151 - Toynbee's Philosophy of World History and Politics

Toynbee's Philosophy of World History and Politics

By Kenneth W. Thompson

Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1985. 230 Pp. $27.50.

Following the fashion of our times, Arnold Toynbee, a celebrity of the 1950s and 1960s, went into eclipse in the following decades. This is a good time to look again at his thought in search of clues for coping with our own enigmatic, perilous history.

Toynbee had two comprehensive scholarly interests. One was the search for patterns in world history, the subject of his twelve-volume magnum opus, A Study of History. The other was international relations, which he studied from his post as Director of Studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs and editor of its annual Survey of International Affairs. Kenneth W. Thompson, professor and director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, is an ideal analyst of Toynbee's way of relating these two interests. Thompson, an eminent political scientist, has studied Toynbee carefully and corresponded with him on points of detail. Toynbee's Reconsiderations, the final volume of A Study of History, makes a score of responses to Thompson's past criticisms.

Thompson agrees with Toynbee that history mingles "the unique and the recurrent." A wise understanding of the past can offer us some guidance in meeting historical crises, but cannot give us confidence in

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predicting the future or knowing exactly what to do about our unique historical perils.

Toynbee, Thompson points out, yearned for the primacy of spiritual factors in history. Especially in his earlier work, he tried to elevate purposive and mythic factors above military and economic coercion. He valued Wilsonian idealism and rational, idealistic solutions to international problems. Over the years, his experience moved him increasingly toward a realism that took account of political, economic, and military power. But he never abandoned ethical sensitivity. Thompson, a scholar of Hans Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr, approves this general direction of Toynbee's thought.

Does this book offer any help on the urgent issue of contemporary history-whether the human race can avoid self-destruction? Toynbee studied historical examples of clashing imperialisms and world governments, looking for analogies that might guide us today. He was, in a very sober way, an advocate of world government. The lesson of history is that world governments come either by conquest (a disastrous method in a nuclear age) or by agreement. When he looked for the factors that supported international agreements in the past, he found few of them present in Soviet-American relations today. So his hope was for an interim arrangement of spheres of influence, which might buy time for building some bases of world community and world government. But at best, the outcome would not be "a tidy system" and would "involve the ascendancy of one or more great powers."

On one major issue, my understanding of Toynbee differs from Thompson's. Thompson's reading, Toynbee affirms the finality of Christianity in a way that puts it "outside the history of religion." The evidences come from one short phase of Toynbee's life, the years (1934-39) in which he produced Volumes IV-VI of A Study of History. There he maintained that the only savior of a dying civilization can be "the God incarnate in a man" and that of the many claimants to such a role, Jesus of Narareth alone is authentic. But in 1939, Toynbee had a mystical experience that revoked much of his earlier belief. In the later volumes of A Study of History and in several subsequent writings, he came to argue that no religion can claim finality, that God is present in various epiphanies, and that the world religions (for Toynbee these were Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism) are adapted to various personality types described by Jungian psychology.

Otherwise, I concur in Thompson's evaluations: Toynbee's work is "breathtaking" in "sheer erudition and learning," his empirical data did not always support his schemata, and his idealism over the years "was painfully and slowly harmonized with reality." In our portentous era, when no voice is adequate to our perils, Toynbee's is a voice worth attention. Thompson is an excellent guide to his understanding.

ROGER L. SHINN

Union Theological Seminary
New York, New York