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Arnold Joseph Toynbee ( 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 global history, a Metahistory based on universal rhythms of rise, flowering and decline. Toynbee articulated a general theory of history and civilization. It has found little response in the discipline of Comparative History that preoccupied him. BIOGRAPHY Toynbee was the nephew of a great 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 at Balliol in 1912, and thereafter held posts 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''. During World War II, he again worked for the Foreign Office and attended the postwar peace talks. His first marriage was to Rosalind Murray, daughter of Gilbert Murray ; they had three sons, of whom Philip Toynbee was the second. They divorced, and Arnold then married Veronica Boulter in 1946. Family connections The Toynbees have been prominent in British intellectual society for several generations: 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-state s or of Ethnic Group s. 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 Sumer ians 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 miliatary 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 Bias es that intrude on historical analysis via the evidence. INFLUENCE Toynbee's ideas have not perhaps proved of great influence on other historians; 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. 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. Toynbee was probably most influential in relation to Asian thinkers, for example through his dialogues with Daisaku Ikeda of Soka Gakkai International . A few of his terms, such as '' Successor State '', and to a lesser extent ''external proletariat'', are found in the work of other authors.
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