Toynbee, Arnold Joseph

Arnold Joseph Toynbee was born in London on April 14, 1889. He was the son of Harry Valpi Toynbee (1861-1941), secretary of a public charity and his wife Sarah Edik Marshall (1859-1939). His sister Jacqueline Toynbee was an archaeologist and art critic. Arnold Toynbee was the grandson of Joseph Toynbee, the nephew of the famous economist Arnold Toynbee (1852-1883). Arnold Joseph Toynbee was a descendant of prominent British intellectuals for generations.

He won a scholarship at Winchester College and Baileyol College , as well as at Oxford in the Humanities (1907-1911) ^[4] . He studied at the British School in Athens. In the future, this training greatly influenced his work “Comprehension of History”. In 1912, Arnold Toynbee began teaching ancient history at Bayliol College . And in 1915, he began working in the intelligence department of the British Foreign Office. Arnold Joseph Toynbee was a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, after which he was appointed professor of Byzantine and modern Greek studies at the University of London. From 1921 to 1922 he was a correspondent for the Guardian . The experience gained during the Greek-Turkish war contributed to the publication of the publication “The Western Question in Greece and Turkey” ^[5] . In 1925, he became professor of international history studies at the London School of Economics and director of the Royal Institute for International Affairs in London.

His first wife in 1913 was Rosalina Murray (1890-1967), the daughter of Gilbert Murray , a famous British scientist, specialist in Ancient Greece. Arnold and Rosa had 4 sons, one of whom became a famous British writer - Philip Toynbee. Arnold Toynbee divorced Rosa Murray in 1946 and married his scientific assistant Veronica M. Bolter (1893-1980) ^[6] .

On October 22, 1975, at the age of 86, Arnold Joseph Toynbee died. In honor of the historian named asteroid 7401 Toynbee .

For most of the 20th century, Michael Lang said, “Toynbee was perhaps the most widely read, translated, and debated scholar of our time. His contribution was enormous - hundreds of books, pamphlets and articles. Many of them were translated into 30 different languages ​​... the critical reaction to the work of Toynbiya is a whole scientific history of the middle of the century: we find a long list of the most important periods in history, Beard , Braudel , Collingwood and so on ” ^[7] . In his most famous work, “ Comprehension of History, ” published between 1934 and 1961, Toynbee “... examined the dawn and sunset of 26 civilizations as part of the course on the history of mankind, and concluded that they flourished due to the successful reaction of societies to challenges led by wise minorities composed of elite leaders ” ^[8] .

“The comprehension of history” is both a commercial and a scientific phenomenon. In the United States alone , more than seven thousand sets of ten-volume editions were already sold by 1955. Most people, including scientists, at first relied only on an abridged edition of the first six chapters prepared by British historian David Churchill Samerwell and published in 1947. 300,000 copies of this reduction were sold in the United States . Numerous publications were full of articles on the topic of Toynbee’s popular work. Lectures and seminars on the theme of the book “Understanding History” were held everywhere. Arnold Toynbee sometimes personally participated in such discussions. In the same year, he even appeared on the cover of Time magazine. The headline read: "The most daring historical theory written in England since the time of Karl Marx's Capital " ^[9] . Toynbee was also a regular observer on the BBC (he spoke, taking into account how non-Western civilizations look at the Western world, considered the history and causes of modern enmity between East and West ^{[10] [11]} .

Harold Adams Innis , a Canadian economic historian, was a prime example of Toynbee advocates among Canadian researchers. Following Toynbee and other authors ( Spengler , Sorokin , Kroeber and Kochrein ), Innis examined the flourishing of civilizations from the point of view of the government of empires and means of mass communication ^[12] . Toynbee's civilization theory has been accepted by many scholars, such as Ernst Robert Curtius, as a variant of the paradigm in the post-war space. Curtius was a follower of Toynbee and believed that the author of " Understanding History " created a huge base for a new study of Latin literature. “Both cultures and historical objects, which are the cultural information source, appear, flourish and decay? Only comparative morphology with special approaches can possibly give an answer to these questions. It was Arnold Joseph Toynbee who posed such a question to the world ” ^[13] .

Already in the 1960s, Toynbee's theory was losing its popularity in science and the media, but many historians continue to refer to the “Comprehension of History” up to the present day ^{[14] [15]} .

Toynbee considered world history as a system of conditionally distinguished civilizations that go through the same phases from birth to death and constitute the branches of a “single tree of history”. Civilization , according to Toynbee, is a closed society, characterized by two main criteria ^[16] : religion and the form of its organization; territorial attribute, degree of remoteness from the place where the given society originally arose ^[17] .

Toynbee identifies 21 civilizations ^[16] :

The theory of the development of civilizations is based on the idea of ​​the emergence and development of civilizations in the form of an answer to the global challenges of their time. The mechanism of the birth and development of civilization is associated with the response to the challenges that the natural and social environment constantly challenges to people (harsh climate, frequent earthquakes or floods, wars, cultural expansion, etc.). The creative minority must successfully respond to the challenge by solving the problem. Toynbee identifies 21 civilizations, of which only 10 civilizations remained in the 20th century, and 8 of them are at risk of assimilation with Western culture. Despite the peculiarity of each civilization, there is a single logic of their development - the progress of spirituality and religion.

Scientists have been put forward the criteria for assessing civilizations: stability in time and space, in situations of Challenge and interaction with other peoples. He saw the meaning of civilization in that comparable units (monads) of history go through similar stages of development. Successfully developing civilizations go through the stages of emergence, growth, breakdown and decomposition. The development of civilization is determined by whether the creative minority of civilization is able to find answers to the challenges of the natural world and the human environment. Toynbee notes the following types of challenges: calling for a harsh climate (Egyptian, Sumerian, Chinese, Mayan, Andean civilizations), calling for new lands (Minoan civilization), calling for sudden blows from neighboring societies (Hellenic civilization), calling for constant external pressure (Russian Orthodox, Western civilization) and the challenge of infringement, when society, having lost something vital, directs its energy to the development of properties that compensate for the loss ^[18] . Each civilization gives an answer formulated by its “creative minority” to the challenge posed to it by nature, social contradictions, and especially other civilizations. At the stages of emergence and growth, the creative minority finds an answer to the challenges of the environment, its authority grows and civilization grows. At the stages of breaking and decomposition, the creative minority loses the ability to find answers to the challenges of the environment and turns into an elite that stands above society and controls not the power of authority, but the power of weapons. Most of the civilization's population is turning into an internal proletariat . The ruling elite creates a universal state , the internal proletariat - the Ecumenical Church , the external proletariat creates mobile military units ^[19] .

At the center of Toynbee's historiosophical constructions lies the concept of Hellenic civilization ^[20] . The scientist fundamentally rejected the category of socio-economic formation ^[20] .

Toynbee about Russia

The main challenge that determined the development of Russian Orthodox civilization, Toynbee considers continuous external pressure. For the first time, it began on the part of nomadic peoples in 1237 with a campaign by Batu Khan. The answer was to change lifestyle and renew social organization. This allowed for the first time in the history of civilizations a settled society not only to defeat Eurasian nomads, but also to conquer their lands, change the face of the landscape and ultimately change the landscape, transforming nomadic pastures into peasant fields, and camps into settled villages. The next time, terrible pressure on Russia ensued in the 17th century from the Western world. The Polish army occupied Moscow for two years. The answer this time was the foundation of St. Petersburg by Peter the Great and the creation of the Russian fleet in the Baltic Sea ^[21] .

Toynbee considered communism established in Russia as a “counterattack”, repelling what the West imposed on Russia in the 18th century. Here is a common point with the ideologies of "Eurasianism", "shift work" and National Bolshevism. The expansion of communist ideas was, according to Toynbee, only one of the inevitable answers to the contradiction "between Western civilization as an aggressor and other civilizations as victims." Witnessing the death of Victorian England, two world wars and the collapse of the colonial system, Toynbee argued that "at the peak of its power, the West is confronted with non-Western countries that have enough aspiration, will and resources to give the world a non-Western look." Toynbee predicted that, in the 21st century, Russia will be the defining challenge for Russia (which the West does not want to embrace), the Islamic world and China .

The theoretical constructions of A. Toynbee caused an ambiguous reaction among professional historians and philosophers.

B. L. Gubman notes ^[22] :

The universalist vision of cultural-historical development, proposed by him, is based on the idea of ​​the unity of the human race, capable of enriching with experience the tradition that translates common humanistic values. The constructions of the British theoretician summarize the richest empirical material, contain generalizations that prompt with serious thought. Of particular interest is his view on the fate of the history of the 20th century, marked by the unity of the entire planetary community, seeking an answer to the challenge of the global problems of our time. Toynbee’s legacy is interesting in terms of translating humanistic value systems into developing a new thinking strategy aimed at analyzing complex collisions of the nuclear age. It calls for thinking about the relationship between the past and the present, the unity and diversity of the cultural and historical process, the progress and multivariance of the development paths of mankind, and the prospects for its future.

The famous French historian, one of the founders of the Annals school, Lucien Fevre, left the following comments ^[23] :

A comparative story through the eyes of Toynbee ... What is this, if not the resurrection in the 20th century of the old literary genre, which was once popular, giving so many masterpieces? From Lucretius to Fontennel, this genre was called the Dialogues of the Dead. To summarize in a nutshell. The fact that A Study of History is laudable does not represent anything particularly new to us. And what is new in it is not of particular value ... We were not presented with any new key. No skeleton key with which we could open twenty-one doors leading to twenty-one civilizations. But we never sought to seize such a miraculous master key. We are without pride, but we have faith. Let history, for the time being, remain Cinderella, sitting at the edge of the table in a society of other humanitarian disciplines. We know very well why she got this place. We are also aware that she was also affected by the deep and general crisis of scientific ideas and concepts, caused by the sudden flourishing of some sciences, in particular physics ... And there is nothing wrong with that, nothing that could make us renounce our painstaking and hard work and rush into the arms of charlatans, naive and at the same time crafty wonderworkers, composers of cheap (but twenty-volume) opuses on the philosophy of history

Russian philosopher A.A. Ivin notes the religiosity of Toynbee's works:

Dividing history into separate, local civilizations, Toynbee at the same time tries to restore the idea of ​​the unity of world history, giving this unity a religious meaning. Through separate civilizations, history leads from primitive societies to civilizations that give rise to higher religions and a person who is associated with them, who is able to acutely sense the existence of another, heavenly world.
...

Toynbee’s concept is striking in the grandeur of his plan - to cover the whole of human history and describe all civilizations that appeared in its course. Extremely rich in details and true observations regarding individual civilizations and their comparisons, the concept ends, however, with the exaltation of world religions and the recognition that history is a divine creative force in motion.

- Ivin A. Philosophy of History ^[24]

Ivin sees in the religious bias the limited analysis in Toynbee’s works only by past civilizations, where religion really played a significant role. Toynbee says almost nothing about the history of the 20th century, and even the events of the 19th century are mentioned by him in passing.

The most important thing is the relationship between man and the landscape - the concept of A. Toynbee is not solved, but confused. Тезис, согласно которому суровая природа стимулирует человека к повышенной активности, с одной стороны, — вариант географического детерминизма, а с другой — просто неверен. Климат около Киева , где сложилось Древнерусское государство, отнюдь не тяжёл. Заявление, что «господство над степью требует от кочевников так много энергии, что сверх этого ничего не остается» (с. 167—169), показывает неосведомленность автора. Алтай и Ононский бор , где сложились тюрки и монголы, — курортные места. Если море, омывающее Грецию и Скандинавию, — «вызов», то почему греки «давали на него ответ» только в VIII—VI вв. BC э., а скандинавы — в IX—XII вв. n э.? А в прочие эпохи не было ни победоносных эллинов, ни отчаянных хищных финикийцев, ни грозных викингов, а были ловцы губок или селедки? Шумеры сделали из Двуречья Эдем, «отделяя воду от суши», а турки все так запустили, что там опять образовалось болото, хотя, по А. Тойнби, они должны были ответить на «вызов» Тигра и Евфрата . Всё неверно.

Не менее произвольной выглядит и географическая классификация цивилизации по регионам. У Тойнби в одну цивилизацию зачислены Византийская и Турецкая империи только потому, что они располагались на одной территории, причём не греки и албанцы, а османы почему-то объявлены «задержанными» (?!). В «сирийскую цивилизацию» попали Иудейское царство, Ахеменидская империя и Арабский халифат , а Шумер и Вавилон разделены на материнскую и дочернюю. Очевидно, критерием классификации был произвол автора.

— Гумилев Л. Н. Этногенез и биосфера Земли. Почему я не согласен с А. Тойнби ^[25]

Ю. И. Семёнов утверждал, что «Тойнби подгоняет реально существующие общества и системы обществ под свои схемы, не останавливаясь перед прямым насилием над фактами» ^[26] .

• Закон вызова и ответа
• Плитки Тойнби

Переведённые на русский язык работы:

• Тойнби А. Дж. Постижение истории: Сборник / Пер. from English Е. Д. Жаркова. — М.: Рольф, 2001—640 с., ISBN 5-7836-0413-5 , тир. 5000 экз.
• Тойнби А. Дж. Цивилизация перед судом истории: Сборник / Пер. from English — М.: Рольф, 2002—592 с., ISBN 5-7836-0465-8 , тир. 5000 экз.
• Тойнби А. Дж. Пережитое. Мои встречи. / Per. from English — М.: Айрис-пресс, 2003—672 с., ISBN 5-8112-0076-5 , тир. 5000 экз.
• Тойнби А. Дж. Исследование истории: В 3 т. / Пер. с англ., вступ. статья и комментарии К. Я. Кожурина . — СПб.: Изд-во С.-Петербургского ун-та: «Издательство Олега Абышко», 2006—1333 с., ISBN 5-288-03610-1 , тир. 1000 экз.
• Тойнби А. Дж., Икеда Д. Избери жизнь. Диалог Арнольда Дж. Тойнби и Дайсаку Икеды — М.: Изд-во Моск. ун-та, 2007—448 с. — ISBN 978-5-211-05343-4
• Тойнби А. Дж. Роль личности в истории. / Per. from English — М.: Астрель, 2012—222 с. — ISBN 978-5-271-41624-8
• Тойнби А. Дж., Хантингтон С. Ф. Вызовы и ответы. Как гибнут цивилизации — М.: Алгоритм, 2016—288 с. — ISBN 978-5-906817-86-0

Остальные

• Тойнби / Г. С. Померанц // Новая философская энциклопедия : в 4 т. / пред. науч.-ред. совета В. С. Стёпин . — 2-е изд., испр. and add. — М. : Мысль , 2010. — 2816 с.
• Емельянов-Лукьянчиков М. А. Иерархия радуги. Русская цивилизация в наследии К.Леонтьева, Н.Данилевского, О.Шпенглера, А.Тойнби. М., Русский мир, 2008, 700 с.
• Рашковский Е. Б. Востоковедная проблематика в культурно-исторической концепции А.Дж. Тойнби. М.: Наука, 1976