It will be argued that Toynbee, despite evident shortcomings, developed a conceptual and theoretical framework that might be of some use for contemporary studies of world politics. The argument will proceed as follows: after shortly situating the civilizationdebate in contemporary scholarship, we will briefly introduce Toynbees intellectual trajectory and shortly state his philosophy of history.
In the following sections, the fundamental characteristics of Toynbees theory of civilizational mechanics, as expounded in his Study of History, will be elucidated. Throughout, the links between this work and his thinking on IR, which are recorded in his voluminous writings in the Surveys of International Relations and in published papers and lectures, will be highlighted.
We will then address intercivilizational encounters, firstly because it is precisely at this point that Toynbees conception of civilizations as self-enclosed intelligible units became problematic, and secondly because it is also in this field that relations between parochial communities e. We will conclude by relating Toynbees thought to that of other social theorists who elaborated similar concepts and ideas and tentatively point both to fruitful and problematic prospects of the concept of civilization in studying politics in a period of globalization the period in which we live.
The very name of the discipline indicates a natural focus on interactions between nation-states and IR scholars have, as a consequence, engaged the civilization debate with some hesitance. The dramatic changes that have taken place on a global scale since the s have, however, called into question the state-centric focus of IR.
The conception of a closed sovereign state is no longer tenable, and even neo-realist scholars have come to accept the multi-sited nature of international politics. To a varying degree, IR scholars have therefore come to accept that the state should be considered one among several layers of analysis. While this debate has often been surrounded by claims concerning the novelty of our post- Cold War period, and the particular challenges posed by globalization,.
Below we debate Toynbee, not in order to argue that civilizations should be considered the only meaningful level of analysis, but in order to consider more in detail why and how it can be considered one such level of analysis.
Pace Toynbee, a proper understanding of world politics must incorporate civilizations as one among many levels of analysis and perhaps considered as intervening variables3.
Besides opening up the level-of-analysis question, the civilization debate also touches upon the temporal horizons of analysis. While the disciplines of sociology, political science and international relations branched off into separate spheres of inquiry during the 20th century, they often shared the premise that analysis could and should be retained within the contemporary period, i. Even when the understanding of contemporary differed4, this understanding perpetuated the Enlightenment self-understanding that our time is radically different, and that references to earlier periods mostly serve to trace the genealogy of certain terms and ideas like state and democracy that only came to full maturity and institutional accomplishment in modernity.
In contrast to this standard view, a number of scholars have increasingly started to question the belief that the period of modernity can be studied in its own terms5.
This recognition was indeed anticipated by classical scholars like Max Weber and Eric Voegelin, who both turned to antiquity in their attempts to diagnose the problematics of the present. In IR, the recognition was part and parcel of Toynbees vision. The invocation of the civilization concept also relates to the broader culture debate which has challenged IR theory since the s. As argued earlier in this Journal6, the attempt to introduce culture as both a descriptive and conceptualanalytical term in IR theory has represented quite a hurdle.
It is increasingly recognized that cultural factors identity, religion, ethnicity are gaining salience for the articulation of political and social movements, for the establishment of legitimacy in politics, and for the escalation of conflict in world politics.
However, the concept of culture is extremely difficult to pin down and operationalize. Cultures can exist at multiple levels and in various dimensions for each individual, from the local community to nation to civilization, from kin to ethnic group to religion, and some would argue that there is now emerging a shared global culture.
Tersely put, culture cannot itself explain anything. To insist on the importance of the concept of civilization certainly does not mean to solve this hurdle and, pace Huntington, offer a bulletproof cultural realism, where culture or civilizational outlook simply replace state interest as the independent variable.
On this point, Toynbee, albeit largely unaware 3. Stephen D. This all indicates that while there may be strong reasons to suggest a return to the question of civilization, that return needs to be made with care. One can identify two sets of challenges concerning the use of civilization, and they should be stated very explicitly at the outset.
First of all, the very fact that Huntington published his original article in Foreign Affairs, in a journal devoted to foreign policy and in particular American foreign policy reminds us about the strongly ideological connotations of the term. This is of course nothing new.
As the ideological counterpart to political colonialism, evolutionist ideology of the 19th century took Western civilization as the taken-for-granted starting point and measure for inquiry. This involved a self-glorifying moral hierarchy between civilized people the West and the less civilized or un-civilized Other the rest. To accept that the West is only one among multiple civilizations as does Huntington only superficially tackles this problematic inheritance.
And indeed, as Huntingtons vocabulary has imploded in political and ordinary discourse, the tendency to re-install a moral hierarchy of western superiority is evident enough. It is therefore not surprising that many social theorists resist, on these grounds alone, any re-introduction of the heavily loaded term Civilization, too reminiscent of worn out ideas supposing Western supremacy, and today mimetically reproduced in well-known versions about Islamic moral superiority, not to mention politicized versions of a particular Chinese civilization routinely used by Chinese political leaders to dismiss Western notions of democracy.
Civilization seems too inflated. Too many bombs have been thrown in its name. Second of all, a major problem concerns the very fact that civilization is a noun and it is exactly as noun that it so easily becomes norm. To speak of a civilization implies both to give it a substance, in terms of cultural content, and to locate it geographically with fairly delimited territorial boundaries.
This usage is in itself a discursive creation of the object, a far-from-innocent process of reification that needs to be studied in its own terms. However, in terms of a starting point for analysis, the unquestioned existence of civilizations is hardly tenable. It blocks us from asking what should indeed be considered the major questions to tackle: how and when do civilizations emerge, develop and eventually disappear?
How do civilizations merge, fuse and sometimes contrast with each other, and how do civilizational encounters spur development and innovation and sometimes violent conflict?
One can also reformulate the issue more fundamentally by turning civilization into a verb: to civilize. Here again one encounters the problem of an unbearable ideological luggage, as the notion to civilize was exactly the ethical command of Western Imperialism. However, if one infers the notion of a civilizing process this problem is overcome, as it can be taken to refer in a value-neutral way to infra-societal dynamics within larger areas.
In the Civilising Process Norbert Elias elegantly demonstrated how a specific kind of self-formation within the European court socie For Elias, therefore, the civilizing process was very much about how constraints on human behaviour were internalized, best summed up in his expression, the courtization of the warrior. Elias recognised that while this implied a historical process of taming violence, it by no means immunitized socities from outbreaks of infra- and intra-societal war. Elias published the Civilising Process in Germany in shortly after he barely escaped the clutches of the Nazis.
A larger discussion of Elias work is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is clear that we need to separate very clearly two very different understandings of civilization: civilization as bounded, territorial wholes, and civilization as process7.
In the final analysis, the two meanings will of course overlap, as civilization processes, as suggested by Elias himself, do of course take place within some kind of delimited areas.
However, these areas are much more open-ended than Huntingtons approach allows us to accept, and in terms of the longue dure approach advocated here, they can and will change over time.
This distinction should help us to overcome the false dilemma looming in the discipline of International Relations: that of either adopting a misguided and ultimately a-historical and a-processual approach to civilizations through Huntington or, alternatively, dismissing the concept altogether due to a confusion of the concept itself with its ideological baggage8. To avoid this, we see no other route but to engage the established but heretofore marginal canon of civilizational analysis.
While there are significant works that antedate Toynbees Study, for the IR scholar his work is the most accessible point of entry into the civilizations discourse. The argument that follows is therefore an attempt to redress the reflexivity gap in IR thought on civilizations by situating the work of Arnold J. Toynbee at the heart of the canon of civilizational discourse in International Relations. As the first scholar who was seriously occupied with the study of civilizations while simultaneously being deeply engaged in the study of international affairs, Toynbee and his whole corpus merit greater attention.
Toynbee might not be an end point for this discussion, and the below presentation is by no means exhaustive. However, he might be a starting point. It should be stressed that we engage this discussion not merely with the aim of recovering a lost piece of intellectual history. It is a telling fact that the very notion of World Politics which was routinely used in the interwar period, by Toynbee and others, has recently resurfaced, and may be about to replace the notion of International Relations this is already happening in several US degree programs.
This change of vocabulary should not be mistaken for a simple question of changing fashions: the notion of World Politics, in contrast to International Relations, implies that the world must be studied as a unit, not reducible to interstate relations, and it implies that the total is more than the sum of its components that there is a bigger 7 Our argument is here inspired by Roland Robertson, Civilization, in Theory, Culture and Society, 23 , , pp.
Leiden: Brill, , pp. In short, there might be something about the present period that invites a reconsideration of ideas that were developed in the prewar period, and ideas which came to the fore in the immediate post-war period. In an hour of crisis, when the order of a society flounders and disintegrates, the fundamental problems of political existence in history are more apt to come into view than in periods of comparative stability9. Eric Voegelin. Toynbee is a puzzling figure.
His name has moved between the forefront of fame Newsweek wrote in that Toynbee had become more influential than Marx , to complete oblivion. Toynbee is rarely even mentioned in contemporary textbook Introductions to International Relations.
Hence and this is sad enough a short biographical introduction is needed before we move on to the substance of his thought. From early childhood, Arnold J. Toynbee was exposed to the classical education that was usual of a British gentleman. His mother, who had studied history at Cambridge, would frequently read to him historical stories and both she and an uncle consistently encouraged a precocious bookishness and cultivated the childs skill with language A critical juncture in Toynbees intellectual development came in when he fell ill with pneumonia.
While he was recuperating at the home of a relative who lived in the country nearby, he was given an historical atlas, which turned out to be a formative reading experience. On the basis of the historical maps of the world contained in the atlas, Toynbee began reading history books available in the house to gather data which he used to reconstruct various political maps of different eras in his Drawing Book This liminal figuration12 illness, withdrawal from the ordinary routine of school life and a prolonged stay in the country stimulated new ideas in Toynbees imagination of multiple civilizations as units of study, and particularly of Asia.
This presented a stark contrast to the formality of his school studies and allowed him to think of the past on a grand scale, bridging time and space as specialists [and his professors] habitually refused to do Toynbee continued his education at the prestigious Balliol College at Oxford University, where the don of the school, Alexander Lindsay, imparted to Toynbee the evolutionary thinking in the manner of Henri Bergson, whose philosophy would.
One of the exercises that his uncle had him perform was to memorize and recite scriptural verses. Interestingly, the same uncle wrote a religious tract in which he declared mans greatest failing to be idolatry of the self, a phrase that Toynbee would use in discussing the nemesis of creativity in regards to civilizational breakdown see below.
Another influence was the Regius Professor of Greek, Gilbert Murray, who did a good deal to set the tone for Oxford classicists. What he sought, always, was to connect the ancients with the contemporary world, making their words, thoughts, and lives relevant to his own time This tone contributed to Toynbees preexisting tendency to make wide-ranging parallels between historical periods, which would become stock-in-trade in all of his writings in subsequent years.
For the first time, Toynbee threw all his intellectual energies into the serious study of international affairs, producing his first book, Nationalism and the War, in In the same year he began working for a propaganda office in the government, focusing on Ottoman affairs. This led to his transfer two years later to the newly created Political Intelligence Division PID , from where he would influence British foreign policy during and after the war16, although at the Paris Peace Conference in he became disillusioned as it was apparent that British Prime Minister David Lloyd George was uninterested in entertaining the advice of his experts, academic and diplomatic alike.
This failure to get his ideas accepted at the peace conference, combined with financial stress and dissatisfaction in his post-war appointment to the Koraes Chair17 at the University of London, led to a physical and moral collapse.
His dream was to begin serious work on his great book of a philosophy of history, and idea that had been germinating in his mind since his college days, but the magnitude of the project and the lack of a clear framework for undertaking it, together with lingering identity issues from the war for which he did not enroll left him demoralized: I feel uprooted and bewildered.
Everything is in such a flux that I had to take the professorship I am in a loathsomely neurasthenic and self-centered condition It was during this psychological lapse that he claimed to have had a vision of the great span of history.
While drawing parallels between ancient and modern societies was commonplace among classically educated Europeans, in was done in diffuse and unfocused ways before the war: For Toynbee, the war made the comparison crisper and far more compelling During this personal and civilizational crisis period, Toynbee began to draw the connections between the processes that took place in Ancient Greece and what had just taken place in Europe.
This represented a shift in Toynbees thinking about history from a Herodotean perspective, typified by an em Lindsay would also play an instrumental role, by supplying philosophical arguments, in Toynbees rejection of Christianity. The other element in this rejection was his awareness of the historicity of Christianity as a monument to the sensibilities of a particular time and place, with no valid claim to universal and eternal truth Voegelin would take issue with exactly this part of Toynbees theory, as it would lead Toynbee to place Christianity as a peripheral part of the Syriac civilization, clearly understating its role.
Toynbee would, in , marry Murrays daughter, Rosalind. This reflexive experience was complemented and compounded by a second formative reading experience in the work of Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes The Decline of the West , in This reading helped Toynbee to give shape to his conception of civilizations and their mechanics as well as to locate some problematic aspects of earlier false starts and of approaches taken by others Toynbee would use the Koraes Chair professorship as a platform from which to work out the details of his philosophy of history, regardless of whether his explorations fell within the parameters of Greek history.
He did not however abandon his immediate concern with international affairs, and when the Greco-Turkish war broke out in he obtained permission to travel to Greece and Turkey in the following year to observe firsthand the events.
It was during his travels in Turkey that Toynbee became convinced that civilizations are closed, monadic entities that are fundamentally incomprehensible to each other, taking up the view posited by Spengler. The atrocious behavior on both sides of the conflict led Toynbee to conclude that it was the result of the breakdown of traditional civilized moral codes and the desperate efforts Greeks and Turks were both making to fashion nation states on the west European model.
Aping the West in this way required the repudiation of an older and distinctively Near Eastern mode of political and social order The culmination of this expedition was another book, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the Contact of Civilizations, where he argued that the longstanding Eastern Question in European diplomacy was in fact a Western question inasmuch as it was the consequence of the West having prevailed in the encounter with the Byzantine and Islamic civilizations, and the disastrous resultant breakdown of the latter two.
It was during Toynbees journey back to England in September , on the Oriental Express that Toynbee first formulated his mature vision for A Study of History, which he drafted on twelve pages of notebook paper. The most significant heading, which he would expand to comprise nearly the entirety of the final magnum opus, was the third heading entitled Comparison of Civilizations, under which were subheadings that more or less corresponded with the outline of the final work Home again, Toynbee then took a position at the British Institute of International Affairs, where he was contracted to write a survey of world politics in the years This led to a full-time position as the Institutes Director of Studies, where he was responsible for producing the annual Survey of International Affairs.
With a secure and steady means of living, Toynbee was able to settle into an intensely rigorous work routine, producing the Survey during the winter and spring months and dedicating summers, beginning in , to A Study of History.
This shift of thought was marked in Toynbees written corpus by the important lecture at Oxford in , The Tragedy of Greece, which in effect provided an occasion for Toynbee to put the impress of the war upon his prewar mastery of Greek and Roman history and literature p. Teggart, but the impact was much more minor, and in fact was overshadowed by that of Spengler. Instead of attempting to obscure all traces of imagination, according to McNeill he made the poetic dimension of his achievement more transparent than the conventions of academic history, as defined in German seminars of the late nineteenth century, had allowed Toynbee held the belief that historians must possess a second sight that is called intuition and claimed that Art and history resemble each other in both being activities of the imagination working upon experience He rejected the view that valid history must rest on meticulously researched articles and monographs, arguing that these were the product of the industrialization of historical thought which produced a division of labor and a deprecation of works of historical literature which are produced by a single mind His command of historical facts and his powerful memory allowed him to oscillate between disparate periods to illustrate correlations and parallels.
Neither did Toynbee shy away from moral judgments of historical events and actors. While arguing that, especially in writing contemporary history as in the Surveys, the historian ought to be both charitable, tentative and dispassionate, he insisted that if the historians duty was to communicate to readers all of the relevant facts and considerations of a given subject matter, it was inherent to that duty to make explicit ones own value-judgments This was to him vital for the writing of fair as opposed to objective history, since because humans are social animals it is of the essence of human actions that they do evoke moral judgments; and these judgments are an intrinsic part of the acts to which the judgments attach Toynbee also denied any strict dividing line between history and contemporary events, another position that seems particularly relevant for current debates: I could not, I believe, have done either piece of work if I had not been doing the other at the same time.
A survey of current affairs on a world-wide scale can be made only against a background of world-history; and a study of world-history would have no life in it if it left out the history of the writers own lifetime In terms of methodology, Toynbee argued that the human sciences should follow the natural sciences insofar as they used a comparative method to categorize their data and events and to discern patterns and structures.
Thus, an inquiry into civilization should therefore begin discursively with an examination of the several civilized societies which have regarded themselves as distinct from the rest of the hu Toynbee and Martin Wight, in International Relations 17 3 , , p.
Also here, of course, Toynbee could have elaborated his methodological points by incorporating Max Weber. When we have noted a number of phenomena common to some or all of these, we shall have obtained material for an analysis of civilization itself While denying that specific encounters were subject to scientific laws, it would appear that the larger processes of societies reveal patterns consistent enough to be categorized as such.
From this Toynbee deduced that the intelligible unit of historical study was not the nation-state, but a larger society which was the field of these larger processes. Any one nation-states history was in effect incomprehensible without reference to its foreign relations with other especially contiguous states.
Civilizations, on the other hand, were self-contained historical units in that their historical processes could be explained without reference to entities beyond their own parameters, however defined Once such units are discerned and categorized according to their principal shared characteristics, they become amenable to comparative study. Toynbee clearly understood civilizations as referring to larger entities where interaction is intense and where mutual influence and exchange of ideas, world-views, techniques and institutional arrangements happen relatively undisturbed across internal boundaries.
Civilizations encompass minor units like nations or societies, and Toynbee would identify 26 such units during the entire history of mankind. The only larger unit bigger than civilization is humankind itself. In Toynbees simultaneous projects, therefore, there was a dialectic between civilizations as intelligible units and the parochial communities into which civilizations were articulated and which were the primary acting units of history.
His occasional use of language in the vein of positivistic physical science, and especially his argument for causal laws in civilizational processes, has led many to dismiss A Study of History as an artifact of an earlier generation of social scientists, among whom the hard sciences were held as the model of scientific legitimacy.
To later scholars, his work was approached as a reflection of the interwar and wartime mood or was outright ridiculed for its religiosity and emphasis on mysticism The result is that the excitement over his Study rapidly waned and it became the clichd work more talked about than read, and in contemporary scholarship it hardly even receives that distinction. While much of the academic criticism of A Study of History is justified the work is riddled with difficulties, incoherence and not a few absurdities Toynbee approaches several key insights specifically self-articulation, mimesis and schism that were or would be apprehended and penetrated more thoroughly in the course of diverse in McNeill, op.
McNeill, These concepts, as well as that of the creative personality, which bears considerable resemblance to Max Webers charisma, are of direct relevance for the study not only of domestic politics and society, but also civilizations and world politics, and need attention.
The stages through which civilizations pass in their historical development are, according to Toynbee, four: genesis, growth, breakdown and disintegration.
While most commentators refer to this formula as his cyclical theory, Toynbee himself rejected cyclical theories of history, remarking that history in fact is composed of two distinct movements.
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There is more at stake in this war than the existence of individual States or Empires, or the fate of a Continent; the whole of modern civilization is at stake, and whether it will perish and be submerged, as has happened to previous civilizations of older types, or whether it will live and progress, depends upon whether the nations engaged in this war, and even those that are onlookers, learn the lessons that the experience of the war may teach them.
It must be with nations as with individuals; in the great trials of life they must become better or worse - they cannot stand still. They must learn and profit by experience and rise to greater heights, or else sink lower and drop eventually into the abyss.
And this war is the greatest trial of which there is any record in history. If the war does not teach mankind new lessons that will so dominate the thought and feeling of those who survive it, and those who succeed the survivors, as to make new things possible, then the war will be the greatest catastrophe as well as the most grievous trial and suffering of which mankind has any record.
About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy.
In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to. With a broad historical and holistic brush, the author presents a view of globalization that is both multidisciplinary and multicultural. What opportunities must we seize? Which is a still-unfinished play of which we do not know the eventual ending and cannot even see the present general aspect from our own position as momentary actors on its crowded and agitated stage.
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