Arnold J. Toynbee - Reception and Criticism

Reception and Criticism

The Study of History sold well. In the U.S. alone, more than seven thousand sets of the ten-volume edition had been sold by 1955. Most people relied on the very clear one-volume abridgement of the first six volumes by Somervell, which appeared in 1947; it sold over 300,000 copies in the U.S. The high brow press provided innumerable discussions of Toynbee's work in the press, not to mention countless lectures and seminars. Toynbee himself often participated. He appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 1947.

Scholars were much less impressed. Toynbee has been severely criticised by other historians. In general, the critique has been leveled at his use of myths and metaphors as being of comparable value to factual data, and at the soundness of his general argument about the rise and fall of civilisations, which may rely too much on a view of religion as a regenerative force. Many critics complained that the conclusions he reached were those of a Christian moralist rather than of a historian. Hugh Trevor-Roper described Toynbee's work as a "Philosophy of Mish-Mash" - Pieter Geyl described Toynbee's ideological approach as "metaphysical speculations dressed up as history" . His work, however, has been praised as a stimulating answer to the specialising tendency of modern historical research.

Toynbee was attacked on numerous fronts in two chapters of Walter Kaufmann's From Shakespeare to Existentialism (1959). One of the charges was that "Toynbee's huge success is confined to the United States where public opinion is heavily influenced by magazines" (p. 426); another was his focus on groups of religions as the significant demarcations of the world (p. 408), as of 1956. Critics attacked Toynbee's theory for emphasizing religion over other aspects of life when assessing the big pictures of civilizations. In this respect, the debate resembled the contemporary one over Samuel Huntington's theory of the so-called "clash of civilizations". Because he took Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as a related group, and contrasted them with Buddhism, his analysis was very different.

In an essay titled The Chatham House Version (1970), Elie Kedourie of the London School of Economics, a historian of the Middle East, attacked Toynbee's role in what he saw as an abdication of responsibility of the retreating British Empire, in failing democratic values in countries it had once controlled. Kedourie argued that Toynbee's whole system and work were aimed at undercutting this imperial role; he included in this denunciation Toynbee's work at the Foreign Office, where he had dealt directly with the Palestine Mandate.