Astro-Rayological Interpretation & Charts
Quotes
Biography
Iimages and Physiognomic Interpretations

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A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man.

A life which does not go into action is a failure.

Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, with takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice.

As human beings, we are endowed with freedom of choice, and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is our responsibility.

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.

Compassion is the desire that moves the individual self to widen the scope of its self-concern to embrace the whole of the universal self.

I can not think of any circumstances in which advertising would not be an evil.

I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.

It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.

Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.

Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God.

The equation of religion with belief is rather recent.

The extinction of race consciousness as between Muslims is one of the outstanding achievements of Islam, and in the contemporary world there is, as it happens, a crying need for the propagation of this Islamic virtue.

The human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenceless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenceless against ourselves.

The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.

When I had got my notes all written out I thought I'd polish it off in two summers, but it took me twenty-seven years.

British historian of great contributing importance on the documentation of history.  Between 1921-1961, Toynbee published 11 volumes of his massive "Study of History"  plus more than 140 articles and books.  He died 10/22/1975, York, England.

English historian whose 12-volume A Study of History (1934-61) put forward a philosophy of history, based on an analysis of the cyclical development and decline of civilizations, that provoked much discussion.

Toynbee was a nephew of the 19th-century economist Arnold Toynbee. He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford (classics, 1911), and studied briefly at the British School at Athens, an experience that influenced the genesis of his philosophy about the decline of civilizations. In 1912 he became a tutor and fellow in ancient history at Balliol College, and in 1915 he began working for the intelligence department of the British Foreign Office. After serving as a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 he was appointed professor of Byzantine and modern Greek studies at the University of London. From 1921 to 1922 he was the Manchester Guardian correspondent during the Greco-Turkish War, an experience that resulted in the publication of The Western Question in Greece and Turkey (1922). 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 Study of History in 1922, inspired by seeing Bulgarian peasants wearing fox-skin caps like those described by Herodotus as the headgear of Xerxes' troops. This incident reveals the characteristics that give his work its special quality--his sense of the vast continuity of history and his eye for its pattern, his immense erudition, and his acute observation.

In the Study Toynbee examined the rise and fall of 26 civilizations in the course of human history, and he concluded that they rose by responding successfully to challenges under the leadership of creative minorities composed of elite leaders. Civilizations declined when their leaders stopped responding creatively, and the civilizations then sank owing to the sins of nationalism, militarism, and the tyranny of a despotic minority. Unlike Spengler in his The Decline of the West, Toynbee did not regard the death of a civilization as inevitable, for it may or may not continue to respond to successive challenges. Unlike Karl Marx, he saw history as shaped by spiritual, not economic forces.

While the writing of the Study was under way, Toynbee produced numerous smaller works and served as director of foreign research of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (1939-43) and director of the research department of the Foreign Office (1943-46); he also retained his position at the London School of Economics until his retirement in 1956. A prolific writer, he continued to produce volumes on world religions, western civilization, classical history, and world travel throughout the 1950s and 1960s. After World War II Toynbee shifted his emphasis from civilization to the primacy of higher religions as historical protagonists. His other works include Civilization on Trial (1948), East to West: A Journey Round the World (1958), and Hellenism: The History of a Civilization (1959).

Toynbee has been severely criticized by other historians. In general, the critique has been leveled at his use of myths and metaphors as being of comparable value to factual data and at the soundness of his general argument about the rise and fall of civilizations, which relies too much on a view of religion as a regenerative force. Many critics complained that the conclusions he reached were those of a Christian moralist rather than of a historian. His work, however, has been praised as a stimulating answer to the specializing tendency of modern historical research.

This page is about the universal historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee; for the economic historian Arnold Toynbee see this article. For further Toynbees and related topics see the disambiguation page Toynbee.
in 1961Arnold Joseph Toynbee CH (April 14, 1889 – October 22, 1975) was a British historian whose twelve-volume analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations, A Study of History, 1934-1961, was a synthesis of world history, a metahistory based on universal rhythms of rise, flowering and decline, which examined history from a global perspective.

Toynbee was the nephew of the economic historian Arnold Toynbee, with whom he is sometimes confused. Born in London, Arnold J. was educated at Winchester College and Balliol College, Oxford. He began his teaching career as a fellow of Balliol College in 1912, and thereafter held positions at King's College London (as Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History), the London School of Economics and the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) in Chatham House. He was Director of Studies at the RIIA between 1925 and 1955.

He worked for the Intelligence department of the British Foreign Office during World War I and served as a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. With his research assistant, Veronica M. Boulter, who was to become his second wife, he was co-editor of the RIIA's annual Survey of International Affairs. In 1936 Toynbee was received in the Reichskanzlei by Adolf Hitler (cf. Acquaintances). During World War II, he again worked for the Foreign Office and attended the postwar peace talks.

Toynbee's ideas and approach to history
Toynbee's approach may be compared to the one used by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West. He rejected, however, Spengler's deterministic view that civilizations rise and fall according to a natural and inevitable cycle.

Toynbee presented history as the rise and fall of civilizations, rather than the history of nation-states or of ethnic groups. He identified his civilizations according to cultural rather than national criteria. Thus, the "Western Civilization", comprising all the nations that have existed in Western Europe since the collapse of the Roman Empire, was treated as a whole, and distinguished from both the "Orthodox" civilization of Russia and the Balkans, and from the Greco-Roman civilization that preceded it.

With the civilizations as units identified, he presented the history of each in terms of challenge-and-response. Civilizations arose in response to some set of challenges of extreme difficulty, when "creative minorities" devised solutions that reoriented their entire society. Challenges and responses were physical, as when the Sumerians exploited the intractable swamps of southern Iraq by organizing the Neolithic inhabitants into a society capable of carrying out large-scale irrigation projects; or social, as when the Catholic Church resolved the chaos of post-Roman Europe by enrolling the new Germanic kingdoms in a single religious community. When a civilization responds to challenges, it grows. When it fails to respond to a challenge, it enters its period of decline. Toynbee argued that "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder." For Toynbee, civilizations were not intangible or unalterable machines but a network of social relationships within the border and therefore subject to both wise and unwise decisions they made. If leaders of the civilization did not appease or shut down the internal proletariat or muster an effective military or diplomatic defense against potential invading outside forces, it would fall.

He expressed great admiration for Ibn Khaldun and in particular the Muqaddimah, the preface to Khaldun's own universal history, which notes many systemic biases that intrude on historical analysis via the evidence.

Influence
Toynbee's ideas have not proved overly influential on other historians; yet, his overall theory certainly was taken up by some scholars, for example, Ernst Robert Curtius, as a sort of paradigm in the post-war period. Curtius wrote as follows in the opening pages of European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953 English translation), following close on Toynbee, as he sets the stage for his vast study of medieval Latin literature. Not all would agree with his thesis, of course; but his unit of study is the Latin-speaking world of Christendom and Toynbee's ideas feed into his account very naturally:

How do cultures, and the historical entities which are their media, arise, grow and decay? Only a comparative morphology with exact procedures can hope to answer these questions. It was Arnold J. Toynbee who undertook the task. […] Each of these historical entities, through its physical and historical environment and through its inner development, is faced with problems of which it must stand the test. Whether and how it responds to them decides its destiny. […] The economic and social revolutions after the Second Punic War had obliged Rome to import great hordes of slaves from the East. These form an "inner proletariat", bring in Oriental religions, and provide the basis on which Christianity, in the form of a "universal church", will make its way into the organism of the Roman universal state. When after the "interregnum" of the barbarian migrations, the Greco-Roman historical entity, in which the Germanic peoples form an "outer proletariat", is replaced by the new Western historical entity, the latter crystallizes along the line Rome-Northern Gaul, which had been drawn by Caesar. But the Germanic "barbarians" fall prey to the church, which had survived the universal-state end phase of antique culture. They thereby forgo the possibility of bringing a positive intellectual contribution to the new historical entity. […] More precisely: The Franks gave up their language on the soil of Romanized Gaul. […] According to Toynbee, the life curves of cultures do not follow a fatally predetermined course, as they do according to Spengler.

– E R Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 1953

The ideas Toynbee promoted enjoyed some vogue (he appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 1947). They may have been early casualties of the Cold War's intellectual climate.

Criticism
Rightly or not, critics attacked Toynbee's theory for emphasizing religion over other aspects of life when assessing the big pictures of civilizations. In this respect, the debate resembled the contemporary one over Samuel Huntington's theory of the so-called "clash of civilizations". For Toynbee's ideas in context, see development of religion.

Toynbee's ideological approach— "metaphysical speculations dressed up as history" is a commonplace modern assessment [1]— was subjected to an effective critique by Pieter Geyl. Toynbee engaged in the public dialogue, which appeared in print (1949, reprinted in 1968) in The Pattern of the Past: Can We Determine It?. This book linked essays by Toynbee and Geyl to an analysis of Toynbee's philosophy of history, contributed by Pitirim A. Sorokin.

An article by Hugh Trevor-Roper, "Arnold Toynbee's Millennium" — describing Toynbee's work as a "Philosophy of Mish-Mash" — was an assault on Toynbee's reputation.

The social scientist Ashley Montagu assembled 29 other historians' articles to form a symposium on Toynbee's A Study of History, published as Toynbee and History: Critical Essays and Reviews, 1956 Cloth, Boston: Extending Horizons Books, Porter Sargent Publishers. ISBN 0-87558-026-2. The book includes three of Toynbee's own essays: What I am Trying to Do (originally published in International Affairs vol. 31, 1955; What the Book is For: How the Book Took Shape (a pamphlet written upon completion of the final volumes of A Study of History) and a comment written in response the articles by Edward Fiess and Pieter Geyl (originally published in Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 16, 1955.)

In an essay titled The Chatham House Version (1970), Elie Kedourie of the London School of Economics, a historian of the Middle East, attacked Toynbee's role in what he saw as an abdication of responsibility of the retreating British Empire, in failing democratic values in countries it had once controlled. Kedourie argued that Toynbee's whole system and work were aimed at the British imperial role.

An attack on Toynbee for this hardly seems entirely fair given that he is on record as pointing out where the responsibility lay: ‘Arnold J. Toynbee who, before becoming recognized as an eminent world historian had dealt directly with the Palestine Mandate in the British Foreign Office, wrote in 1968: “All through those 30 years, Britain (admitted) into Palestine, year by year, a quota of Jewish immigrants that varied according to the strength of the respective pressures of the Arabs and Jews at the time. These immigrants could not have come in if they had not been shielded by a British chevaux-de-frise. If Palestine had remained under Ottoman Turkish rule, or if it had become an independent Arab state in 1918, Jewish immigrants would never have been admitted into Palestine in large enough numbers to enable them to overwhelm the Palestinian Arabs in this Arab people's own country. The reason why the State of Israel exists today and why today 1,500,000 Palestinian Arabs are refugees is that, for 30 years, Jewish immigration was imposed on the Palestinian Arabs by British military power until the immigrants were sufficiently numerous and sufficiently well-armed to be able to fend for themselves with tanks and planes of their own. The tragedy in Palestine is not just a local one; it is a tragedy for the world, because it is an injustice that is a menace to the world's peace.”’ (Robert John and Sami Hadawi, The Palestine Diary, vol. I (1914-1945), (New World Press, New York, 1970), pp. xiv-xv. Quoted from United Nations Records, Division for Palestinian Rights (DPR) 30 June 1990 The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: 1917-1988 PART

Trivia
It is assumed that Arnold J. is the Toynbee referred to on the Toynbee tiles. His ideas also feature in the Ray Bradbury short story named "The Toynbee Convector", and a lesser-known book called (among other titles) Toynbee 22. He appears alongside T.E. Lawrence as a character in an episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, dealing with the post-World War I treaty negotiations at Versailles. He also receives a brief mention in the Charles Harness classic "The Paradox Men".