Historical Study of Arnold Toynbee

167). The work's professional reception was never comparable.

His severest critics pull in felt that his Study has interrupted the positive solicitude of historical

writing. At the same beat, scholars moved by

Toynbee's efforts move over non been wanting. These sympathizers, however, have refused conversion to

his system of memorial (Gargan, 1961, p. 1).

in spite of appearance a some years, A Study of History any but dropped off both the habitual and academic radar. Historians have heard of it but few have meditate it, a lot less used its framework to find research problems. Today, few among the general public would even have it away his name. Nevertheless, some canonical elements of Toynbee's thesis have entered American popular intellectual culture--largely done the surprising yet logical medium of intelligence fiction.

This raise explores the reception and impact of A Study of History, at the time of its publication and in the decades since, with particular emphasis on its broadest impact, the confirmative one through science fiction. The essay will also inquire, though, into whether historians today may now be more loose to Toynbee's work than they were when it appeared.

Arnold Toynbee was born in England in 1881, and by his avow testimony belonged to the last generation of scholars to receive a determinate education, that is, one based primarily on mastery of old-fashioned Latin and Greek and the literatures writte

It be to be asked whether Toynbee, having indirectly entered the popular culture, has yet found a place in the professional work of historians. For some historians, the impact of A Study of History proved substantial and enduring, not for any of its specific theories, but from its sheer scope. William H. McNeill describes his youthful get wind with it (1986, pp. 174-98). He quickly rejected its substantive ideas, but having read it he could no longer picture the history of culture as a single main thread test from Egypt to Greece, Rome, France, Britain, and the United States.

Toynbee awakened him to the idea that China, India, precolumbian America, and other parts of the valet had their own histories, as important to the overall understanding of history as that of the West.

A passage in the Foundation Trilogy itself capably summarizes the usefulness of this historical sequence to the writer of popular fiction. Of a pleasure-planet, a sort of cosmic vacation resort, we are told that it had in turn given itself to

If Toynbee's ultimate religious message has been forgotten, his earlier instauration of the fall and rise of civilization has, though the intermediary of science fiction, become a standard trope in our popular culture. If a film opens with tribesmen or biker-barbarians amid the ruins of a modern city, we do not need to have the theme explained to us; we recognize it at once.

The French Annales school might at send-off seem as far as possible from Toynbee. Toynbee looks experience at the world's history from Olympian heights, while in McNeill's smart as a whip description of the Annalistes' mentor, "[Marc] Bloch's rural France smelt of the barnyard, not of dusty archives" (McNeill, 1986, p. 203). Fernand Braudel, the best-known exponent of the Annaliste school, is as close to the soil as his mentor, yet in his final work, The Identity of France, he does not hesitate to identify and argue for centuries-long cycles in French history, runn
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