Criticism

[In progress]

An incomplete list of important critical writings on Toynbee’s work, with special attention to controversies in his lifetime.

~~~

The best-known criticisms of Toynbee in his lifetime were or were in

1. Pieter Geyl, Arnold J Toynbee, Can We Know the Pattern of the Past? Discussion between P. Geyl and Arnold J. Toynbee concerning Toynbee’s book “A Study of History”, Holland, Uitgeverij FG Kroonder, 1948

Radio discussions broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on January 4 and March 7 1948. The first had been printed in The Listener, vol 39, no 990, January 15 1948.

2. Pieter Geyl, Arnold J Toynbee, Pitirim A Sorokin, The Pattern of the Past: Can We Determine It?, Boston, Beacon Press, 1949

Has essays by Geyl (Toynbee’s System of Civilizations) and Sorokin (Toynbee’s Philosophy of History) and a transcript of the radio discussions already mentioned.

Geyl’s essay had originally been a talk given at the Historisch Genootschap te Utrecht on November 9 1946. It was reprinted in Dutch and appeared in English in the Journal of the History of Ideas, vol 9, no 1, New York, January 1948. Sorokin’s essay had appeared in the Journal of Modern History, vol 12, no 3, Chicago, September 1940.

3. Pieter Geyl, Debates with Historians, Batsford, 1955; also Groningen, JB Wolters, 1955 (in English)

Has, inter alia, the essay by Geyl from The Pattern of the Past, and three others by him on Toynbee: Prophets of Doom (Sorokin and Toynbee), Toynbee Once More, Empiricism or Apriorism? and Toynbee the Prophet (The Last Four Volumes). There may be references to Toynbee in other chapters.

Prophets of Doom was the text of a lecture given at Stanford in 1949 and had appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, vol 26, no 4, autumn 1950. Morton, in her Toynbee bibliography (OUP, 1980), refers to a Dutch version of this essay, published in 1954, whose text differs considerably from the English. Toynbee Once More, Empiricism or Apriorism? had appeared in From Ranke to Toynbee: Five Lectures on Historians and Historiographical Problems, in Studies in History, vol 39, Smith College, Northampton, Mass, 1952. Toynbee the Prophet had appeared in Dutch in De Gids, vol 118, no 1, January 1955 and was based on a (Dutch?) radio broadcast. The English version appeared simultaneously in Journal of the History of Ideas, vol 16, no 2, New York, April 1955 and in Christian Register, vol 134, no 4, Boston, April 1955.

4. MF Ashley Montagu, editor, Toynbee and History, Critical Essays and Reviews, Boston, Porter Sargent, 1956

Among thirty essays on Toynbee here are those by Geyl and Sorokin from The Pattern of the Past (the radio transcript does not reappear); another by Geyl, Toynbee as Prophet, from Debates with Historians; and a piece by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Testing the Toynbee System. There are also three pieces by Toynbee: A Study of History, What I Am Trying to Do; A Study of History, What the Book Is For: How the Book Took Shape; and a Comment on reviews of the last four volumes of the Study by Fiess and Geyl.

Toynbee as Prophet had appeared in Debates with Historians as Toynbee the Prophet (The Last Four Volumes); Testing the Toynbee System in The Sunday Times (London), October 17 1954; A Study of History, What I Am Trying to Do in International Affairs (the journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs published by OUP), vol 31, 1955. A Study of History, What the Book Is For: How the Book Took Shape was the text of a pamphlet published by OUP in 1954. The Comment had appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas, vol 16, no 3, New York, June 1955.

The other essays in the book are a Foreword by Montagu; A Study of Toynbee by Tangye Lean; Toynbee’s Study of History by GJ Renier; Herr Spengler and Mr Toynbee by H Michell; Dr Toynbee’s Study of History: A Review by Sir Ernest Barker; Study of Toynbee: A Personal View of History, Times Literary Supplement; Historical Consequences and Happy Families by Lawrence Stone; Much Learning by AJP Taylor; The Prospects of the Western World by Geoffrey Barraclough; The End of a Great Work by WH Walsh; The Place of Civilization in History by Christopher Dawson; The Napoleon of Notting Hill by Lewis Mumford; Fact and Fiction in Toynbee’s Study of History by Rushton Coulborn; Toynbee’s Study of History by George Catlin; Toynbee and the Historical Imagination by Hans Morgenthau; Toynbee’s Approach to History by Kenneth W Thompson; Toynbee and Classical History: Historiography and Myth by W Den Boer; Toynbee’s Treatment of Chinese History by Wayne Altree; Arnold Toynbee’s Conception of the Future of Islam by Gotthold Weil; Reflections on Toynbee’s A Study of History: A Geographer’s View by OHK Spate; Toynbee and Super-History by Walter Kaufmann; The Professor and the Fossil by Frederick E Robin; The Toynbee Heresy by Abba Eban; Toynbee and Religion: A Catholic View by Linus Walker; Reason or Religion: An Old Dispute Renewed by Jan Romein; Faith and a Vision of a Universal World by Hans Kohn; and Toynbee as Poet by Edward Fiess.

5. Hugh Trevor-Roper, Arnold Toynbee’s Millennium, Encounter, June 1957

A piece by Trevor-Roper in a literary magazine. Correspondence following publication appeared in the July, August, September, October and November issues. The most substantial contribution was from Geyl in November.

The article is reprinted in Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol and Melvin J Lasky, editors, Encounters, An Anthology from the First Ten Years of Encounter Magazine, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963.

6. Pieter Geyl, Encounters in History, Cleveland and New York, World Publishing Co, Meridian Books, 1961

Contains an essay, Toynbee’s Answer, reviewing the twelfth volume (OUP, 1961) of A Study of History, in which Toynbee answered his critics; a review, “Hitler’s Europe”, of Survey of International Affairs, 1939-1946: Hitler’s Europe, OUP, Under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1954; and an article about a German apologist for Toynbee, Othmar F. Anderle, or Unreason as a Doctrine. According to Morton, the first two first appeared in a book in the UK edition of Encounters in History, Collins, 1963. She does not mention the third. I suggest the US edition, but have not looked at it to check.

Toynbee’s Answer had appeared first of all, in English, in Mededelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, Afdeling Letterkunde, n s v 24, no 5, Amsterdam, 1961. “Hitler’s Europe” had been a talk in English broadcast on the BBC in 1954. Othmar F. Anderle, or Unreason as a Doctrine was originally published “in Meridian Books newspaper, The Meridian, New York, Fall 1958”.

There are references to Toynbee in further essays in Encounters in History: French Historians for and against the Revolution; Huizinga as Accuser of His Age; Geoffrey Barraclough, or the Scrapping of History; The Vitality of Western Civilization; and Looking Back.

~~~

Morton also mentions

1. Systeem en Geschiedenis, a paper by Geyl read before the Sociëteit “De Koepel” te Amsterdam on February 13 1948, published in Nieuw Vlaams Tijdschrift, vol 3, 1948-9

2. The Western World, a review by Geyl of Toynbee’s BBC Reith Lectures, The World and the West (OUP, 1953), Manchester Guardian, February 17 1953

3. Four articles or comments which Toynbee published after Geyl’s death in 1966: Professor Pieter Geyl, The Times (London), January 7 1967, a footnote to the Times obituary; Pieter Geyl, de Vechter, Elseviers Weekblad, January 14 1967; Pieter Geyl, Journal of Contemporary History, vol 2, no 2, April 1967; and Pieter Geyl, Encounter, vol 28, no 5, May 1967

~~~

Trevor-Roper was not Toynbee’s most searching critic, but his writings did the most to damage his reputation in the UK. His view of Toynbee is also made clear in

1. Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Prophet, New York Review of Books, New York, October 12 1989, a review of McNeill’s biography of Toynbee; and

2. His letters to Berenson, in Richard Davenport-Hines, editor, Letters from Oxford, Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2006

~~~

Toynbee’s biographer William H McNeill discusses him in

1. Edward T Gargan, editor, The Intent of Toynbee’s History, A Cooperative Appraisal, with a Preface by Arnold J. Toynbee, Chicago, Loyola University Press, 1961

McNeill’s is the first essay in the collection and is called Some Basic Assumptions of Toynbee’s A Study of History. His Preface to no 3 below suggests that it was prepared for a symposium organised by Edward Gargan at Loyola University in 1955. He had not been a contributor to the Montagu volume, above.

2. Review of Toynbee’s Change and Habit, The Challenge of Our Time, OUP, 1966, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, no 371, Philadelphia, May 1967

3. Mythistory and Other Essays, University of Chicago Press, 1986

Two of the essays are about Toynbee: Basic Assumptions of Toynbee’s A Study of History and Historians I Have Known: Arnold J. Toynbee. The first is presumably the same as no 1 above. McNeill had originally intended the second to be one of his Becker Lectures at Cornell in 1983.

4. Arnold J. Toynbee, 1889-1975 in Proceedings of the British Academy, vol 63, 1977

5. Arnold J. Toynbee, A Life, New York, OUP, 1989

6. Toynbee Revisited, pamphlet in British Studies seminar series, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Univ of Texas, 1993

7. The Pursuit of Truth, A Historian’s Memoir, University Press of Kentucky, 2005

McNeill also wrote one of the volumes of the Survey of International Affairs, to which Toynbee contributed a Foreword:

Survey of International Affairs, 1939-1946: America, Britain and Russia, Their Cooperation and Conflict, OUP, Under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1953

McNeill reacts against some of Toynbee’s views in

The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community, University of Chicago Press, 1963

~~~

There is discussion of Toynbee in

Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Routledge, 1945

RG Collingwood, The Idea of History, OUP, 1946

Richard Overy, The Morbid Age, Britain between the Wars, Allen Lane, 2009

~~~

Toynbee answers his critics in the twelfth volume of A Study of History, which is called Reconsiderations. It contains a partial list of their writings.

~~~

There is further biographical information in

Richard Clogg, Politics and the Academy, Arnold Toynbee and the Koraes Chair, Routledge, 2004

~~~

Unless otherwsie stated, the books listed are first editions in the English-speaking world and the place of publication is the UK.

[In progress]