British historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee is known for his 12-volume analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations, published as A Study of History, 1934–1961.3 Toynbee was also interested in the seeming repetition of patterns in history and, later, in the origins of civilization. This interest led him to read Spengler’s work. Although both men describe the rise, flowering and decline of civilizations, they have moved in different directions.
In his monumental work, Toynbee describes the rise and decline of 23 civilizations. He attributed the robustness or decline of a civilization to the response to moral and religious challenge. Like Spengler, he too described the parallel lifecycles of growth, dissolution, a ‘time of troubles’, a universal state and a final collapse, leading to a new genesis. Although he found a uniformity of patterns, Toynbee insisted that the cyclical pattern could, and should, be broken. He rejected Spengler‘s deterministic view that civilizations rise and fall according to a natural and inevitable cycle. For Toynbee, a civilization might or might not continue to thrive, depending on the challenges it faced and its responses to them. Working at the level of civilizations, he presented the history of each of the 23 civilizations in terms of challenge-and-response. Responding to the challenges of extreme difficulty, ‘creative minorities‘ devised solutions that reoriented their entire society. Toynbee surmised that when a civilization responds to challenges, it grows, and when their leaders stop responding creatively, civilizations 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.
According to Toynbee, the growth of civilizations
could be analysed into succession of performance of the drama of challengeand-response and that the reason why one performance followed another was because each of the responses was not only successful in answering the particular challenge by which it had been evoked but was also instrumental in provoking a fresh challenge&. This repetitiveness or recurrency of challenge is likewise implied in the concept of disintegration, but in this case the responses fail. This repetition of the same challenge is in the very nature of the situation. When the outcome of each successive encounter is not victory but defeat, the unanswered challenge can never be disposed of, and is bound to present itself again and again until it either receives some tardy and imperfect answer or else brings bout the destruction of the society.4
Toynbee argued that the ‘criteria of growth were not to be found in an increasing command over the human or the physical environment’. By the same token, ‘the loss of such command is not among the causes of disintegration’. Toynbee goes further to suggest ‘that an increasing command over environment is a concomitant of disintegration rather than of growth’.
According to Toynbee, an outbreak of internal discord leads to a breakdown that precedes disintegration. This discord takes away the broken-down society into two different dimensions simultaneously—the vertical and the horizontal schisms. A vertical schism occurs between geographically segregated communities—articulation of a society into parochial communities—and a horizontal schism occurs between geographically intermingled but socially segregated classes.
Toynbee’s were more admired by the history reading public than by fellow historians, who criticized him for contorting information to fit his alleged patterns of history.
Leave a Reply