Arnold Joseph Toynbee was a British historian, philosopher of history, author of numerous books and research professor of international history at the London School of Economics and King's College in the University of London. Toynbee in the 1918–1950 period was a leading specialist on international affairs.
He is best known for his 12-volume A Study of History (1934–1961), and it is this work that is regarded as a significantly new and different approach to human history.
A Study of History received enormous popular attention but according to historian Richard J. Evans, "enjoyed only a brief vogue before disappearing into the obscurity in which it has languished." Toynbee's goal was to trace the development and decay of 19 world civilizations in the historical record, applying his model to each of these civilizations, detailing the stages through which they all pass: genesis, growth, time of troubles, universal state, and disintegration.
The 19 major civilizations, as Toynbee sees them, are: Egyptian, Andean, Sinic, Minoan, Sumerian, Mayan, Indic, Hittite, Hellenic, Western, Orthodox Christian (Russia), Far Eastern, Orthodox Christian (main body), Persian, Arabic, Hindu, Mexican, Yucatec, and Babylonic.
According to this model there are four "abortive civilizations" (Abortive Far Western Christian, Abortive Far Eastern Christian, Abortive Scandinavian, Abortive Syriac) and five "arrested civilizations" (Polynesian, Eskimo, Nomadic, Ottoman, Spartan), for a total of 28.
Nevertheless, Toynbee's scheme, his list of both the successes and the failures, appears to foreground those civilisations that are, and have been, essential to the foundation narrative of Western European culture as the inheritor of a world history that validates the contemporary Western European global dominance.
A recent article The Return of Civilization—and of Arnold Toynbee? by Krishan Kumar of the University of Virginia, (Comparative Studies in Society and History, Volume 56, Issue 4, October 2014 , pp. 815-843) puts Toynbee's contribution in a clear light:
When asked by a journalist in 1965 how he would like to be remembered, Toynbee replied: “As someone who has tried to see it whole, and … not just in Western terms.” McNeill comments on this: “Toynbee, more than any other single person, was able to introduce to a large portion of the world's reading public the simple truth that Asians, Africans, Amerindians, and even specialized peoples like the Eskimo had a history that was independent of and analogous to the history of Europeans. The vision of a human past, cast, as he said, ‘not just in western terms’ was, therefore, his great and central contribution to our tradition of learning, and ought to become his enduring claim to fame” (1989: 284–85). This indeed, certainly in the context of the time, is surely enough to warrant a return to Toynbee, as one of the great pioneers of global, comparative, history. But perhaps even more it is as a comparative student of civilizations that Toynbee has claims on us today. It is not just Eurocentrism, or a narrow focus on the West, that stands in need of correction. It is also “methodological nationalism,” the privileging of the nation-state as the object of historical or sociological study. If “civilization” can help us to get beyond that, then its return is welcome indeed, and Toynbee's time, too, may have come around again.
Kumar references Jack Goody's 1996. The East in the West, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate 2004 (Cambridge: Polity Press): The Theft of History 2006 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): Renaissances: The One or the Many? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010). and makes the following note:
The phenomenon of “renaissances,” as “the evocation of a dead culture by the living representatives of a civilization that is still a going concern,” is treated fully in volume 9 of the Study (1962–1964: XI: 1–166). In his recent study, Renaissances, Jack Goody praises Toynbee for the breadth of his approach, specifically his rejection of Eurocentrism (2010: 8–9)
