A Study of History

Overview

About a thousand pages in Somervell’s two abridged volumes, a twelve-volume comparative history of some twenty-one civilisations, from the Egyptian and Sumerian to the Western, published between 1934 and 1961. Toynbee argues that civilisations, not nations, are the units of history, that they arise through creative responses to challenges, grow through the leadership of creative minorities, and break down when those minorities become merely dominant and the masses secede.

The later volumes give the universal churches that emerge from dying civilisations the central role.

What happens

The unit of study. Toynbee argues that a nation’s history cannot be understood on its own, that the intelligible unit is the civilisation, and identifies some twenty-one, living and dead, as the field for comparison.

Genesis. Civilisations do not arise from race or from favourable environments but from a creative response to a challenge, of hard country, new ground, blows, pressures or penalisation, that is severe enough to stimulate and not so severe as to crush.

Growth. A growing civilisation meets each new challenge by a further response, led by a creative minority whom the majority follows by mimesis, and its progress is measured by increasing self-determination rather than command over environment.

Breakdown. Growth ends when the creative minority, resting on a past success, becomes merely dominant, holding by force what it once held by attraction, and the majority secedes into an internal proletariat at home and an external proletariat beyond the frontier.

Disintegration. A disintegrating civilisation passes through a time of troubles, throws up a universal state that gives it a false peace, and produces, from its internal proletariat, a universal church that outlives it.

The churches and the future. The later volumes argue that the universal churches may be the real goal of history and civilisations only their chrysalis, survey the contacts between civilisations in space and time, and end with an inquiry into the prospects of the Western civilisation and Toynbee’s own reasons for writing.

How to read it

Read the choice of civilisations as the unit of study as the work’s founding move, and notice how much depends on whether the twenty-one are really comparable.

Pay close attention to the theory of challenge and response, neither racial nor environmental, and test it against the cases Toynbee draws on and the ones he does not.

Notice the account of breakdown, the creative minority become merely dominant, and ask whether it describes how ruling classes lose their claim to rule or only names the moment after they have.

Consider the religious turn of the later volumes, the churches made history’s goal, and decide whether the pattern Toynbee found is a discovery or an imposition.

Read this work alongside Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah to compare two attempts, six centuries apart, to find the laws by which societies rise and fall.

Questions it raises

• Are civilisations really the intelligible units of history, and does the list of twenty-one hold up, or does the count change depending on what one wants to prove?
• Is challenge and response a law of history or a description that fits any case after the fact?
• Does the theory of breakdown explain why creative minorities become merely dominant, or only that they do?
• What happens to the study when the churches become the goal of history: does it become theology, and is that a failing?
• Why did the profession reject a work that the public embraced, and which of the objections, to the pattern, the evidence, or the prophecy, is the strongest?
• Is the Western civilisation, on Toynbee’s own account, in its time of troubles, and what would a creative response to its present challenges look like?