1A study of History
Arnold J. Toynbee’s multi-volume work A Study of History, the first
three volumes of which appeared in 1934, drew inspiration from
Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918), a two-volume work which
Toynbee had read in 1920 in the course of elaborating a philosophy of
history.^1 Yet despite it being a source of inspiration, Toynbee was criti-
cal of Spengler’s effort, later observing that while the pages of Decline
of the West teemed with ‘firefly flashes of historical insight,’ Spengler’s
account of the geneses of civilisations was ‘unilluminatingly dogmatic
and deterministic’.^2 Toynbee observed that for Spengler, civilisations
emerge, flourish and then decline ‘in unvarying conformity with a fixed
time-table’ and that the latter considered this civilisational trajectory to
be simply a law of nature, requiring no further discussion. Yet it was pre-
cisely the question of why civilisations rise and fall that Toynbee wished
to open up for investigation and in relation to this question he proposed
that where the ‘German a priori method drew blank..English empiricism’
might succeed.^3
CHAPTER 1Peaceful Change or War?
© The Author(s) 2020
J.-A. Pemberton, The Story of International Relations,
Part Three, Palgrave Studies in International Relations,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31827-7_
(^1) William H. McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press,
1989), 98–99.
(^2) A. J. Toynbee, ed., Civilization on Trial (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 9.
(^3) Ibid., 10.