Books: Toynbee Revisited

RECONSIDERATIONS (740 pp.)—Arnold J. Toynbee—Oxford ($10).

THE INTENT OF TOYNBEE’S HISTORY (224 pp.)—Edifed by Edward T. Gargan —Loyola ($5).

Scholars are not a notably generous lot. When they review one another’s work, the friction of dry skin is almost audible as they rub their hands over a colleague’s failure to sustain a thesis, his reliance on a wrong date, a superseded document or, better still, a bogus one. An expert on the receiving end of this kind of abuse is famed Historian Arnold J. Toynbee. His massive, ten-volume Study of History (TIME, Oct. 18, 1954) left him vulnerable on at least two scores: 1) it became the most widely discussed history of modern times, and popularity is a crown most scholars professionally deplore with the same fervor that they secretly pray for it; 2) Toynbee had attempted to rise above “microscopic” research, impose a grand order on world history in terms of civilizations, and then to move beyond even that to the great religions. There, Toynbee declared, man’s summit goal was nothing less than God.

So vast was his canvas that mistakes were inevitable. Not even his astonishing erudition could save him from them, and his colleagues pounced on them with cries that expressed responses all the way from learned indignation to simple glee. He has been accused of ignorance, of dabbling in mythology at the expense of fact, of distorting fact to bolster false theories, of writing a prose poem, of trying to achieve an education in the process of writing a book. The fact is that a lot of the criticism was justified. It was also fact that with all of its errors of detail, the History was the boldest and most exciting effort yet made by a modern historian to chart man’s troubled, inspired climb from primitive morass to a fellowship of man and God.

Meo Culpa. Toynbee was stung by the criticisms, perhaps even shaken. The proof lies in Toynbee’s Reconsiderations, a massive overhauling of his previous positions, which is at the same time an astonishing admission of error. At the same time, The Intent of Toynbee’s History provides a broad platform for nine of his keenest critics to have a fresh go at an already well-clobbered classic. On the whole, the critical lash falls with less severity than formerly. It is true that Professor David M. Robinson, an expert on Toynbee’s favorite “Hellenic” world, hardly tries to conceal his conviction that Toynbee is profoundly ignorant of some of the basic sources of study in his favorite field. Professor Matthew A. Fitzsimons of Notre Dame says flatly that Toynbee’s treatment of the U.S. “is in accurate and distorted, insufficient and indefinite.” Yet most of these experts pay homage to his scope, his overall grasp, the boldness of his vision. Relatively, time has been on Toynbee’s side. In 1935, reviewing the first three volumes of the Study, the Journal of Modern History sniped: “A Gargantuan feast, shall we say? Or is it hash and not chopped up fine enough at that?”

Toynbee is harder on himself. Reconsiderations reads in places like a humble mea culpa. He confesses to intellectual rashness, to “opaque” induction rather than use of logic, to having carried “analogy to excessive lengths . . . ‘Going too far’ is a standing temptation for me.” But for relying on mythology as well as science, he accepts, wisely, no blame, since mythology has given him many of the insights that make his History a continuously startling experience. So long as science and mythology are used as “a carriage-and-pair and not a one-horse shay,” he sees no need to apologize. On a much more serious level. Toynbee admits to errors that are basic to his entire scheme. He admits that using Hellenic civilization as the model by which to judge the decline and fall of others is a mistake. It leads him, in fact, to recast his whole view on the development of the “higher religions.” No longer do they result from an “encounter” between two or more civilizations. They are in fact not byproducts of the vagaries of civilizations but the very base on which civilizations themselves rest.

Damaged, Not Toppled. To a close reader of the History, such a major shift is the equivalent of saying that the whole Study needs revision. Toynbee even finds it now necessary to revise his table of civilizations, one of the key points of his huge labor, and at one point he blandly confesses that “I now have to abandon my previous construction of three distinct civilizations.” In the same way he acknowledges that his list of “arrested civilizations” is “capricious.” Moreover, he tacitly agrees that he forced facts into theories when he writes: “I have also neglected to try other keys where the Hellenic key has not fitted the lock. These were faults, I confess.”

What is even more startling, almost embarrassing, is Toynbee’s attempt to rationalize his personal deficiencies. His cumbersome style, “my Latinizing way of writing English,” he attributes to “my classical education.” He also confesses, oddly for a historian, that he is “almost entirely ignorant of modern Western discoveries, from the seventeenth century onwards, in the fields of mathematics and physical science. This is indeed a big blank . . . In my knowledge of the non-Hellenic civilizations and the higher religions there are appalling gaps. And my knowledge of the aeons of history before these last 5,000 years is little better than sheer ignorance.” And so it goes, deficiencies in anthropology, ignorance of geography, indifference to “economic and technological factors.”

At this point the reader may well ask if Toynbee hasn’t totally disqualified himself as the author of his own book. The answer is no. Anyone who has read the History knows that he treats himself too harshly. The ignorance he pleads is, in fact, a relative thing: what single historian other than he knows so much or has used his knowledge with such soaring imagination? And who besides Spengler has had the audacity to escape from the drugging minutiae of documentary sweepings into the exhilarating reaches of man’s whole past? Toynbee lacerates himself too much, and the total effect is damaging. But not annihilating. For after all, A Study of History exists, and it is Toynbee’s monument. In Reconsiderations he has chipped it more severely than have all his critics put together, but even this unprecedented exercise in self-criticism leaves it in no danger of toppling.