Civilization on Trial

Overview

About two hundred and sixty pages, a collection published in 1948 of thirteen lectures and essays from the 1940s in which Toynbee put the ideas of A Study of History to the general reader. He argues that the unification of the world under Western technology and the atomic bomb have put Western civilisation itself on trial, that civilisations die by suicide rather than murder, and that the higher religions, not the civilisations that carried them, are the real subject of history.

Essays on Islam, Russia, Greece and Christianity’s future are included.

What happens

My view of history. Toynbee opens with an account of how he came to see civilisations rather than nations as the units of history, and to compare the Greek and Western worlds after watching the First World War repeat the Peloponnesian.

The present point in history. He argues that Western technology has unified the world for the first time, so that the West’s fate is now everyone’s, and that the atomic bomb has made the question of whether it can avoid the suicide of earlier civilisations a matter of survival.

Does history repeat itself. Toynbee considers whether the pattern of breakdown he found in twenty civilisations must apply to the West, and answers that the pattern is a challenge, not a fate, since a creative response remains possible.

Islam, the West and the future. He argues that Islam, having met the Western challenge, may play a role in the coming world order, and that the West’s racial and cultural arrogance is the greatest obstacle to that order.

Russia’s Byzantine heritage. Toynbee reads the Soviet Union as the heir of Byzantium rather than a new creation, its totalitarianism and its sense of mission both inherited from the Orthodox empire.

Christianity and civilisation. The closing essays argue that civilisations may exist to serve the higher religions rather than the reverse, that the collapse of the Roman world was the chrysalis of the Church, and that the West’s decline might likewise serve a spiritual end.

How to read it

Read the title essay as the anxieties of 1948 given a historical frame, the West one civilisation among twenty and the bomb the challenge that makes its trial urgent.

Pay close attention to the claim that civilisations die by suicide rather than murder, and to how it turns attention inward at the moment the Cold War was turning it outward.

Notice the religious turn of the closing essays, the higher religions made history’s real subject, and weigh what it gained Toynbee in readers and cost him among historians.

Consider the collection as the form in which most people met the argument of A Study of History, and ask what is lost and gained by putting twelve volumes into thirteen lectures.

Read this book alongside Gibbon’s Decline and Fall to compare two accounts of Rome’s end, one that blamed Christianity for the fall and one that made the fall Christianity’s chrysalis.

Questions it raises

• Is the claim that civilisations die by suicide rather than murder a historical finding or a moral exhortation, and does it matter which?
• Does the atomic bomb really put the West on trial in the way earlier civilisations were tried, or does a weapon that can end everything break the comparative method?
• What does it mean to say the higher religions are the real subject of history, and can a historian hold that view without ceasing to be one?
• Is the reading of the Soviet Union as Byzantium’s heir an insight or a way of not looking at what was new in it?
• Why did Toynbee’s fame collapse so quickly after the 1950s, and what did the historians who dismissed him fail to answer?
• Is Toynbee’s hope for a creative response to the West’s challenge borne out by the decades since 1948, or has the trial simply been adjourned?