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Arnold Toynbee: Ecumenism Manque, or the Whig Interpretation of History in
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17753 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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6 / 1990 |
5,105 Words |
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Hugh Ragsdale
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With the centenary of the birth of Arnold Toynbee the celebration of his work has probably climaxed and passed. He has been subjected to searching criticism and has sustained massive damage. Pieter Geyl has especially called attention to Toynbee's mistakes of logic in the manipulation of his own criteria. For example, Toynbee maintains that the power unit of study is not the nation but a civilization; yet he uses such national and subnational units as the Netherlands, New England, and North Carolina as examples of the character of civilizations. He identifies a golden mean of challenge - specifically contrasted with too much or too little - as the causative factor in the genesis of civilizations, but he never stops to define how it is measure. Pitirim Sorokin has pointed out that Toynbee pays little attention to such significant subjects as art, music, science, and law. Hugh Trevor-Roper has caricatured him in a near hysterical fashion as a prophet who not merely foresees but actually relishes the doom of Western Civilization - unless he himself is designated its savior. Much of Trevor-Roper's commentary seems to me more savage and personal than professional. On the other hand, I admit to perceiving in Toynbee's work an element of cultural guild probably occasioned by disappointment in the inadequate way in which Western civilization exemplifies the virtues Toynbee admires, an attitude by no means uncommon among Western liberals and aesthetes.
But if Toynbee's, mistakes and inadequacies are well known, we can still improve our own study of history by a judicious reappraisal of his.
Obviously, one future of his work to which our age is much indebted is the focus of our attention away from the provincial confines of our former historical outlook and onto the world at large, including non-Western civilizations. My own generation in college was much impressed by two little books - Civilization on Trial (1948) and The World and the West (1953) - in which he effectively popularized some of the prominent themes of his larger work, A Study of History (twelve volumes). Yet, ironically, Toynbee did not, in my opinion, bring a genuinely ecumenical, unprovincial point of view to the study of history.
I am interested less in Toynbee's mistakes than in his values, the sources of his values, and in the way in which they contaminated his perceptions - and here I want to summarize briefly, relying chiefly on William McNeill's centennial biography. In the atmosphere of World War I, his debt to the Greek outlook in history, especially to Thucydides, was natural and obvious. His idea of the superiority of human will over environmental factors in the genesis and evolution of civilization reflects the confidence of nineteenth-century liberal England. His treatment of civilizations as separate entities largely incapable of communicating with each other - at least through volume 8 of his work, down to the subject "Contacts Between Civilizations in Space - is owing perhaps to Oswald Spengler and to Toynbee's own experience of the Turkish and Greek atrocities after World War I. There would seem to be one other primary influence in Toynbee's outlook. His animus against militarism probably derives from his own draft evasion during World War I. All of which is to say that his outlook was distinctly European or that his perceptions derived almost exclusively from the values of the country in which he was born and from those of the country in which he specialized as a scholar. (Toynbee, of course, addressed all of these points and all other criticism directed at him - and at impressive length - in volume 12, published in 1961.
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