A Study of History by Arnold Joseph Toynbee

Civilizations arose in response to some set of challenges of extreme difficulty, when 'creative minorities' devised solutions that reoriented their entire society. With the civilizations as units identified, he presented the history of each in terms of challenge-and-response. 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. He identified civilizations according to cultural rather than national criteria. Toynbee presented history as the rise and fall of civilizations, rather than the history of nation-states or of ethnic groups. He rejected, however, Spengler's deterministic view that civilizations rise and fall according to a natural and inevitable cycle. Toynbee's approach may be compared to the one used by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West. They divorced in 1946 Arnold then married Boulter in the same year. 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. During World War II, he again worked for the Foreign Office and attended the postwar peace talks. In 1936 Toynbee was received in the Reichskanzlei by Adolf Hitler (cf. Boulter, who was to become his second wife, he was co-editor of the RIIA's annual Survey of International Affairs. 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. He was Director of Studies at the RIIA between 19. 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.

was educated at Winchester College and Balliol College, Oxford. Toynbee was the nephew of the economic historian Arnold Toynbee, with whom he is sometimes confused. His perspective of history also impacted the philosophy of history.

Rejecting a natural deterministic view of Oswald Spengler (1880 – 1936), who similarly explained the rise and fall of civilization in The Decline of the West, Toynbee introduced the concept of challenge-response, how people responded the challenges they encountered determined the rise and fall of civilization.

Toynbee approached history not from the perspective that takes the nation-state or ethnic groups as the unit of history, but from civilizations as a unit, taking into account of the roles of religious traditions world wide.

A Study of History by Arnold Joseph Toynbee