16
header across here The Return of Arnold Toynbee?
I
n 1929 the historian Arnold Toynbee made an extensive visit to China and Japan. Steaming into Hong Kong, he fancied himself in his beloved Mediterranean, the site of most of his studies hitherto as a classicist. “From the sun to the horizon, on every side, there was a cloudless blue sky. A fresh, dry, north-easterly breeze was blowing in my face; and on either hand were jagged islands rising from the sea with the lineaments of the Isles of Greece . . . . I felt I was in the Classical World”. The exhilaration continued as he visited Shanghai, Peking, Nanking, and Manchuria, despite the changes of scenery, climate, and comfort (Shanghai was a “Nordic city”, Manchuria “has the climate of Canada”, Nanking was “the most uncomfortable capital in the world”). The Great Wall evoked “awe and admiration”. He praised “the marvellous symmetry” of the architecture of the Forbidden City. He was impressed by the “cool-headedness and restrained vitality” of Chiang Kaishek, the leader of the Kuomintang, and though disgusted by the cynicism and opportunism of many of Chiang’s leading associates, saw much in the work of ordinary officials to encourage him. The Chinese, he decided, are “a wonderful nation. They have been expanding – North and South and East and West – for three thousand years. How far will they go?” When the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931, Toynbee was appalled by the failure of the League of Nations to act, and by British connivance at this irresponsibility. This, he thought, would ultimately lead to “finis Britanniae”. In his first book, Nationality and the War (1915), he had predicted that “the fundamental factor of world politics during the next century will be the competition between China and the new [British] Commonwealth”. Now he saw Britain throwing away the chance to take a leading role in the international crisis, and condemning itself to becoming a junior partner to the other “British Empire”, the United States. But what is more remarkable in this prediction was the recognition, confirmed by his first-hand observations in 1929, that China would overcome the turmoil created by the Nationalist Revolution of 1911 and go on to become a great world power again. In his monumental, twelve-volume, Study of History (1934–61), Toynbee returned repeatedly to China and its civilization. Like many scholars since, he thought that in the long perspective of Chinese history, the “century of humiliation” suffered by the Chinese since the Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century represented no more than the blink of an eye. China would find its rightful place again among the world powers, and its culture – especially as represented by religious thinkers such as Confucius and Lao-Tse, but also by secular figures such as Sun Yat-Sen – would contribute powerfully to the syncretic world civilization that Toynbee thought was emerging in the second half of the twentieth century. The Chinese returned the compliment in
KRISHAN KUMAR being, in the 1930s and 1940s, among the first non-Western countries to pay attention to Toynbee’s work. After the Communist Revolution of 1949 this was not surprisingly officially discouraged. But, as I learned on a recent trip to China, there has been a rediscovery and a renewed interest in him over the past decade or so. This matches, and has partly been fuelled by, the long-standing commitment to Toynbee in Japan that dates back to the huge success of the Japanese translation of his works in the 1960s and 1970s, and the setting up of a wellfinanced Toynbee Society – still very active – to carry on his endeavours. No less helpful to
several decades, had been widely reviewed and discussed – the TLS devoted its whole front page and two inside columns to a review of the first three volumes in 1934, finding in them a “nobly conceived and assiduously executed work”, with a possible “mark of greatness”. Even those professional scholars who disagreed with him on this or that topic praised him for the breadth of his enterprise and the extraordinary achievement it represented. The great German literary scholar E. R. Curtius compared Oswald Spengler unfavourably with Toynbee, arguing that “a new methodology for the humanistic disciplines is announced in [Toynbee’s] work”. He thought that “Toynbee’s view of history could become,
Toynbee’s reputation in Japan has been the backing of the powerful religious group, Soka Gakkai, whose leader Daisaku Ikeda idolized Toynbee and made his thinking central to Soka Gakkai’s blend of East–West philosophy. Is it time also for Western scholars and thinkers to reconsider the “monumentally unfashionable” Toynbee, as Jonathan Benthall not so long ago described him (TLS May 14, 2010)? Might his moment have come again? In the 1950s and 60s Toynbee was one of the most famous people in the world, his reputation akin, perhaps, to that of H. G. Wells – another great synoptic thinker – in the 1920s and 30s. His Study of History, written over
in the next decades, a common possession of all thinking people – by way of ‘inspiration’ and social mimesis”. In America, Henry Luce in 1947 put Toynbee on the front cover of Time magazine, and Whittaker Chambers in the same issue proclaimed him one of the most important thinkers of his time. Toynbee’s American reputation was well and truly launched, and Toynbee spent much of the 1950s on lecturing tours there, when he could attract hundreds and even thousands of listeners. At the University of Minnesota in the winter of 1955 he addressed an overflow audience of 10,000 people, many of whom had come hundreds of miles through the snow to hear
TLS OCTOBER 24 2014
him. Not to be outdone, the Japanese in 1967 had him lecturing in the Imperial Palace in the presence of the Emperor, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Education (such august attention was not entirely new – in 1936, Hitler, seeking to influence British public opinion over his Rhineland policy, sought out Toynbee during the historian’s visit to Berlin and granted him a two-hour interview). Curtius had remarked, in his essay of 1948, that “it may be foreseen that the response of official historical scholarship to the ‘challenge’ of Toynbee’s Study of History will be one of protest.” The scholars had indeed been sharpening their pens, and in the 1950s came out in full-blown attack. Probably most influential, from a purely scholarly point of view, were the courteous but emphatically expressed criticisms of the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl, in his book Debates with Historians (1955). But it was the witty and merciless attack of the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, in the pages of Encounter (June 1957), that probably did the most damage to Toynbee’s reputation, especially in Britain. Trevor-Roper portrayed Toynbee as a would-be Messiah and ridiculed his Study as a kind of Bible, prophesying a millennium to be inaugurated Anno Toynbaei (“on this article as a whole, no comment”, was Toynbee’s laconic observation in his Reconsiderations of 1961, Volume 12 of the Study). The historical profession, swayed by this judgement from the newly appointed Regius Professor of History at Oxford, duly turned its back on Toynbee. Undergraduates were sternly warned off him. I should have sensed what was in store when, anxiously noting my interest in Toynbee (to whom I had been introduced by the classics master), my history teacher at my north London grammar school arranged that the sixth-form history prize I was awarded should be Geyl’s Debates with Historians. That should put a stop to that. Later, as a history undergraduate at Cambridge, I quickly learned from the amused and condescending smiles on the face of my teachers to avoid all references to Toynbee. I have recently, after a long period in which his volumes languished on an upper shelf, returned to Toynbee. I have done so partly under the stimulus of a renewed interest not so much in him as in the concept of “civilization” – a concept, like Toynbee himself, long scorned by professional scholars. This revival is conventionally, and conveniently, dated from the appearance of Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (1997). It has continued in such works as Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the rest (2011) , as well as in a number of recent works by Anthony Pagden, Ian Morris and others which are basically a defence of Western civilization against what are seen as threats to its worldwide cultural, economic and political dominance. That is one thing driving the renewed interest in civilizational analysis. Another is the more generalized fear, revealed in such works as Felipe