Toynbee, Arnold Joseph(1889–1975)
Arnold Joseph Toynbee was in the twentieth century the foremost contemporary representative of what is sometimes termed "speculative philosophy of history." In some respects he occupied a position analogous to that of Henry Thomas Buckle in the nineteenth century. Like Buckle, he sought to discover laws determining the growth and evolution of civilization and to do so within the context of a wide comparative survey of different historical societies; like Buckle again, the results of his investigation became a storm center of controversy and criticism. To support his hypotheses, Toynbee, however, was able to draw on a vast fund of material of a kind unavailable to his Victorian predecessor, and the imposing examples and illustrations in which his work abounds make Buckle's much-vaunted erudition look strangely threadbare. As a consequence, Toynbee's historical theory is worked out in far greater detail; in fact, it represents a highly articulated and complex structure with many ramifications and appendages. Moreover, the materialist optimism underlying Buckle's linear conception of history as a continuous progressive development is wholly absent from Toynbee's analysis of the rise and decay of different cultures, while, in place of Buckle's positivistic rationalism, there runs through all Toynbee's work, especially his later books, a strain of mysticism and religious idealism.
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