Links:

    -PROFILE: The Challenge (SWhittaker Chambers, Mar. 17, 1947, TIME)

[P]rofessor Toynbee, while avoiding the sins that beset Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West—"baffling immensity and enigmatic gloom"—had met the German philosopher's requirement for the writing of 20th Century history: Toynbee had found history Ptolemaic and left it Copernican. He had found historical thinking nation-centered, as before Copernicus astronomical thinking had been geocentric. The nation (Greece, Rome, Japan, the U.S.) was the common unit of history. Toynbee believed that not nations but civilizations were the "intelligible fields of study."

If Toynbee's repudiation of the nation as history's central fact was Copernican, it also had an Einsteinian effect. For the relations of civilizations could not be investigated without introducing a new space-time factor into the study of history. Where, before, there had been nations, dramatizing their buzzing brevity upon the linear scale of history, there were, from Toynbee's vantage point, vertical progressions of human effort. Where there had been a plane, there was now chasmic depth, the all but unimaginable tract of time.

Toynbee had introduced into the theory of history two other ideas of far-reaching consequence:

1) To the theory of Spengler (whom Toynbee, nevertheless, calls "a man of genius") that civilizations are tragic organisms, growing inexorably toward predetermined dooms, Toynbee advanced a dryly lucid counter-proposition: civilizations are not things-in-themselves, but simply the relations that exist between men living in a given society at a given moment of history.

2) He shattered the frozen patterns of historical determinism and materialism by again asserting God as an active force in history. His assertion, implicit throughout the 3,488 pages of A Study of History, implied another: the goal of history, however dimly sensed in human terms, is the Kingdom of God. That aspiration redeems history from being a futile tragedy of blood.

Hence the saying of Toynbee admirers that the writing of history must be dated B.T. and A.T.—Before Toynbee and After Toynbee.

    -BIO: Arnold J. Toynbee (Wikipedia)
    -BIO: Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889) (Malaspina Great Books)
    -GOOGLE BOOKS ARCHIVE: Arnold Toynbee
    -GOOGLE BOOK: The world and the West (Arnold Joseph Toynbee)
    -ESSAY: The world and the Greeks and Romans: an excerpt from The World and the West (Arnold Joseph Toynbee, April 1953, Harper's)
    -ESSAY: Russia and the West: an excerpt from The World and the West (Arnold Joseph Toynbee, March 1953, Harper's)
    -ETEXTS: Toynbee, Arnold Joseph, 1889-1975 (Project Gutenberg)
    -ESSAY: Sir Lewis Namier and history (Arnold Joseph Toynbee, May 1967, Harper's)
    -ESSAY: Encounters between civilizations (Arnold Joseph Toynbee, April 1947, Harper's)
    -ESSAY: The Far-East's reaction to western civilization (Arnold Joseph Toynbee, September 1927, Harper's)
    -ESSAY: America, England, and world affairs (Arnold Joseph Toynbee, March 1926, Harper's)
    -ESSAY: Ibn Khaldun (Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History : The Growths of Civilizations)
    -EXCERPT: Christianity and Civilization: From Civilization on Trial (Arnold Toynbee)
    -EXCERPT: from A Study of History: Challenge and Response (Arnold J. Toynbee)
    -ESSAY: Bertrand Russell (Arnold J. Toynbee, 1970)
    -LECTURE: Professor Arnold J. Toynbee on the Evolution of Nations Through History (12-Nov-54, National Archives)
    -ARCHIVES: Arnold Toynbee (Find Articles)
    -PROFILE: Arnold Toynbee:The boldest historian (Granville Hicks, February 1947, Harper's)
    -ESSAY: Arnold Toynbee: Study of History (Age of the Sage)
    -ESSAY: H R Trevor-Roper vs. Arnold Toynbee: A post-Christian Religion and a new Messiah in an age of reconciliation? Frederic H R Trevor-Roper vs. Arnold Toynbee: A post-Christian Religion and a new Messiah in an age of reconciliation? Frederic H.R. Trevor-Roper vs. Arnold Toynbee: A Post-Christian religion and a new Messiah in an age of reconciliation (Frederick Hale)
    -ESSAY: The origins of world history: Arnold Toynbee before the First World War (Gordon Martel, September 2004, Australian Journal of Politics and History)
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    -REVIEW: of The World and the West by Arnold Toynbee (TIME)
    -REVIEW: Professor Toynbee Surrenders the West: Do the Facts Justify This Defeatism?: a review of The World and the West (G. F. Hudson, May 1953, Commentary)
    -REVIEW: of The World and the West (The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science)
    -REVIEW: of A Study of History by Arnold J. Toynbee (Stefan Zenker)
    -REVIEW: of Hellenism, by Arnold J. Toynbee (Maurice Cohen, January 1960, Commentary)
    -REVIEW: of Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life by William McNeill (Samuel Francis, National Review)
    -REVIEW: of Toynbee and History. Critical Essays and Reviews. Edited by M. F. Ashley Montagu (Paul Mattick, 1956, Western Socialist)