A Study of History
Arnold J. Toynbeeâs multi-volume work A Study of History, the first three volumes of which appeared in 1934, drew inspiration from Oswald Spenglerâs Decline of the West (1918), a two-volume work which Toynbee had read in 1920 in the course of elaborating a philosophy of history.1 Yet despite it being a source of inspiration, Toynbee was critical of Spenglerâs effort, later observing that while the pages of Decline of the West teemed with âfirefly flashes of historical insight,â Spenglerâs account of the geneses of civilisations was âunilluminatingly dogmatic and deterministicâ.2 Toynbee observed that for Spengler, civilisations emerge, flourish and then decline âin unvarying conformity with a fixed time-tableâ and that the latter considered this civilisational trajectory to be simply a law of nature, requiring no further discussion. Yet it was precisely the question of why civilisations rise and fall that Toynbee wished to open up for investigation and in relation to this question he proposed that where the âGerman a priori method drew blank..English empiricismâ might succeed.3
Yet irrespective of the massive amount of historical data on which Toynbee drew in charting the course civilisations, his own approach was hardly in conformity with the approach that one typically associates with the expression âEnglish empiricismâ. Indeed, Toynbeeâs A Study of History was greatly informed by a notion derived from the theory of creative evolution elaborated by the French philosopher and first president of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC) of the League of Nations (LON) which many of Toynbeeâs English peers viewed saw as loose, speculative and even mystical: the Ă©lan vital (life-force).4 According to Bergson, it is the Ă©lan vital which explains the onward rush of life: although lifeâs particular articulations may become immobile and decay, life itself rushes ever forward. Alongside this forward movement an âessentialâ feature of the Ă©lan vital concerns, as Bergson explained, the âunforseeability of the forms that life createsâ.5
Bergson was fond of saying that the future lies in our hands and more particularly, that our future trajectory greatly depends on our ability âto open what was closedâ.6 Here, it is important to note that for Bergson, it is âhuman individuals and not human societies that âmakeâ human historyâ.7 Bergson stated in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion), that history only takes a forward leap when society âallows itself to be convincedâ or âshakenâ and that the âshakeâ which propels society forward must âalways be given by someoneâ.8 For Bergson, the someone in question concerns the one or several individuals possessed of moral genius: he states that it is âonly to the thrust of geniusâ that the âinertia of humanity has ever yielded.â9 According to Bergson, society will remain caught in a âvicious circleâ until that time when âone or several privileged souls, having dilated in themselves the social soul, have broken the circle in drawing society after them.â10
Toynbee assimilated Bergsonâs theory of creative evolution to his civilisational template. What this theory suggested when imported into an account of the history of civilisations is the following: whereas some civilisations fall prey to âarrestedâ development and âperilous immobilityâ and then go into decline, other civilisations surge ahead. Impelled by an Ă©lan, some civilisation thrust onwards, managing through innovative adaptations to overcome the almost insurmountable obstacles that they find in their path.11 Following Bergson, Toynbee contended that the Ă©lan by means of which civilisations grow is conveyed by âcreative pioneers,â that is, by âsuperhuman souls that break the vicious cycle of primitive social lifeâ through bringing about in their social environment the âmutationâ which they have realised within themselves. Crucial to this transformative process is the coming into play of what Toynbee referred to as the âfaculty of sheer mimesisâ: creative minorities are imitated by the âuncreative rank and fileâ.12
According to Toynbee, the social dynamic at the heart of the relation between a creative minority and the uncreative majority is what drives the growth of societies, this growth being in the direction of âprogressive self-determination or self-articulationâ.13 Societal growth involves a process by which a civilisation becomes less and less concerned with responding to challenges issuing from the âexternal environmentâ be it âphysical or human,â and more and more concerned by challenges issued âby itself to itselfâ in its own âinner arenaâ.14 In respect to civilisational decay, Toynbee cited militarism as the main cause, the origins of which concerned a âloss of creative power of creative individuals or minoritiesâ. Due to their loss of creative power, the individuals or minorities in question are increasingly unable to sway the masses. In ârage and panic,â they transform themselves into a âdominant minorityâ: they begin to rule by the whip within their own domain while periodically turning their batteries on their neighbours without.15 Toynbee stated that militarism
has been by far the greatest cause of the breakdowns of civilizations during the last four or five millenniaâŠ.Militarism breaks a civilization down by causing the local states in which the society is articulated to collide with one another in destructive fratricidal conflicts. In this suicidal process, the entire social fabric becomes fuel to feed the devouring flame in the brazen bosom of Moloch.16
Naturally given Europeâs own recent experience of fratricidal conflict, the possibility of European decline was at the forefront of Toynbeeâs mind during the time in which he was preparing the first three volumes of A Study of History. This was evidenced by his meditations on the destiny of European culture in a paper he gave at a conference in Copenhagen under the auspices of the Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations (CISSIR) in 1931, by which time he had been working on the various volumes of A Study of History for some years.17 That said, it should be noted that Toynbee did not directly confront the question of the possibility of European decline in the first three volumes of A Study of History. In the case of the fourth volume however, it was a different matter altogether. The preface to this volume was dated March 31, 1939, and therein Toynbee confessed that in light of the âcatastropheâ that might descend upon his world at any moment, he had felt at times that in writing the book, the âpainfully appropriateâ themes of which, he observed, were âbreakdownâ and âdisintegration,â he was âtempting Fateâ and âwasting effort.â He openly wondered whether the âparoxysmâ of nationalism that had engulfed the Western world in the previous year suggested that âour parochial national states might have to pass through further bouts of internecine fratricidal warfareâ before they would âenter into an effective social contract or else submit to the terrible alternative of being unified by forceâ.18
In contrast with the sense of foreboding conveyed in the preface to the fourth volume of A Study of History, the preface accompanying the first three volumes, which was dated May 16, 1933, saw Toynbee offer a broadly optimistic appraisal of the international situation. He observed therein that whereas in the age now past national communities aspired to be âuniverses in themselves,â in the so-called ânew age, the dominant note in the corporate consciousness of communities is a sense of being parts of some larger universeâ. Toynbee maintained that this sense of corporate consciousness grew out of the feeling on the part of national communities that they could no longer âstand by themselvesâ and that because of this feeling, states had adapted their sovereign independence to the LON and to other international instruments such as the Pact of Paris: what was formally known as the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy, a treaty which was signed in August 1928 by fifteen countries.19 As Toynbeeâs biographer William H. McNeill argues, if the principal message of A Study of History concerned the âdemotionâ of Western civilisation to one civilisation amongst many, it was a message that was âsoftenedâ by suggestions that this civilisation âmight yet be saved and that God or His secularized equivalent, Ă©lan vital, was still in charge.â20 McNeill further argues that to the extent that A Study of History reflects Toynbeeâs concern for the peaceful progress of Western civilisation and the international order of which it was the chief author, it may be seen as a âgrandiose background argument for the advocacy of collective security.â21 Yet at the same time and for the very same reason, A Study of History may be seen as a grandiose background argument for the advocacy of peaceful change, a cause that Toynbee would champion in the years after 1933.22
Peaceful Change or War? An Address at Chatham House
Toynbee was very disturbed by Italyâs violation of the Covenant of the LON in the form of its ongoing aggression against Ethiopia in the wake of the Walwal incident of December 5, 1934. It was in ...