A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 1-6

by Arnold J. Toynbee, David Churchill Somervell (Editor)

Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History has been acknowledged as one of the greatest achievements of modern scholarship. A ten-volume analysis of the rise and fall of human civilizations, it is a work of breath-taking breadth and vision. D.C. Somervell's abridgement, in two volumes, of this magnificent enterprise, preserves the method, atmosphere, texture, and, in many instances, the very words of the original. Originally published in 1947 and 1957, these two volumes are themselves a great historical achievement.

Volume 1, which abridges the first six volumes of Toynbee's study, includes the Introduction, The Geneses of Civilizations, and The Disintegrations of Civilizations. Volume 2, an abridgement of Volumes VII-X, includes sections on Universal States, Universal churches, Heroic Ages, Contacts Between Civilizations in Space, Contacts Between Civilizations in Time, Law and Freedom in History, The Prospects of the Western Civilization, and the Conclusion.

Of Somervell's work, Toynbee wrote, "The reader now has at his command a uniform abridgement of the whole book, made by a clear mind that has not only mastered the contents but has entered into the writer's outlook and purpose."

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Philosophy, World History, Classics, Sociology, Historical

640 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1947

About the author

Not 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.

Reviews

[Roy Lotz · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the perennial infirmities of human beings is to ascribe their own failure to forces that are entirely beyond their control.

One day, a couple years ago, I was walking to Grand Central Station from my office in Manhattan. Hurrying, as usual, to get to the 6:25 train in time to get a good seat by the window—which meant arriving by 6:18 at the latest—I looked down to find a Toynbee tile lying in the middle of the street.

Toynbee tiles are mysterious plaques, pressed into the asphalt in city streets, that have appeared in several cities in the United States. Small (about the size of a book) and flat (they’re made of linoleum), nearly all of them bear the same puzzling message: “TOYNBEE IDEA MOVIE ‘2001 RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPITER." Sometimes other little panicky or threatening messages about the Feds, Gays, Jews, and instructions to “lay tile alone” are scribbled in the margins. Nobody knows the identity of the tile-maker. He is clearly a dedicated conspiracy theorist with a tenuous grasp on conventional reality; and considering that the tiles have been appearing since the 1980s, all around the US and even in South America, you’ve got to give the tile-maker credit for perseverance. (Click here for more on the tiles.)

I was stunned. I had heard of the tiles before, but I never thought I’d see one. I walked across that intersection twice daily; clearly the tile had been recently installed, perhaps just hours ago. I wanted to bend down and examine it closely, but the traffic light soon changed and I had to get out of the way. Reluctantly I moved on towards Grand Central; but I felt gripped by curiosity. Who is this mysterious tile maker? What is he hoping to accomplish? Suddenly I felt an overpowering desire to unlock his message. So instead of jumping on my usual train—I wasn’t going to get a window seat, anyway—I stopped by a bookstore and picked up Toynbee’s Study of History.

Toynbee, for his part, was apparently no lover of mystery, since he tried to explain nothing less than all of human history. The original study is massive: 12 volumes, each one around 500 pages. This abridgement squeezes 3,000 pages into 550; and that only covers the first five books. (Curiously, although the cover of this volume says that it is an abridgement of volumes one through six, it is clear from the table of contents that it only includes one through five. Similarly, though the next volume of the abridgement says it begins with book seven and ends with book ten, it actually begins with book six and ends with book twelve. This seems like a silly mistake.)

The abridgement was done by an English school teacher, D.C. Somervell, apparently just for fun. He did an excellent job, since it was this abridged version that became enormously popular and which is still in print. All this only proves what Toynbee says in the preface, that “the author himself is unlikely to be the best judge of what is and is not an indispensable part of his work.”

As a scholar, Toynbee achieved a level of fame and influence nearly incomprehensible today. His name was dominant in both academe and foreign affairs. In 1947, just after this abridgement of his major work became a best-seller, he was even featured on the cover of Time magazine. This, I might add, is a perverse index of how much our culture has changed since then. It is nearly impossible to imagine this book—a book with no narrative, written in a dry style about an abstract thesis—becoming a best-seller nowadays, and equally impossible to imagine any bookish intellectual on the cover of Time. (Both Toynbee's Study of History and Spengler's Decline of the West were released right after the conclusion of a world war, when many were searching for explanations of such massive destruction; this undoubtedly helped their sales.)

But enough about tiles and Toynbee; what about the book?

In A Study of History, Toynbee set out to do what Oswald Spengler attempted in his influential theory of history, The Decline of the West—that is, to explain the rise and fall of human communities. In method and content, the two books are remarkably similar; but this similarity is obscured by a powerful contrast in style. Where Spengler is oracular and prophetic, biting and polemical, literary and witty, Toynbee is mild, modest, careful, and deliberate. Spengler can hardly go a sentence without flying off into metaphor; Toynbee is literal-minded and sober. Toynbee’s main criticism of his German counterpart seems to have been that Spengler was too excitable and fanciful. The English historian seeks to tread the same ground, but with rigor and caution.

Nevertheless, the picture that Toynbee paints, if less colorful, is quite similar in outline to Spengler’s. The two of them seek to divide up humans into self-contained communities (‘cultures’ for Spengler, ‘societies’ for Toynbee); these communities are born, grow, break down, collapse, and pass away according to a certain pattern. Both thinkers see these groups as having a fertile early period and a sterile late period; and they both equate cultural vigor with artistic and intellectual innovation rather than political, economic, or military might.

Naturally, there are significant divergences, too. For one, Toynbee attempts to describe the origin and geographic distribution of societies, something that Spengler glosses over. Toynbee’s famous thesis is that civilizations arise in response to geographic challenge. Some terrains are too comfortable and invite indolence; other terrains are too difficult and exhaust the creative powers of their colonizers. Between these two extremes there is an ideal challenge, one that spurs communities to creative vigor and masterful dominance.

While I applaud Toynbee for the attempt, I must admit that I find this explanation absurd, both logically and empirically. The theory itself is vague because Toynbee does not analyze what he means by a ‘challenging’ environment. How can an environment be rated for ‘difficulty’ in the abstract, irrespective of any given community or any goal? A challenge is only challenging for somebody trying to do something. Further, thinking only about the ‘difficulty’ collapses many different sorts of things—average rainfall and temperature, available flora and fauna, presence of rival communities, and a host of other factors—into one hazy metric.

This metric is then applied retrospectively, in supremely unconvincing fashion. Toynbee explains the dominance of the English colony in North America, for example, as due to the ‘challenging’ climate of New England. He even speculates that the ‘easier’ climate south of the Mason-Dixon line is why the North won the American Civil War. Judgments like these rest on such vague principles that they can hardly be confirmed or refuted; you can never be sure how much Toynbee is ignoring or conflating. In any case, as an explanation it is clearly inadequate, since it ignores several obvious advantages possessed by the English colonists—that England was ascendant while Spain was on the wane, for example.

Now that we know more about the origins of agriculture, we have come to the exact opposite conclusion as Toynbee. The communities that developed agriculture did not arise in the most ‘challenging’ environments, but in the areas which had the most advantages—namely, plants and animals that could be easily domesticated. But Toynbee cannot be faulted for the state of archaeology in his day.

The next step in Toynbee’s theory is also vague. The growing society must transfer its field of action from outside to inside itself; that is, the society must begin to challenge itself rather than be challenged by its environment. This internal challenge gives rise to a ‘creative minority’—a group of gifted individuals who innovate in art, science, and religion. These creative individuals always operate by a process of ‘withdraw-and-return’: they leave society for a time, just as Plato’s philosopher left the cave, and then return with their new ideas. The large majority of any given society is an uncreative, inert mass and merely imitates the innovations of the creative minority. The difference between a growing society and either a ‘primitive’ or a degenerating society is that the mass imitate contemporary innovators rather than hallowed ancestors.

Incredibly, Toynbee sees no relation between either technological progress or military prowess and a civilization’s vigor. Like Spengler, he measures a culture’s strength by its creative vitality—its art, music, literature, philosophy, and religion. This allows him to see the establishment of the Roman Empire, as Spengler did, not as a demonstration of vitality but as a last desperate attempt to hold on to Hellenic civilization. Toynbee actually places the ‘breakdown’ of Hellenic society (when they lost their cultural vitality) at the onset of the Peloponnesian War, in 431 BCE, and considers all the subsequent history of Hellene and Rome as degeneration.

But why does the creative minority cease to be genuinely creative and petrify into a merely ‘dominant’ minority? This is because, after one creative triumph, they grow too attached to their triumph and cannot adapt to new circumstances; in other words, they rest on their laurels. What’s more, even the genuine innovations of the creative minority may not have their proper effect, since they must operate through old, inadequate, and at times incompatible institutions. Their ideas thus become either perverted in practice or simply not practiced at all, impeding the proper ‘mimesis’ (imitation) by the masses. After the breakdown, the society takes refuge in a universal state (such as the Roman Empire), and then in a universal church (such as the Catholic church). (As with Spengler, Toynbee seems to have the decline and fall of the Roman Empire as his theory's ur-type.)

To me—and I suspect to many readers—Toynbee’s theories seem to be straightforward consequences of his background. Born into a family of scholars and intellectuals, Toynbee is, like Spengler, naturally inclined to equate civilization with ‘high’ culture, which leads naturally to elitism. Having lived through and been involved in two horrific World Wars, Toynbee was deeply antipathetic to technology and warfare. Nearly everyone hates war, and rightly; but in Toynbee’s theory, war is inevitably a cause or an effect of societal decay—something which is true by definition in his moral worldview, but which doesn’t hold up if we define decay in more neutral terms. The combination of his family background and his hatred of violence turned Toynbee into a kind of atheistic Christian, who believed that love and non-violence conquered all. I cannot fault him ethically; but this is a moral principle and not an accurate depiction of history.

Although the association is not flattering, I cannot help comparing both Toynbee and Spengler to the maker of the Toynbee tiles. Like that lonely crank, wherever he is, these two scholars saw connections where nobody else had before, and propounded their original worldviews in captivating fashion. Unfortunately, it seems that coming up with a theory that could explain the rise and fall of every civilization in every epoch seems to be just about as possible as resurrecting the dead on planet Jupiter. But sometimes great things are accomplished when we try to do the impossible; and thanks to this unconquerable challenge, we have two monuments of human intelligence and ambition, works which will last far, far longer than linoleum on asphalt.
_________________________
To learn more about the tiles, I highly recommend this documentary, now on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MAsB...

[J. Sparks · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 1 out of 5]

Toynbee’s approach to history is not only nonsense but diverts into silliness while pretending to connect the history of the world through his myopic lens tinged by a conservative British superiority inspired by his anti-rational sentiments and superficially connected by nonexistent thematic motifs.

This abridgement mercifully saves the reader from suffering through all of Toynbee’s excessively detailed examples supporting his absurd assertions while he claims to prove his inane universal theories of history.

I’m being kind. Toynbee’s incoherence is worse than Oswald Spengler’s, who Toynbee cites multiple times as his inspiration. Spengler was a self-proclaimed fascist while disavowing the Nazi’s for the monsters that they were. Toynbee has a belief that civilizations form a species and that each of the 25 or so civilizations that have ever existed are individuals within that species. Spengler focused his crazy theory on culture. Toynbee connects his nonsense to Civilizations or societies as a whole. Both espouse a branch of conservatism that clearly flirts with fascism and for which could be embraced by the 20th century’s worst fascist, Adolph Hitler. (By the end of this first abridgement, Toynbee goes out of his way to denounce Hitler as frequently as he denounces the Marxist and the Soviet Union).

Toynbee would say that ethos gives teleos for a civilization and that mimesis (imitative nature) of the masses causes the death, suicide or non-growth of failed or failing individual civilizations and that the creative but select few within the society are needed for progress to overcome the mimesis of the masses. He would also say that there is no such thing as a society or a government, and there are only individuals (it’s as if he is quoting Margaret Thatcher before she would define conservatism in the exact same manner). Ethos gives teleos is a fancy way of saying ‘character gives destiny’, and Toynbee exudes all of the cultural superiority of ’20 million English who speak of England’s might, while 20 broken soldiers have no bed for the night’. In addition, Toynbee clearly thinks that secular states are inferior to a spiritual states based on superstition particularly superstitions based on his preferred theistic preferences.

Now, even with all of Toynbee’s silliness and every page reeks of silliness even when he is speaking of history since his historical story telling is always in order to support his goofy theses, this book has a redeeming value and is not without merit. The biggest plus is to see how a whole group of self appointed intellectuals could embrace and believe this load of crap neither without bursting out in laughter nor while holding ones nose from the whiff of embarrassment. It’s hard to believe that people at one time believed this crap and thought it had merit. Do yourself a favor instead of having Toynbee pick and choose his favorite Thucydides stories, just read Thucydides yourself. You won’t regret that decision. I promise you. (I say that in all sincerity since Thucydides’ ‘History of the Peloponnesian Wars’ is one of my all time favorite books and that Toynbee seemed to quote that book more than any other book except for pointless quotations from the Bible).

In the first half of this book it was obvious to me that Toynbee’s dislike of left wing Hegelianism meant that he was falling into a wickedly dangerous tolerance of right wing Hegelianism. I noticed that everyone’s least favorite fascist, Adolph Hitler, feted Toynbee personally and his first three books from this series. Modern conservatives would love what Toynbee is getting at and I’ve noticed fascists/conservatives still understand and respect the inspiration to this book Spengler’s ‘The Decline of the West’, and I also noticed that the fictional character in Saul Bellow’s book ‘Humboldt’s Gift’ never read Hegel or at least did not understand him and constantly wanted people to, and that he bemoaned the fact that people no longer read Toynbee (btw, I noticed the fictional Karl Ove did the exact same thing in his fictional ‘My Struggle’). Conservatives will generally accept Toynbee and be awed by his superficial connections and embrace his silly themes, and they tend not to like Hegel as Toynbee definitely does not and they just have never gotten around to reading Hegel or taking the time to understand him.

Toynbee with his overarching mega themes and his endless set of tedious examples from history which don’t really fit his silly narratives is a relic from a bygone era that is best viewed for its meta-historical worth since the only value he provides today is that people at one time took his perspective for the ‘study of history’ serious and while today overwhelmingly the world except for Conservepedia, the ‘conservative alternative to Wikipedia’, who live in an alternative universe and see this book in nothing but flattering terms. Truth has a liberal bias and conservatives need alternative facts even if it means they see worth in nonsense such as Toynbee’s take on history. Fortunately those who are living in the reality based world overwhelmingly see this work for the nonsense and silliness that it really was.

[Patrick McLean · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a writer I find this book to be a useful and inspiring tool. It makes my world-making brainy parts light up light Christmas.

If you are a fan of stories with big cosmologies (which would be everything by Asimov, Heinlein, Robert E. Howard, etc.) this will be a very interesting book. The sweep of history is laid out and explored, not in a fashion that struggles to stay in step with the intellectual fads of the day ( a la Diamond ) but with depth and passion.

My favorite bit so far:

It is ... a paradox of advancement that, if Necessity be the mother of Invention, the other parent is Obstinacy, the determination that you will go on living under adverse conditions rather than cut your losses and go where life is easier.

Can one find fault with the history or the analysis -- of course. But as a jumping off point to the creations of worlds, as an antidote to temporal provincialism (the idea that things now are as they have always been) this book is wonderful.

[Simon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book took me a long time (several months) to read despite itself being an abridged version of a much longer work, and I spent a long time deciding on whether to rate it three or four stars. The reasons why will in all likelihood become apparent throughout this review.

Arnold J. Toynbee's "A Study of History" is even in abridged form an impressively ambitious work of historical analysis. The author wrote the book to explain how complex societies emerge in the first place, and why some collapse during crisis while others thrive. The work has often been compared to Oswald Spengler's "Decline of the West" and while the two works do superficially touch on the same subject matter, they are radically different in substance as a consequence of Spengler and Toynbee using almost polar opposite methodologies. Spengler mostly looks at art, culture, religion; while Toynbee does touch on those subject matter, most of "A Study of History" is concerned with materialistic political issues such as economics, geopolitics and the basic nuts-and-bolts of building competent state institutions. As a matter of fact, approximately 25% through "A Study of History" Toynbee spends much energy on criticising Spengler for neglecting the materialistic side of history. Toynbee is also more cautious than Spengler, taking great pains to point out all the countries whose history is not a perfect match for his theories and it's only Western societies that his analysis describes 100%.

Let's start with the strengths of Toynbee's analysis. He arrives at several interesting insights that make perfect sense now but I had never thought of until reading "A Study of History". For instance: Complex civilisations usually emerging in inhospitable environments precisely because communities need some kind of advanced division of labour and administrative system to even survive there in the first place; the important role that revealed religions with a revered prophet play in establishing a complex state capable of competing with other states and resolving internal conflict; conversely, he also notices that explicitly theocratic states are disproportionately likely to suffer a total collapse when faced with a geopolitical crisis they can't handle.

Indeed, one of the universal constants in human history that Toynbee notices is that top-down state-imposed religions rarely last very long with Akhenaton's sun-worship and the Roman imperial cult serving as good demonstrative examples. Toynbee also shows convincingly that states which in their official propaganda portray themselves as aspiring world governments end up suffering a total collapse with Achaemenid Persia and Ottoman Turkey standing out as good examples in addition to Imperial Rome. The subsequent collapse of the USSR and the USA's very traumatic ongoing decline as a superpower certainly prove Toynbee right in that accord... especially considering an absolutely hilarious line either here or in his other book "Civilisation on Trial" where Toynbee describes both liberal and Marxist progress narratives as "secularised re-tellings of the Book of Revelation with historical necessity in the place of divine providence"

On the subject of which ideologies help states thrive and others hinder them, Toynbee also finds that states which either venerate a romanticised golden age or a futuristic utopian vision in their official ideology tend to decline quickly - notice that the notoriously dysfunctional and corrupt Fascist Italy did both of those at the same time! It seems like a country's national identity being attached to an extremely specific model of practical statecraft is bad, in other words.

So far, so good. The reasons I only gave this three stars are numerous: There are some of Toynbee's theories I am not completely convinced by, such as his convoluted explanation for exactly why Britain became the world's dominant colonial empire. Other parts have just plain aged badly. There are many places where Toynbee takes great places to be critical of the often Western-centric character of British academic history through most of his history, explicitly criticising then-popular scientific racism... and then going on to argue that South East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa had yet to create complex societies because it wasn't necessary for survival in either geographical area. Which only makes sense using a very "white British upper-middle class academic circa 1947" definition of "complex society". To pick another example, Toynbee argues that Eastern Orthodox Christianity "collapsed as a culture" when things started going downhill for the Byzantine Empire which absolutely does not make sense the way Toynbee argues it since he has to resort to absurd arguments to write Russia into Western culture after Peter the Great modernised the country.

The results are a very mixed bag to 21st century readers, that probably made perfect sense to most of its initial mid-20th century audience. Today, however, "A Study of History" contains a weird mix of still thought-provoking points about why some societies thrive during crises but others do not along with opinions that will strike most readers as either infuriating or unintentionally hilarious depending on their inclination. I will nonetheless recommend this to anyone with an interest in geopolitics and the mechanics of statecraft but very cautiously as you need a proverbial saltshaker handy to make it all the way through.

[Colin Cordner · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an abridgement of Toynbee's first seminal forays into the study of the structure of history. It's hard to downplay the brilliance of his endeavours (which strike gold in the later volumes). Expert naysayers nitpick at the details of his study, but very few individuals can match Toynbee's theoretical vision of the whole; no philosopher of history can afford to ignore him.

Toynbee's initial starting-point, as reflected in the abridged volume of v.1-6, was to study history as the unfolding and evolution of civilizations as they are articulated by concrete human communities according to their understanding of their callings, from within particular material/social conditions (e.g. as opposed to dealing in reductive abstractions such as "nations" or "states", or "Geist" or "the means of production"). That is to say that Toynbee understood that the starting-point for understanding history is to grasp the religious dimension of human striving, and the material and institutional conditions which structure and limit those strivings. I.e. The history of civilizations is the story of religions.

[Lo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kurt Vonnegut, the late and very great, often name checked this dude and so naturally I had to go see what was what. Kurt has never steered me wrong!

[Garry · Rating 4 out of 5]

The alphabet of popular history, what K. Marx was calling the 'spiral of civilizations', or the death of the empires, according to Toynbee. In most cases thoughtful analysis.

[Robert Sheppard · Rating 4 out of 5]

WHAT EVERY EDUCATED CITIZEN OF THE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW IN THE 21ST CENTURY: THE GREAT HISTORIANS OF WORLD HISTORY--HERODOTUS, THUCYDIDES, SIMA QIAN, IBN KHALDUN, THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS, JULIUS CAESAR, PLUTARCH, LIVY, POLYBIUS, TACITUS, GIBBON, MARX, SPENGLER & TOYNBEE----FROM THE WORLD LITERATURE FORUM RECOMMENDED CLASSICS AND MASTERPIECES SERIES VIA GOODREADS—-ROBERT SHEPPARD, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF




"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." is an apt admonition to us all from George Santayana, who, in his "The Life of Reason," echoed the similar earlier words of the conservative philosopher Edmund Burke. But the great histories and historians of World History bring us far more than events of nations, chronicles of the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, or lessons and precedents from the past; they also constitute a fundamental part of World Literature, bringing us great reading experiences and exciting sagas as in Thucydides' "History of the Peloponesian War," in-depth portraits and readings of the character of great men and shapers of the world as in Plutarch's "Parallel Lives" and China's "Records of the Grand Historian" by Si Ma Chen, and deep philosophical and scientific insights into the workings of human society its environment as revealed in the panoramic visions of great Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun, Karl Marx, Oswald Spengler and Sir Arnold Toynbee. As such, in our modern globalized world of the 21st century, where not only our own history, but also the interrelated histories of all of nations show so clearly that "the past is always present," and therefore every educated citizen of the modern world has an obligation to read the great works of history from all major civilizations to even begin comprehending the living world about us and the ultimate meaning of our own lives.




WHAT WAS THE FIRST WORK OF HISTORY IN THE WORLD?



If to begin our survey we put the daunting threshold question of what was the firs work of "history" in human experience, like most radical questions we will find that the answer all depends on how we put the question and define its terms. "History" undoubtedly began with the campfire stories of Neolithic man about families, tribes and conflicts far before the invention of writing. Histories were passed down in oral sagas memorized by poets such as Homer's "Iliad and Odyssey," and only centuries later recorded in script. But true history begins with works of systematic analysis and interpretation of human events, and in that light the general consensus is that the first great work of World History was that of the Greek historian Herodotus in the 5th Century BC, "The Histories."




HERODOTUS, AUTHOR OF "THE HISTORIES"




Herodotus (5th Century BC) is thus often referred to as "The Father of History," a title conferred upon him by Cicero amoung others, but also disparagingly as "The Father of Lies" by some of his critics. He was born in Halicarnassus, a Greek city which had become part of the Persian Empire that enjoyed strong trade relations with Egypt. He travelled widely, spending time in Periclian Athens, Egypt, Persia and Italy and collected histories, tales and historical lore wherever he traveled, noting the customs of the people, the major wars and state events and the religions and lore of the people. He wrote in a "folksy" style and purported to record whatever was told to him, which led to critics deploring some of the "tall tales" or mythical accounts in his work, but which Herodtodus himself said he included without judgment to their ultimate truth to illustrate the historical beliefs of the peoples he encountered. His primary focus was to explain the history and background of the Persian War between the Greeks and the Persian Empire, though he also included cultural observations of other peoples such as the Egyptians. His "Histories" is entertaining and interesting, though somewhat voluminous and scattered for the modern reader unfamiliar with the context.




THUCYDIDES, MASTER OF REPORTORIAL AND EYEWITNESS HISTORY




Thucydides (460-395 BC) is most remembered for his epic "History of the Peloponnesian War" of Greece which recounts the struggle for supremacy and survival between the enlightened commercial empire of Athens and its reactionary opponent Sparta, which ended in the defeat of the Athenians. His approach and goal in writing was completely different from Herodotus, as he was himself a General in the wars he wrote about and set out to provide "the inside story" of eyewitnesses and personal accounts of the major participants in the great events of their history so that their characters, understanding, strategies and actions could be closely judged, especially for the purpose of educating future statesmen and leaders. This approach was later shared by Polybius in his "The Rise of the Roman Empire." As a more contemporary history it is often more exciting to read, and establishes the tradition followed by Livy and others of including the "key speeches" of the leaders in war council, the "inside story" of their schemes and motivations, and rousing tales of the ups and downs of fast-moving battles. It contains such classics such as Pericles "Funeral Speech" for the ballen war heroes reminiscent of Lincoln's Gettysburg address. It is a must for those seeking to understand Classical Greece and a rich and exciting read.




SIMA QIAN, AND THE "RECORDS OF THE GRAND HISTORIAN" OF HAN DYNASTY CHINA



Sima Qian (Szu Ma Chien/145-86 BC) is regarded as the greatest historian of China's long and florid history and his personal tragedy is also held up as an example of intellectual martyrdom and integrity in the face of power. He like his father was the chief astrologer/astronomer and historian of the Han Imperial Court under Emperor Wu. His epic history "Records of the Grand Historian" sought to summarize all of Chinese history up to his time when the Han Dynasty Empire was a rival in size and power to that of Imperial Rome. He lived and wrote about the same time as Polybius, author of "The Rise of the Roman Empire," and like him he wrote from the vantage point of a newly united empire having overcome centuries of waring strife to establish a unified and powerful domain. In style, his history has some of the character of Plutarch in his "Lives" in that it often focuses on intimate character portraits of such great men as Qin Shi Huang Di, the unifier and First Emperor of China, and many others. It also contains rich and varied accounts of topic areas such as music, folk arts, literature, economics, calendars, science and others. He was the chief formulator of the primary Chinese theory of the rise and fall of imperial dynasties known as the "Mandate of Heaven." Like the theory of the Divine Right of Kings, its premise was that Emperors and their dynasties were installed on earth by the divine will of heaven and continued so long as the rulers were morally upright and uncorrupted. However, over centuries most dynasties would suffer corruption and decline, finally resulting in Heaven choosing another more virtuous dynasty to displace them when they had forfeited the "Mandate of Heaven," a kind of "Social Contract" with the divine rather than with mankind. Then, this cycle would repeat itself over the millennia.

His personal life was occasioned by tragedy due to his intellectual honesty in the "Li Ling Affair." Two Chinese generals were sent to the north to battle the fierce Xiongnu hordes against whom the Great Wall was constructed, Li Ling and the brother-in-law of the Emperor. They met disaster and their armies were annihilated, ending in the capture of both. Everyone at Court blamed the disaster on Li Ling in order to exonerate the Emperor's relative, but Sima Qian, out of respect for Li Ling's honor disagreed publicly and was predictably sentenced to death by Emperor Wu. A noble like Sima Qian could have his death sentence commuted by payment of a large fine or castration but since he was a poor scholar he could not afford the fine.

Thus, in 96 BC, on his release from prison, Sima chose to endure castration and live on as a palace eunuch to fulfill his promise to his father to complete his histories, rather than commit suicide as was expected of a gentleman-scholar. As Sima Qian himself explained in his famous "Letter to Ren An:"


“If even the lowest slave and scullion maid can bear to commit suicide, why should not one like myself be able to do what has to be done? But the reason I have not refused to bear these ills and have continued to live, dwelling in vileness and disgrace without taking my leave, is that I grieve that I have things in my heart which I have not been able to express fully, and I am shamed to think that after I am gone my writings will not be known to posterity. Too numerous to record are the men of ancient times who were rich and noble and whose names have yet vanished away. It is only those who were masterful and sure, the truly extraordinary men, who are still remembered. ... I too have ventured not to be modest but have entrusted myself to my useless writings. I have gathered up and brought together the old traditions of the world which were scattered and lost. I have examined the deeds and events of the past and investigated the principles behind their success and failure, their rise and decay, in one hundred and thirty chapters. I wished to examine into all that concerns heaven and man, to penetrate the changes of the past and present, completing all as the work of one family. But before I had finished my rough manuscript, I met with this calamity. It is because I regretted that it had not been completed that I submitted to the extreme penalty without rancor. When I have truly completed this work, I shall deposit it in the Famous Mountain. If it may be handed down to men who will appreciate it, and penetrate to the villages and great cities, then though I should suffer a thousand mutilations, what regret should I have?”

— Sima Qian




JULIUS CAESAR: HISTORY AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND AUTOMYTHOLOGY




Julius Caesar was famous for writing accounts of his own military campaigns, most notably in his "History of the Gallic Wars." Curiously, he writes of himself in the third person. Though a personal history, his writing contains little introspection or deep analytical thought and is rather the action-drama of the campaign, with special care to show his own personal courage and leadership. Before the 20th century most European schoolboys would read the work as part of their efforts to learn Latin in Grammar School. Later famous leaders such as Winston Churchill also followed in Caesar's tradition in writing history alonside making it, for which he received the Nobel Prize. Caesar's work is worth reading and exciting in parts, though sometimes becoming repetitive in the minutiae of the endless conflicts.




THE GREAT ROMAN HISTORIES: LIVY, POLYBIUS, TACITUS, SEUTONIUS AND AMMIANUS MARCELLINUS



The thousand-year history of the Roman Republic and Empire can be gleaned from these five great historians in the order presented. For the earliest history of the founding of the Roman Republic from the 6th-4th Centuries BC Livy (59BC-17 AD) in his "Ab Urbe Condita Libri" (From the Founding of the City) is the best source, tracing the saga from the tale of Aeneas fleeing from fallen Troy to the Rape of the Sabine Women, Romulus & Remus, the tyranical Tarquin Kings, the Founding of the Republic, the evolution of the Roman Constitution and up to the sack of the city by the Gauls in the 4th Century BC. Though ancient history is presumed to be boring, I surprisingly found Livy's account surprisingly lively, almost a "can't put down read."

Polybius (200-118 BC) then picks up the story in his "The Rise of the Roman Empire" tracing the three Punic Wars with Carthage, Hannibal's campaign over the Alps and Rome's entanglement with the collapsing Greek Empire of Seleucis, Macedon and the Ptolmeys until attaining supremacy over the entire Mediterranean. Polybius is a surprisingly modern historian who saw as his challenge to write a "universal history" similar to that of our age of Globalization in which previously separate national histories became united in a universal field of action with integrated causes and effects. He was a Greek who was arrested and taken to Rome and then became intimate with the highest circles of the Roman Senate and a mentor to the Scipio family of generals. He like Thucydides then attempts to tell the "inside story" of how Rome rose to universal dominance in its region, and how all the parts of his world became interconnected in their power relations.

Tacitus (56-117 AD) continues the story after the fall of the Republic and rise of the Roman Empire under the emperors. Along with his contemporary Seutonius who published his "History of the Twelve Caesars" in 121 AD, he tells of the founding of the Empire under Julius Caesar, the Civil Wars of Augustus involving Mark Anthony & Cleopatra, the Augustan "Golden Age" and the descent into unbelievable corruption, degeneration, homicidal and sexual madness and excess under Caligula and Nero, followed by a return to decency under Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius. The endstory of the Roman Empire is reflected in Ammianus Marcellinus (395-391 AD) who wrote in the time of Julian the Apostate who unsuccessfully tried to shake off Christianity and restore the old pagan and rationalist traditions of Classical Greece and Rome.




PLUTARCH, THE GREAT HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHER




Plutarch (46-120 AD) is most famous for his historical biographies in "Parallel Lives" or simply "Lives." He was, like Polybius, a Greek scholar who wished to open understanding between the Greek and Roman intellectual communities. His "Parallel Lives" consists of character portraits and life histories of matching pairs of great Greeks and great Romans such as Alexander and Caesar, hoping to enhance appreciation of the greatness of each. Much of Shakespeare's knowledge of the classical world reflected in his plays such as "Julius Caesar," "Anthony and Cleopatra" and "Coriolanus" came from reading Plutarch in translation. His character analyses are always insightful and engaging to read. His biographical method was also used by the great near-contemporary Sima Qian of Han Dynasty China.



IBN KHALDUN, ISLAMIC PIONEER OF MODERN HISTORY, SOCIOLOGY AND ECONOMICS



One of the blind spots in our appreciation of World History is the underappreciation of the contributions of Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) and many other Islamic and non-Western thinkers, including Rashīd al-Dīn Fadhl-allāh Hamadānī (1247–1318), a Persian physician of Jewish origin, polymathic writer and historian, who wrote an enormous Islamic history, the Jami al-Tawarikh, in the Persian language, and Ala'iddin Ata-Malik Juvayni (1226–1283) a Persian historian who wrote an account of the Mongol Empire entitled Ta' rīkh-i jahān-gushā (History of the World Conqueror). Of these Ibn Khaldun was the greatest and a theoretical forerunner of our modern approaches to history, far ahead of his time and little appreciated in either the Western or the Islamic world until recently. His greatest work is the The "Muqaddimah" (known as the Prolegomena) in which he anticipated some of the themes of Marx in tracing the importance of the influence of economics on history, including the conflict between the economic classes of the nomadic pastoral and herding peoples, the settled agriculturalists and the rising urban commercial class. Like Marx he stressed the importance of the "economic surplus" of the agricultural revolution and the "value-added" of manufacture, which allowed the rise of the urban, military and administrative classes and division of labor. He stressed the unity of the social system across culture, religion, economics and tradition. He even anticipated some of the themes of Darwin and evolution, tracing human progress in its First Stage of Man "from the world of the monkeys" towards civilization. Toynbee called the Muqaddimah the greatest work of genius of a single mind relative to its time and place ever produced in world history.



THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE MONGOL EMPIRE



"The Secret History of the Mongol Empire" was precisely that, a private history written for the family of Ghengis Khan recording its rise and expansion from Ghengis Khan's humble personal origin to an empire stretching from China to Poland and Egypt. Its author is unknown but it contains an engaging account of the Khanate, the royal family and its traditions and the incredible expansion of its domain. While not a theoretical work it provides a useful missing link in our understanding of the Mongol Empire as a beginning stage of modern Globalization and a conduit for sharing between civilizations, East and West, and, unfortunatelyh for the transmission of the Black Plague across the world.



THE GREAT MODERNS: GIBBON, MARX, SPENGLER & TOYNBEE



The "must read" classics of modern World History include the work of Edward Gibbon "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" which traces its fall to a decline in civic virtue, decayed morals and effeminacy amoung the public and the debilitating effects of Christianity vis-a-vis the rationalism of the Greek-Roman heritage. Marx, of course is central to modern history, not only formulating the laws of social development based on economics, class conflict and the transition from agricultural to capitalist economies, but also formulating the revolutionary program of Communism. Oswald Spengler was a remarkable German amateur historian whose "Decline of the West" traced a theory of "organic civilizations" that have a birth, blossoming, limited lifespan and death like all living creatures. He held this to be a cyclical universal historical process of civilizations now exemplified by the West entering the stage of spiritual exhaustion and collaps in warfare. Arnold Toynbee charted a similar process analyzing 26 civilizaitons across all human history, but differed with Spengler in that he believed moral reform and a return to Christian ethics could revive the West and forestall its decline.



SPIRITUS MUNDI AND WORLD HISTORY



In my own work, the epic contemporary and futurist novel Spiritus Mundi World History plays a central role as various characters such as Professor Riviera in the Mexico City Chapter and Prof. Verhoven of the Africa chapters discourse on human history, evolution, evolutionary biology and the rise of civilization, culminating with the quest of the protagonists led by Sartorius to establish a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly for global democracy, a globalized version of the EU Parliament as a new organ of the United Nations.



World Literature Forum invites you to check out the great historians of World History and World Literature, and also the contemporary epic novel Spiritus Mundi, by Robert Sheppard. For a fuller discussion of the concept of World Literature you are invited to look into the extended discussion in the new book Spiritus Mundi, by Robert Sheppard, one of the principal themes of which is the emergence and evolution of World Literature:


For Discussions on World Literature and n Literary Criticism in Spiritus Mundi: http://worldliteratureandliterarycrit...


Robert Sheppard


Editor-in-Chief
World Literature Forum
Author, Spiritus Mundi Novel
Author’s Blog: http://robertalexandersheppard.wordpr...
Spiritus Mundi on Goodreads:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17...
Spiritus Mundi on Amazon, Book I: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CIGJFGO
Spiritus Mundi, Book II: The Romance http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CGM8BZG


Copyright Robert Sheppard 2013 All Rights Reserved

[noblethumos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Arnold J. Toynbee’s A Study of History, even in its abridged form prepared by D. C. Somervell, remains one of the twentieth century’s most ambitious attempts to theorise the rise and fall of civilisations. Condensed from the original twelve volumes into a single, accessible text, the abridgement preserves the essential contours of Toynbee’s historical vision while rendering his argument legible to generalists and scholars alike. Though now subject to substantial critique, the work stands as a monumental exercise in comparative civilisational analysis and a foundational exemplar of grand historical theorising.


Toynbee set out to transcend national narratives and to offer a comprehensive theory explaining the cyclical development of human societies. His core proposition is that civilisations are the primary units of historical analysis, far exceeding nations or empires in explanatory power. Across more than twenty civilisations he identifies recurring patterns—emergence, growth, breakdown, and disintegration—driven less by material forces than by spiritual, moral, and cultural dynamics.


The abridged volumes retain Toynbee’s overarching conceptual architecture and his distinctive interpretative style: synthetic, moral-philosophical, and deeply comparative.


The Challenge–Response Mechanism
Central to Toynbee’s model is the idea that civilisations arise through creative responses to challenges—environmental, political, or cultural. Successful elites innovate, adapt, and expand the society’s capacities. Failure to respond effectively leads to stagnation or decline. In this sense, Toynbee rejects deterministic models of civilisational ascent and decline, emphasising agency, creativity, and moral purpose.


Creative Minorities and the Problem of Mimesis
Toynbee posits that civilisations are led by creative minorities, groups capable of offering imaginative solutions and inspiring broader social cohesion. Over time, however, these elites degenerate into dominant minorities reliant on coercion rather than charisma. This shift erodes legitimacy and accelerates societal breakdown.


The related concept of mimesis—the idea that external groups emulate dominant civilisations—provides Toynbee with a framework for understanding cultural diffusion, imperial expansion, and the formation of “universal states.”


Universal States and Universal Churches
A further key theme is the emergence of universal states (e.g., the Roman Empire, the Han Empire) during the late phases of civilisational decay. These states impose order but lack the creative vitality of earlier phases. In parallel, universal churches arise as spiritual successors, preserving cultural meaning and offering new frameworks for belonging. Toynbee’s treatment of religious traditions underscores his belief in the primacy of spiritual forces in sustaining societies.


Disintegration and the Internal Proletariat
Toynbee’s theory of decline focuses on the widening gulf between the dominant minority and two “proletariats”: the internal proletariat, which rejects the legitimacy of its own civilisation, and the external proletariat, which threatens it from without. These dynamics, he argues, precipitate the final disintegration of civilisational order.


Somervell’s abridgement performs a remarkable service: condensing thousands of pages while maintaining the coherence of Toynbee’s architectonic structure. His editorial hand is light enough to preserve Toynbee’s voice, yet firm enough to enhance readability and thematic clarity.


The abridged edition highlights Toynbee’s methodological innovations—his comparative breadth, his attention to long-term patterns, and his insistence on non-material explanations of historical change. It also brings sharper focus to Toynbee’s engagement with philosophy, theology, and cultural analysis.


Although A Study of History was widely acclaimed upon publication, later historiography has exposed significant limitations.


Excessive Systematisation
Toynbee’s cyclical model has been criticised for imposing overly rigid patterns onto complex and heterogeneous historical developments. Civilisations rarely follow the linear trajectory he proposes, and the drive to fit disparate cases into a universal schema sometimes leads to selective or tendentious evidence.


Ambiguous and Idealist Causation
Toynbee’s reliance on moral and spiritual explanations—such as the creative vitality of elites or the degenerative effects of dominance—makes his theory difficult to operationalise. Modern historians often favour materialist explanations grounded in institutions, economics, demography, and ecology, areas that Toynbee addresses only indirectly.


Civilisation as a Problematic Unit of Analysis
The concept of civilisation itself has come under scrutiny. Critics argue that civilisations are not discrete, bounded units but fluid, interconnected networks. Toynbee acknowledges interaction, yet his model still privileges autonomy and internal dynamics.


Limited Attention to Social and Economic Structures
While Toynbee’s philosophical orientation is a strength, it also leads to gaps. Class relations, gender dynamics, technological systems, and environmental factors receive comparatively less attention, limiting the explanatory versatility of his framework.


Despite its limitations, A Study of History remains deeply influential. It represents one of the last great attempts at a universal theory of history—an endeavour now largely abandoned in academic scholarship. Toynbee’s emphasis on cross-cultural comparison, long-term patterns, and non-material drivers of change continues to inform global history, historical sociology, and civilisational studies.


Moreover, the abridged edition has ensured the accessibility and longevity of Toynbee’s ideas, allowing new generations to engage critically with one of the most ambitious historical syntheses of the modern era.


The abridged A Study of History distils Arnold Toynbee’s sweeping civilisational analysis into a coherent and engaging narrative. Though modern scholarship has moved away from grand unified theories of historical development, Toynbee’s vision retains intellectual fascination. His focus on moral creativity, leadership, and cultural adaptation challenges purely materialist accounts and invites readers to consider history as a drama shaped by human imagination and spiritual striving.


As a work of global historical theorisation, the abridged Study remains unmatched in scope and ambition. While its analytical framework invites critique, its imaginative reach ensures its enduring status as a landmark in twentieth-century historiography.

GPT

[Matt Stearns · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been looking for books like Toynbee's A Study of History since I finished reading it in undergrad. I've taken to locating it in bookstores in hopes that the section has similar books. I find it often under General History or Historiography. In my opinion it does not belong in either. A Study of History is more at home in a Philosophy or Social Psychology section. The sheer breadth and depth of Toynbee's analysis dwarfs the offerings one typically finds in General History and is but tangentially related to Historiography.

The book's approach to history is much more philosophical and psychological as Toynbee asserts and then backs up his premise that civilizations have a general trajectory that they all follow. As a young man reading such a grand attempt at explaining everything it was particularly engrossing. The reader is left in awe over the amazing amount of information on past cultures and peoples. The similarities Toynbee points to will certainly have the reader leaving with the thought that the divisions within humankind are all artifice. It reminded me a great deal of Campbell's approach to religion in the Hero with 1000 Faces. We all have a desire to create, are prone to corrupt our creation, and then destroy it to create anew.

[Nils · Rating 3 out of 5]

Remarkably tedious, though the lineaments of its influence are obvious, particularly on the thinking of other "grand strategists" like Rostow, Kennedy and above all Huntington -- especially in the concept of a unitarian, holistic and hermetic civilizations, and the way in which hybridism is seen as producing not so much vigor as degeneration and decay. The language is impossibly florid, and the judgments on contemporary civilization are often sourly conservative, such as the repeated dismissal of jazz as "Benin barbarism." It's hard to figure how Toynbee was so popular in his postwar heyday, just as it is hard to imagine that same world in which TS Eliot used to sell out baseball stadiums of people who wanted to hear him read his poetry — one imagines that these two shared a largely overlapping fan base.

[Michael Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I learnt a lot. There are civilisations in here that I had never previously heard of, especially around the South of Turkey, the steppes of Eastern Europe and the Dneipr valley.

Both George Yeo and Lee Kuan Yew have nominated this book as 'foundational' and 'transformative' when they studied it at Cambridge in the '70s.

I found that I could not read it fast. I had to keep stopping and thinking about it. Still not completely convinced of his thesis, despite his mountains of historical 'evidence.'

I think that I will be thinking about the contents for quite a while to come. I guess that is the sign of a good book.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful summary of his multi-volume work. The best combination of history as science, and history as art.

[Yaseen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insightful overview of history as seen philosophically. It is a work that often comes up when I'm speaking. Clearly has had an impact on me.

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’d heard Toynbee’s theories of civilizations and historical change in historiography classes. But reading this felt like such a waste of time. Such a white man’s view of the world. I don’t think it’s useful to talk about rules for how civilizations work. It’s clear that he had way more knowledge of Europe and that all his examples were basically tied to the old school idea of what went into “Western Civilization”—Hittites/Egypt to British empire. He three in examples from Islamic societies, India and China, and even once or twice the American medieval empires and Japan. But mostly it was just the places in Europe and it was never clear what the differences were between a civilization, society, state or religion and it’s obvious that one can make arbitrary “rules” fit just about any society. All you have to do is say, there will be X number of crises and then such and such will happen and then can totally find those elements in any unit of human organization that you want to use. His Christian commitment was sweet but got in the way of his attempt to find “rules” for “success” of societies. IMHO

[Charles Haywood · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book. It’s regarded as a classic, from a time before the study of history became corrupted by political correctness. From a time when the ascendancy of a civilization was taken for granted as a good, and history was not dominated by gender and race “studies,” but focused on the reality of history and what could be objectively learned from it.

But I didn’t like the book. While undoubtedly erudite, it is extremely long-winded, and erudite to the point of turgidity. More importantly, it’s not particularly convincing in its main theses. It’s hard to condense those theses, but in essence the book (which is an abridgement of six full-length books! And there are six more not covered by this abridgment.) classifies civilizations into nineteen named ones, and purports to discern universal principles behind their rise, stagnation, and fall.

These principles include what Toynbee calls “challenge and response”—the idea that a civilization grows by meeting challenges (which can be neither too easy nor too hard). But that does not clearly distinguish cause and effect. Of course successful civilizations will continually overcome challenges. But it’s less clear that overcoming those challenges is what actually causes the civilization to become successful. Another Toynbee universal principle is that that civilizations decay not because of internal or external pressure, but because their internal “creative minority” loses will and changes from a ruling class that really leads and drives society forward, to simply an extractive ruling class in ever-greater tension with the ruled, ultimately leading to the civilization’s unravelling.

Toynbee’s most interesting universal principle is that during a time of decline, a society forms a “universal state”—not a sign of dynamism and success, but a calcification into empire with rigidity that disallows creativity and social mobility, leading to the ultimate downfall of the civilization. He did not think (as of the mid-20th Century) that the West had formed a universal state, but identified that as a future possibility.

None of this is irrational. All of it is internally coherent. It may all be true. It is quite interesting. So as a work of pure history the book is quite good, if limited in its appeal to true history buffs. But as a work of political philosophy it’s just not especially compelling, perhaps because its broad sweep makes it difficult to criticize with specificity. Similarly, a nearly total unwillingness to actually place modern Western civilization within Toynbee’s framework and make specific predictions makes it less interesting. You can understand why Toynbee didn’t want to do that, for that would have become the focus of attention on his book, but sixty years later it makes the book less appealing to modern readers.

One interesting facet of the book is that while Toynbee talks more about Western civilization and its precursors than about other civilizations, he does talk a lot about other civilizations and treats them as equally valuable and informative to his analysis (actually, as necessary to his analysis). Toynbee gives equal weight to Far Eastern (Chinese/Japanese/Korean), Indian subcontinent, and Americas civilizations in his analysis, and it appears, judging from some side comments from the abridging author, that Toynbee’s original six books went into much greater historical detail on those other civilizations, and the abridger has re-focused on the West in the interests of space. One effect, though, of choosing civilizations is that Toynbee recognizes that Africa has contributed nothing at all to world civilization, and while it has briefly had some third-order societies based on localized and transitory trade, it has never had a civilization in the Toynbee sense (though Toynbee does not rule out it creating a civilization in the future). This recognition of non-PC realities probably has contributed to the decline in Toynbee’s reputation, who was apparently once the most famous historian in the world.

So, in sum, this book is interesting for history buffs and those trying to form a coherent world historical/philosophical framework, as well as for those interested in the focuses of historians of the past. But I’m not sure it has a lot to offer the modern American, struggling with a very different America and a very different world (even if Toynbee is right that, ultimately, the world is exactly the same if viewed through the correct lens).

[Pacific Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Toynbee categorizes the world into 21 “living societies” (p.8) that form the intelligible units of historical study, including Western Christendom, Orthodox Christian Society, Islamic Society, Hindu Society, and the Far-Eastern Society. He then goes on to systemic comparison between them throughout the book.

“In primitive societies […] mimesis is directed towards the older generation and towards dead ancestors […] On the other hand, in societies in process of civilization, mimesis is directed towards creative personalities […] society is in dynamic motion along a course of change and growth” (p.49). The creative minority inspires the masses through mimesis. Civilization forms in transition from a static condition to a dynamic one, and die when the opposite happens. He sees it as a creative and stimulating enterprise, which is in contrast to Spengler’s view.

Toynbee proposes a “challenge and response” model to the genesis of civilizations, emphasizing the psychological response of a society than race or environment (p.68). For example, in response to the post-Ice Age climate shift, the “sluggish and unambitious emigrants” ended up in tropical Sudan, and the more ambitious ones founded the Egyptian civilization (p.72). I sympathize with the argument that hard times create strong men. But, is there a place without significant challenges? If challenge was all that was necessary for civilization, we would see it sprouting all over the place instead of it being a rare oddity. He mentions several other types of challenges that have to exist in a “golden mean,” including external pressures on the frontier.

In an ailing civilization, the creative energy dissipates and the dominant minority fails to encourage mimesis, leading to increased oppression and the schism of the internal/external proletariat (p.77). There are afterwards three phases of decline: a “time of troubles” spurred by tyranny, a universal state, and an interregnum with barbarian Volkerwanderung in a “heroic age” (p360). The increased militarism necessary to maintain order increases the expenses of the state. The internal proleteriat become “robbed of their social inheritance and turned into exploited outcastes” (p.378). They create universal churches in a “higher religion”, while the external proletariat form barbarian war bands (p.555). Today, the latter are found in the Middle East.

Interestingly, as decay progresses, there is a psychological “promiscuity” where the cultural divisions between classes diminish, and is replaced by a sense of unity. This amounts to a weakening of the spirit in the creative minority, art and culture become universally vulgar (p.495). He focuses a lot on the spiritual aspects of society and the philosophies they choose to adopt, for example in “archaism” vs “futurism” during the decline (“schism of the soul”, p.520).

The book is probably a bit too pretentious for the modern American audience, and a bit Anglo-centric for everyone else. The tome is extremely verbose, I don’t see why you would need to read 12 volumes to get the same point across – I think the abridged two volume is more than enough if you are very interested in history. There is also a summary of the main arguments at the end of the first volume.

(Take a shot every time he says “Volkerwanderung”).

[JV · Rating 3 out of 5]

Antes de tudo, o argumento do livro.

Apesar do grande número e relevância, Toynbee descarta as histórias nacionais pois são sempre dependentes de um grupo maior, a civilização. Essas civilizações são o sujeito da história. Olhando temporalmente achamos junto a nossa civilização ocidental uma relação de filiação à civilização greco-romana, olhando espacialmente encontramos a civilização ortodoxa oriental, islâmica, hindu e extremo-oriental. Mas o que marca uma civilização? Diz Toynbee: i- império universal (como o romano) que surge de época conturbada; ii um interregno donde nascem iii uma igreja e iv um Völkerwanderung dos bárbaros. Através do tempo e espaço identifica-se 21 civilizações: egípcia, andina, sínica, minóica, suméria, maia, Yucatec, mexicana, hitita, síria, babilônica, iraniana, arábica, extremo-oriental (continental), extremo-oriental (japonesa), hindu, Índica, helênica, cristã ortodoxa (principal), cristã ortodoxa (russa) e ocidental.

Para Toynbee essas civilizações nascem como resposta a um estímulo humano ou ambiental. Como numa mola onde se aplicada força insuficiente não há reação e se aplicada em excesso há o estiolamento, civilizações saudáveis nascem onde há um impulso adequado. O caso dos esquimós, só para dar um exemplo, é de quando o desafio de viver no polo norte é tão grande que a civilização pára no tempo, é incapaz de evoluir porque sua existência é o maior de seus méritos. Uma civilização “saudável” cresce no ritmo de seu elã vital, ou seja está sempre propondo novos desafios e os superando, criando e se reinventando sempre. O desafio dentro desse elã vital é proposto por indivíduos e minorias dentro do corpo social que coexistem num mutualismo benéfico. Pegando emprestado a teoria de Bergson (ou Carlyle) um Santo inaugura uma nova forma de viver, de sentir etc e esse conhecimento é transmitido através da mimesis ao corpo da civilização, o que gera um processo criativo. Quando o processo é interrompido cria-se um estado de suspensão que pode durar milênios. O primeiro passo é a criação de um estado universal e passa-se a viver de glórias passadas. Por outro lado, em contraposição à elite do estado universal, surge o que Toynbee chama de proletário interior e exterior. As massas não querem congelar no tempo e radicalizam sua mudança, religiões e filosofias são criadas ou adotadas em resposta à opressão estatal, eis o proletariado interno. Povos periféricos se radicalizam em torno do imperialismo que se crê universal. Futuramente esses povos parasitarão o grande império e junto ao proletário interno criarão uma nova civilização.

Tirando especificidades e caveats essa é a tese de Toynbee que parece mesmo coisa de gênio do século. Tentei ler duas vezes anteriormente mas falhei por não conhecer história o suficiente. Estudei. E mesmo estando aquém dos conhecimentos mastodônticos do Toynbee consegui ler essa versão resumida em um só tomo. Devo dizer-me ainda assim insatisfeito com o estudo. Me sinto um pouco como o Nelson nessa citação de sua biografia:

Inversamente, qualquer ataque ou restrição que lhe fizessem era respondido por Nelson com a negação completa e instantânea de todas as qualidades do outro. Mesmo que em desacordo com o que o próprio Nelson pudesse ter dito na véspera. Isso aconteceu com Otto Maria Carpeaux, que qualificara “O vestido de noiva" de "magistral" e mandara a Nelson um bilhete elogioso ao ler o texto de "Anjo negro". Na porta da ABI, Nelson não poupava elogios a Carpeaux:

"É um crânio! Tem várias bibliotecas na cabeça! Sabe o Goethe de cor e salteado!"

Mas Carpeaux não gostou de "Anjo negro" ao vê-la encenada e Nelson ficou sabendo. No dia seguinte, no mesmo lugar, resumiu Carpeaux para Otto Lara Resende:

"Uma besta."

"Mas, Nelson, ontem mesmo você dizia que ele era um crânio!", argumentou Otto.

"Ô, Otto, você quer que eu julgue o Carpeaux pelo que ele acha do Goethe?”

Parafraseando, se acho que Toynbee destrói, qual açougueiro atabalhoado, a história que conheço, como confiar em seu julgamento da dinastia Han chinesa ou na literatura egípcia? Dito isso, aprendi muitos fatos e narrativas aqui. A parte de questões específicas, também fiquei encafifado com duas afirmações gerais.

Primeiramente que Toynbee faz crer, igualando todas as civilizações nesses ciclos, que elas são indivíduos da mesma espécie. Quase como se um ornitólogo dissesse que tudo que voa é pássaro e tudo é igual. Realmente não penso assim. Nesse sentido o estudo bem menor mas sem dúvidas mais criativo de Spengler, A Decadência do Ocidente, é superior. Também o estudo político de Montesquieu não falha nesse ponto. Há diferenças específicas entre as civilizações que não são discutidas.

Depois penso que reduzir a mimesis todo o poder criativo de uma civilização, penso que é reducionista. Li em Curtius a distinção entre autoridade e liderança que pode ser citada contra o Toynbee. Autoridade é um fato, um dado da existência, que as pessoas meramente reconhecem. Pelé é uma autoridade no futebol. Já o líder não é uma autoridade, ele mobiliza as pessoas e cria uma resistência, um líder é sempre controverso é frequentemente desprezado pelos próprios liderados. Na autoridade a mimesis está presente enquanto na liderança não necessariamente. Acho que o desprezo do Toynbee pela ação humana, especialmente prática, é o que explica seus constantes e vexaminosos erros no que tange à economia e rumo do século vinte. Por Toynbee estaríamos cobertos de cinzas e destroços da nossa civilização.

Aposto que muitos sentiram-se empolgados lendo o resumo do argumento de Toynbee logo no começo desta resenha. Penso que muitas vezes pelo livro os leitores se sentirão dessa forma por causa de algumas sacadas interessantes mas de um modo geral a leitura é aborrecida. É difícil manter o interesse diante de tão súbitas mudanças de objeto. Ora falamos de Platão, página depois de Ciro e meia página adiante do tzar Pedro o grande. Difícil embora tenha me esforçado por gostar do livro.

[James Violand · Rating 2 out of 5]

Toynbee’s renown is undeserved by students of history: he is only concerned with societies as he defines them. He inflates minuscule evidence to support his preordained conclusions. He does this with the Minoan, Mayan, Hittite, Andean and Hindu civilizations. He also conflates Ancient Greece and Rome into one society! Toynbee examines the beginning and ending of empires/civilizations, arbitrarily assigning dates to mark the beginning of the demise. The Persian invasion of Greece marks the beginning of end of Athens? He arbitrarily names periods, for example WWI and WWII are the General War of 1914 – 1918 and the General War of 1939 – 1945. Why does he do this so often? It can only result in the reader's confusion. Though it is difficult to plod through this work, I have concluded that, based upon Toynbee’s assessments, we are doomed. The controlling minority (the intelligentsia, social elite, politically savvy) become enamored of the proletariat (disenfranchised) and identify with them to such an extent that their culture assumes a cancerous tumor that inevitably leads to a erosion of fundamental concepts that had led to the uniqueness of that particular society. Borders become porous and the external proletariat (foreign disenfranchised) supplants the citizen and the society falls. Prescient?

[Al Maki]

If you’re the sort who would like to have an overview of human civilizations: what they are, how they come about, it’s worth a look because it certainly has some observations worth pondering. However, even the abridgement is about the length of war and peace. As well the style is quite abstract and has a syntax that is complicated enough to occasionally require several rereadings of sentences.
As to the validity of his argument, it reminded me of what Aldous Huxley said of psychology in the early 20th century: it resembled a medieval bestiary but was the best that could be done in its time.

[shandy⚡️ · Rating 5 out of 5]

the creative will elevate his society!

time and time again in history, the creative minority will push the boundary to develop a new thinking in societal terms.

Toynbee is able to draw examples and parallels for the reader to see such thing. He also describes how societies come to be and how they fall, either by their own or conquest.

Recommend!

[Jesus Sivasankar · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mammoth task! Only by reading history do we loose the awe of history and only then can we move forward. But once you realize that, you can't read history any more, for, depicting a single character is a tough task in itself, and how can anyone depict the character of all life!

[Priyank · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good

[laurentiu]

0

[Avital Pilpel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book! A classic, if a bit of in promoting Christianity...

[Maksim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding study of civilizations

[izad]

REF: Amelia Valcárcel aquí: https://youtu.be/9RgWTcqsxnU

[Kay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chapter 22 is very good

[Janis Kvaternik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reread this classic set forty years after beginning the series. Still amazing, still learning from the past to try to scry the future.