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Arnold 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'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 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 Bias es that intrude on historical analysis via the evidence. INFLUENCE Toynbee's ideas have not proved overly influential on other historians. is a notable exception. Following Toynbee and others (Spengler, Kroeber, Sorokin, Cochrane), Innis examined the flourishing of civilizations in terms of administration of empires and media of communication. Toynbee's overall theory 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: '' RECEPTION AND CRITICISM 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 attacked on numerous fronts in two chapters of Walter Kaufmann 's ''From Shakespeare to Existentialism'' (1959). One of the charges was that "...Toynbee's huge success is confined to the United States where public opinion is heavily influenced by magazines ..." (p.426); another was his focus on groups of religions as the significant demarcations of the world (p.408), as of 1956. 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 . Because he took Judaism, Christianity, Islam and communism as a related group, and opposed them to Buddhism, his analysis was very different. :"The coming of Buddhism to the West may well prove to be the most important event of the Twentieth Century." - AJT Toynbee's ideological approach— "metaphysical speculations dressed up as history" is a commonplace modern assessment {Link without Title} — was subjected to an effective critique by . 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. In an essay titled ''The Chatham House Version'' (1970), 1990 The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: 1917-1988 PART I 1917-1947 “IX. THE ENDING OF THE MANDATE” The transformation of Mandated Palestine c.f. {Link without Title} . BIOGRAPHY 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. His first marriage was to Rosalind Murray (1890-1967), daughter of Gilbert Murray , in 1913 ; they had three sons, of whom Philip Toynbee was the second. They divorced in 1946 ; Arnold then married Boulter in the same year. FAMILY CONNECTIONS The Toynbees have been prominent in British intellectual society for several generations:
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