Arnold Joseph Toynbee Biography

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A controversial historian, Arnold Joseph Toynbee is best known for his 12-volume work entitled A Study of History (1934-1961). He was born in London on April 14, 1889, into a scholarly, upper middle class family. His Uncle Arnold was a well-known English economist who wrote a history of Britain's Industrial Revolution in 1884. Toynbee's father, Harry, was a social worker and his mother, Edith, was one of the few women of the Victorian Era with a college degree. Wrote Toynbee some years later, "I am an historian because my mother was one."

Toynbee was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, earning a degree in the classics in 1911. His interest in Greek and Latin led him to the British Archeological School in Athens for a short time. He walked about the Greek countryside constantly. "Few men knew Greece so well as Arnold Toynbee," claimed an article in the Times Literary Supplement.

In 1912, Toynbee returned to Balliol College where he became a tutor and fellow in ancient history. With poor health keeping him from the military, he worked for the intelligence department of the British Foreign Office in 1915 and served as a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 after World War I. By then, Toynbee was a published author of such works as Greek Policy since 1882 (1914) and The Murderous Tyranny of the Turks (1917), recognized as authorities on current events in those two countries. With the war over, Toynbee returned to teaching, this time as professor of Byzantine and modern Greek studies at the University of London (1919-1921). His The Western Question in Greece and Turkey was published in 1922 as a result of his work as a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian (1921-1922) during the Greco-Turkish War. In 1925, he became research professor of international history at the London School of Economics and director of studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London.

Toynbee began his massive A Study of History in 1922, and the first three volumes appeared by 1934. The second three volumes were published in 1939, another four in 1954, an atlas in 1959, and a final volume in 1961. The first ten volumes examine the rise and fall of civilizations throughout human history. Toynbee concluded that successful civilizations excelled under the leadership of creative minorities made up of elite leaders. They fell when leaders were no longer creative, which allowed militarism, nationalism, and tyranny to take over. The death of civilization was not, inevitable, however, according to Toynbee; since it could continue to respond successfully to new challenges. Arguing that his conclusions were reached from empirical evidence, Toynbee laid out the stages of a civilization, including growth, dissolution, a troubled time, the universal state, and, finally, a collapse that led to rebirth.

Toynbee's work brought him success and intellectual acclaim, but he was not without severe critics. Historians argued that his view of the rise and fall of civilizations relies too much on religion as a reviving force. His conclusions, it was said, were more those of a Christian moralist than a historian, and there were objections to his use of myths, to which he gave the same value as historical data. Toynbee's final volume Reconsiderations was an attempt to answer those criticisms.

After World War II, Toynbee shifted his interest from history to religion with such publications as Historians Approach to Religion (1956). In 1966, he published Change and Habit: The Challenge of Our Time in which he predicted that China would become the unifier of the world if the United States and the Soviet Union could not maintain world order.

Toynbee suffered a stroke in 1974 and died the following year in York, England, on October 22. Since his death, critics have taken a gentler view of his master work. Some argue that even with its faults, A Study of History has detailed a set of meaningful characteristics concerning major civilizations. Toynbee has at least forced historians to think about the problems of world history and to debate these issues among themselves. Said Peter Gay in the New Republic, Arnold Toynbee was "a type we can ill afford to lose--a superficial but thoroughly learned eclectic."