Arnold Joseph Toynbee (; 14 April 1889 – 22 October 1975) was an English historian, a philosopher of history, an author of numerous books and a research professor of international history at the London School of Economics and King's College London. From 1918 to 1950, Toynbee was considered a leading specialist on international affairs; from 1929 to 1956 he was the Director of Studies at Chatham House, in which position he also produced 34 volumes of the Survey of International Affairs, a "bible" for international specialists in Britain.
He is best known for his 12-volume A Study of History (1934–1961). With his large output of papers, articles, speeches, presentations, and numerous books translated into many languages, Toynbee was widely read and discussed in the 1940s and 1950s.
Toynbee was born on 14 April 1889 in London, England, to Harry Valpy Toynbee (1861–1941), secretary of the Charity Organization Society, and his wife Sarah Edith Marshall (1859–1939). His mother took the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in English history at Cambridge University, when higher education for women was unusual and before women were allowed to graduate from the university, and his sister Jocelyn Toynbee was an archaeologist and art historian. Arnold Toynbee was a grandson of Joseph Toynbee, a nephew of the 19th-century economist Arnold Toynbee (1852–1883), and a descendant of prominent British intellectuals for several generations.
Having won a scholarship, he was educated at Winchester College, an all-boys independent boarding school in Winchester, Hampshire. From 1907 to 1911, having won a scholarship to Oxford University, he read literae humaniores (i.e. classics) at Balliol College, Oxford. Early in Toynbee's degree, his father suffered a nervous collapse and was institutionalised, causing financial difficulties for the family. Regardless, Toynbee achieved first class honours in mods and in greats and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree. From 1911 to 1912, he toured Italy and Greece to study the classical landscape and remains that "he had thitherto known only through books".
In 1912, having returned from his travels, Toynbee was elected a fellow of his alma mater Balliol College, Oxford, and appointed a tutor in ancient history. Unusually for a British classical scholar of that time, his interests crossed Greek and Roman civilisation, and ranged from Bronze Age Greece to the Byzantine Empire. He also combined traditional classical literary scholarship with the emerging discipline of classical archaeology.
He served as a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, where he helped shape the Treaty of Sèvres. He was present at the meeting at the Hotel Majestic when Lionel Curtis proposed the formation of an Institute of International Affairs, resulting in the formation of Chatham House in London and The Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Historian and Director of Studies
In 1925 he became research professor of international history at the London School of Economics. In 1929 he became Director of Studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), a post he held until 1956. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 1937. He was elected an International Member of the American Philosophical Society in 1941 and an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1949.
His first marriage was to Rosalind Murray (1890–1967), daughter of Gilbert Murray, in 1913; they had three sons, of whom Philip Toynbee was the second. Their son Lawrence (born 1922) was a painter and married Jean Constance Asquith, granddaughter of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith. Arnold and Rosalind divorced in 1946; Toynbee then married his research assistant, Veronica M. Boulter (1893–1980), in the same year. He died on 22 October 1975, age 86.
Views on the post-World War I peace settlement and geopolitical situation
In his 1915 book Nationality & the War, Toynbee argued that any eventual postwar peace settlement should be guided by the principle of nationality. In Chapter IV of his 1916 book The New Europe: Essays in Reconstruction, Toynbee argued against the competing principle of "natural borders." Toynbee encouraged the use of plebiscites for the allocation of disputed territories, an idea brought to fruition by the postwar use of plebiscites.
In his 1915 book Nationality & the War, Toynbee offered various elaborate proposals and predictions for the future of various countries, both European and non-European. For example, he advocated an autonomous Poland in a federal arrangement with Russia, the retention of Austro-Hungarian dominion over Czech and Slovak lands, Austro-Hungarian relinquishment of Galicia, Transylvania, and Bukovina, independence for Bosnia, Croatia, and Slovenia, the division of Bessarabia between Russia and Romania and joint use by those two countries of the port of Odessa, Russian acquisition of Outer Mongolia and the Tarim Basin in central Asia and of Pontus and the Armenian Vilayets in the Ottoman Empire, a strong, independent, central government in Persia. and a Russo-British partitioning of Afghanistan.
Academic and cultural influence
Michael Lang says that for much of the twentieth century,
Toynbee was perhaps the world's most read, translated, and discussed living scholar. His output was enormous, hundreds of books, pamphlets, and articles. Of these, scores were translated into thirty different languages....the critical reaction to Toynbee constitutes a veritable intellectual history of the midcentury: we find a long list of the period's most important historians, Beard, Braudel, Collingwood, and so on.
Toynbee's approach may be compared to the one used by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West. He rejected, however, Spengler's deterministic view that civilizations rise and fall according to a natural and inevitable cycle.
In his best-known work, A Study of History, published 1934–1961, Toynbee
examined the rise and fall of 26 civilisations in the course of human history, and he concluded that they rose by responding successfully to challenges under the leadership of creative minorities composed of elite leaders.