilization and its superiority in support of fascism. By the time of this second abridgement Toynbee walked away from that kind of thought.
Toynbee hypothesizes a Jungian structure with archetypes for the life of civilizations with a similar mystical belief in synchronicity and a collective consciousness immanent with each species of civilizations. Toynbee also crystalized his understanding for his morphology of civilizations by analogizing to the third generation immigrants in Massachusetts to his own theory of civilizations, he mentioned it as a pivotal conversation that he had in the understanding for his own theory.
Toynbee’s world view and the certainty that he has in the superiority of colonizers over subjugated Indians makes him one of the only books that I have read where the author made Gandhi the bad guy, since for Toynbee the standardization of laws, language, and culture the Brits imposed on India was de-facto superior to what they had before. Toynbee sees the world myopically and he doesn’t fully consider the liberty of the India people as important as their equality in the world of humanity.
Toynbee pretends to be writing a book that considers the particular and generalizes to the whole and then makes that a universal about the lifecycles of civilizations. In the end he does mention the most perfect of all history books: Thucydides “History of the Peloponnesian Wars” and Thucydides does what Toynbee tries to do in his 12-volume work but fails to do.
There is no central overriding authority that gives truth and Toynbee will give absoluteness in his revealing of societies and falsely attributes a wholeness to what is complex, nuanced and he misses the context of the history. Toynbee would have been well suited by re-reading Thucydides to see how it can be done. Toynbee mentioned that everything needed to be understood before anything can be understood, and he said, for example, a history of England could not stand alone otherwise, I would say that he probably has never read David Hume’s six-volume work on the “History of England,” I have and Hume knew how to frame the world in ways that Toynbee was not capable of doing.
Toynbee is interesting because he is wrong and pseudo-scientific while at one time he was the intellectuals go to guy for how to think about history universally. Today he is almost completely ignored and nobody (well almost nobody) reads his non-abridged works since they are so long-winded and he does get his history wrong as well as his conclusions. The abridgements are at least readable because the editor mercifully condenses the material into smaller chunks. If you are going to pass letters stealthily a good way would be to hide them in Spengler's "Decline of the West" or in Toynbee's "A Study of History" (I thank Kevin Shepard a goodreads friend for that illusion and the movie was "The Lords of Discipline")
Toynbee fabricates a genus for the species of civilizations by taking the particular and generalizing them into a category by attaching characteristics on to each of the 26 civilizations (societies) he studies broadly. The pseudoscientific conclusions he reaches are always somewhat vapid and nebulous. I say pseudoscientific because there is no data I could provide to him that would refute his conclusions since he always deals with non-falsifiable assertions as part of his major thesis.
He thinks of the civilizations as living entities and each of the species are as individuals to him. In the earlier histories he studies them as a culture with broad characteristics including the religion they had and later he wants to study the religion as it relates and explains the civilization. Toynbee will say, Frazier in the “Golden Bough” used the present to get at the origins of religious certainties, and Toynbee will say Frazier has it backwards, that the superstitions of the past explain the present. Toynbee thinks of Western Christian civilization as the special one and writes his history as if it is the only one that matters and it is special, and wants to say that it will last and not die.
Toynbee believes that mimesis (imitation) will atrophy civilizations and that originality is necessary for continued growth until destruction from competing civilizations means surrender or victory. For Toynbee, civilizations lose innovation when internal proletariats allow external proletariats to dictate the culture and they wrongly look towards archaic ways or futurisms meshed with false utopian promises. Toynbee never comments on the fact that after the Normans conquered England in 1066 the external ruling proletariats never left England and they still rule in their stead as British Royality.
He topically latches on to the bogeyman of communism since he is writing in the 1950s and he prioritizes liberty over equality. For the first abridgement, Toynbee was feted by Nazis (and he was and accepted their praise) since Toynbee’s species of civilizations is easily applied to German self-identity specialness. Hitler, Spengler, Thomas Mann each believed in the specialness of German civilization and its superiority in support of fascism. By the time of this second abridgement Toynbee walked away from that kind of thought.
Toynbee hypothesizes a Jungian structure with archetypes for the life of civilizations with a similar mystical belief in synchronicity and a collective consciousness immanent with each species of civilizations. Toynbee also crystalized his understanding for his morphology of civilizations by analogizing to the third generation immigrants in Massachusetts to his own theory of civilizations, he mentioned it as a pivotal conversation that he had in the understanding for his own theory.
Toynbee’s world view and the certainty that he has in the superiority of colonizers over subjugated Indians makes him one of the only books that I have read where the author made Gandhi the bad guy, since for Toynbee the standardization of laws, language, and culture the Brits imposed on India was de-facto superior to what they had before. Toynbee sees the world myopically and he doesn’t fully consider the liberty of the India people as important as their equality in the world of humanity.
Toynbee pretends to be writing a book that considers the particular and generalizes to the whole and then makes that a universal about the lifecycles of civilizations. In the end he does mention the most perfect of all history books: Thucydides “History of the Peloponnesian Wars” and Thucydides does what Toynbee tries to do in his 12-volume work but fails to do.
There is no central overriding authority that gives truth and Toynbee will give absoluteness in his revealing of societies and falsely attributes a wholeness to what is complex, nuanced and he misses the context of the history. Toynbee would have been well suited by re-reading Thucydides to see how it can be done. Toynbee mentioned that everything needed to be understood before anything can be understood, and he said, for example, a history of England could not stand alone otherwise, I would say that he probably has never read David Hume’s six-volume work on the “History of England,” I have and Hume knew how to frame the world in ways that Toynbee was not capable of doing.
Toynbee is interesting because he is wrong and pseudo-scientific while at one time he was the intellectuals go to guy for how to think about history universally. Today he is almost completely ignored and nobody (well almost nobody) reads his non-abridged works since they are so long-winded and he does get his history wrong as well as his conclusions. The abridgements are at least readable because the editor mercifully condenses the material into smaller chunks. If you are going to pass letters stealthily a good way would be to hide them in Spengler's "Decline of the West" or in Toynbee's "A Study of History" (I thank Kevin Shepard a goodreads friend for that illusion and the movie was "The Lords of Discipline")
August 14, 2014
Toynbee is one of the most important minds of the twentieth century. His work has been largely ignored because it puts the responsibility for the survival of the world squarely on our shoulders. He's the only historian I know to blend history and psychology, words that repeat throughout his analysis of historical patterns are: soul, choice, despair, I could go on and on. He shows with clarity and grace how individual human choices coalesce into historical events. The abridgment of which this is the second volume is comprised of a first volume (abridging the first 6 volumes of his work) and this second volume abridging the seventh to tenth volume. Yes I have read them all, but that kind of read isn't for the faint of heart. The two volume abridgment is a way to delve into this man's work in a more humane way.
September 4, 2019
A Study of History (abridgement, VII - X)
Toynbee continues, but this time is concerned with universals whether states or churches and then descends into examples of contacts between rival universals (How can there be more than one?) After reading his pontifications regarding failures in humanity, he changes course and admits that the current Western society has infiltrated everywhere and, since this has never happened before, the Western civilization may not follow all previous ones in disintegrating. So everything he has espoused since the first page of the first book may no longer apply! The glaring omission in the entire work is nothing anyone could have foreseen: technology’s insidious growth in media to control thought and behavior. That is too frightening to fathom, because, if this civilization falls there will be no competitor in human form to arise again.
Toynbee continues, but this time is concerned with universals whether states or churches and then descends into examples of contacts between rival universals (How can there be more than one?) After reading his pontifications regarding failures in humanity, he changes course and admits that the current Western society has infiltrated everywhere and, since this has never happened before, the Western civilization may not follow all previous ones in disintegrating. So everything he has espoused since the first page of the first book may no longer apply! The glaring omission in the entire work is nothing anyone could have foreseen: technology’s insidious growth in media to control thought and behavior. That is too frightening to fathom, because, if this civilization falls there will be no competitor in human form to arise again.
February 2, 2010
The best short summary of a general history of the world I can imagine. Still - if you can get a hold of his unabridged volumes (I myself only have vols. 5 & 7) do so - and let me know where you got them!
December 9, 2020
Класика
June 12, 2020
While the first abridged volume mainly discussed the rise, growth, and decline of civilizations, Toynbee’s second volume goes into depth discussing universal states, churches, and new topics like contacts between civilizations, law & freedom, etc. As with the first volume, there is a cumulative “argument” summary at the end.
Toynbee opens by discussing the belief in immortality of the universal state, with citizens evoking “their ghosts after they have proved themselves mortal by expiring” (p.6). This mirrors our contemporary attitudes in the West. He also criticizes extremely resilient civilizations like the Egyptians as being “boring and somnolent.” This likely reflects the modern emphasis on progress as opposed to stability. He viewed religion as the most important thing in life, and spends a chapter discussing how the universal church could be a higher form of society (p.94).
Heroic Ages refer to the barbarian external proletariat destroying the universal state. Barbarian power is short-lived, though, as they lack the knowledge or character to maintain complex civilization (p.136). The medieval Dark Ages was actually a creative rebirth afterwards, where they compose epic poetry based on the legends of the past.
He discusses contacts between civilizations in space and in time. The latter refers to something like the Renaissance. It’s interesting he points out that it will “occur only when an affiliated society has raised itself to the cultural level at which its predecessor was standing at the time” (p.254). He also talks about the “three-generation rule” in social cycles (~137 years), which could describe the war-and-peace cycles of Western Europe (p.284).
Throughout the book there is a strong emphasis on spirituality and philosophy, talking about people being “aloof in their hearts”, having a “deep-seated spiritual malaise”, etc, which is the mystical explanation that people like Tainter hated. The arguments are not bad in and of itself, but I read the book to gain a better sense of where we might be heading as a civilization, and how I could best prepare. To this end, I don’t think it has been very useful. Even the concluding chapters on Western Civilization seemed off the mark having been written so long ago…
For example, he falls victim to the prevailing myth of progress, where it is no longer possible “for inanimate Nature either to exterminate Mankind or even to interrupt human progress” (p.320). Though he acknowledges the possibility of decline and fall, he imagines a point where Western Civilization deals successfully with war, class-conflict, and population problems, leaving only the problem of how to spend our leisure time (p.345). Toynbee was born in 1889, and the book is a nice time-capsule of the Anglo literati of the era, including reflections on empire, the new experiment with communism, dangers of nuclear warfare, etc (written 1929 to 1955).
I read the two volume set. If you are interested in history, I would recommend a single volume edition instead. Toynbee has very flowery prose and quotes high literature, I think his works are more of literature than what we would call history today. He grew up with “Hellenic” education, though, much better than anything I had, so take my review for what it’s worth... I'll consider revisiting this work in the future when I am not so rushed for time.
Toynbee opens by discussing the belief in immortality of the universal state, with citizens evoking “their ghosts after they have proved themselves mortal by expiring” (p.6). This mirrors our contemporary attitudes in the West. He also criticizes extremely resilient civilizations like the Egyptians as being “boring and somnolent.” This likely reflects the modern emphasis on progress as opposed to stability. He viewed religion as the most important thing in life, and spends a chapter discussing how the universal church could be a higher form of society (p.94).
Heroic Ages refer to the barbarian external proletariat destroying the universal state. Barbarian power is short-lived, though, as they lack the knowledge or character to maintain complex civilization (p.136). The medieval Dark Ages was actually a creative rebirth afterwards, where they compose epic poetry based on the legends of the past.
He discusses contacts between civilizations in space and in time. The latter refers to something like the Renaissance. It’s interesting he points out that it will “occur only when an affiliated society has raised itself to the cultural level at which its predecessor was standing at the time” (p.254). He also talks about the “three-generation rule” in social cycles (~137 years), which could describe the war-and-peace cycles of Western Europe (p.284).
Throughout the book there is a strong emphasis on spirituality and philosophy, talking about people being “aloof in their hearts”, having a “deep-seated spiritual malaise”, etc, which is the mystical explanation that people like Tainter hated. The arguments are not bad in and of itself, but I read the book to gain a better sense of where we might be heading as a civilization, and how I could best prepare. To this end, I don’t think it has been very useful. Even the concluding chapters on Western Civilization seemed off the mark having been written so long ago…
For example, he falls victim to the prevailing myth of progress, where it is no longer possible “for inanimate Nature either to exterminate Mankind or even to interrupt human progress” (p.320). Though he acknowledges the possibility of decline and fall, he imagines a point where Western Civilization deals successfully with war, class-conflict, and population problems, leaving only the problem of how to spend our leisure time (p.345). Toynbee was born in 1889, and the book is a nice time-capsule of the Anglo literati of the era, including reflections on empire, the new experiment with communism, dangers of nuclear warfare, etc (written 1929 to 1955).
I read the two volume set. If you are interested in history, I would recommend a single volume edition instead. Toynbee has very flowery prose and quotes high literature, I think his works are more of literature than what we would call history today. He grew up with “Hellenic” education, though, much better than anything I had, so take my review for what it’s worth... I'll consider revisiting this work in the future when I am not so rushed for time.
March 6, 2022
Truly a classic for anyone seriously interested in history. I first became aware of this book through one of those top 100 history books rankings and boy does this book not disappoint. A serious study is given to the life cycle of civilization and the role of the church nested within a civilization (he studies civilizations in light of religion and by extension the church as opposed to studying religion in terms of the civilization ). His ideas about the internal proletariat vs the external proletariat which will eventually seek to destroy the internal proletariat and set about an age of heroism (heroic age) is very formative. I might also strongly recommend Oswald Spengler's "The Decline of the West" as a study of civilizations through life cycles.
(Note I don't like the star rating and as such I only rate books based upon one star or five stars corresponding to the in my opinion preferable rating of thumbs up/down. This later rating system encourages in my opinion the degree to which the reader is likely to read a review instead of merely glancing at the number of stars)
(Note I don't like the star rating and as such I only rate books based upon one star or five stars corresponding to the in my opinion preferable rating of thumbs up/down. This later rating system encourages in my opinion the degree to which the reader is likely to read a review instead of merely glancing at the number of stars)
August 28, 2012
A truly comprehensive and masterful review of history, although religion takes too much importance in Toynbee's perception of what history and men are.
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October 3, 2012great
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews