1 PEACEFUL CHANGE OR WAR? 5before they would ‘enter into an effective social contract or else submit
to the terrible alternative of being unified by force’.^18
In contrast with the sense of foreboding conveyed in the preface to
the fourth volume of A Study of History, the preface accompanying the
first three volumes, which was dated May 16, 1933, saw Toynbee offer
a broadly optimistic appraisal of the international situation. He observed
therein that whereas in the age now past national communities aspired
to be ‘universes in themselves,’ in the so-called ‘new age, the dominant
note in the corporate consciousness of communities is a sense of being
parts of some larger universe’. Toynbee maintained that this sense of
corporate consciousness grew out of the feeling on the part of national
communities that they could no longer ‘stand by themselves’ and that
because of this feeling, states had adapted their sovereign independence
to the LON and to other international instruments such as the Pact of
Paris: what was formally known as the General Treaty for Renunciation
of War as an Instrument of National Policy, a treaty which was signed in
August 1928 by fifteen countries.^19 As Toynbee’s biographer William H.
McNeill argues, if the principal message of A Study of History concerned
the ‘demotion’ of Western civilisation to one civilisation amongst many,
it was a message that was ‘softened’ by suggestions that this civilisation
‘might yet be saved and that God or His secularized equivalent, élan
vital, was still in charge.’^20 McNeill further argues that to the extent that
A Study of History reflects Toynbee’s concern for the peaceful progress
of Western civilisation and the international order of which it was the
chief author, it may be seen as a ‘grandiose background argument for the
advocacy of collective security.’^21 Yet at the same time and for the very
same reason, A Study of History may be seen as a grandiose background
argument for the advocacy of peaceful change, a cause that Toynbee
would champion in the years after 1933.^22
(^18) Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 4 (London: Oxford University Press,
1939), viii–ix, 3.
(^19) Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 1 (London: Oxford University Press,
1934), viii, 14–15.
(^20) McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 164.
(^21) Ibid., 160.
(^22) Ibid., 163.