‘The Toynbee Convector’: The Rise and Fall of Arnold J. Toynbee's Anti-Imperial Mission to the West

Abstract

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the historian and internationalist Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975) conducted a highly public campaign against Western imperialism, arguing that the West needed to acknowledge and atone for its aggression if the world was to find peace. His efforts met with considerable resistance, damaging his reputation as a scholar and a political thinker. This article examines the origins of Toynbee's anti-imperialism in his philosophy of history, his public arguments of the postwar period, and the reaction they provoked.

Notes

I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on this article and to the librarians at the Bodleian for their assistance with Toynbee's papers. The usual caveat applies.

1. The story is included in Ray Bradbury, The Toynbee Convector (New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 1988).

2. Toynbee discussed his “time travelling” in A Study of History, 12 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1934–60), 10.129–40.

3. W. H. McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). See also C. T. McIntire and Marvin Perry, “Toynbee's Achievement,” in Toynbee Appraisals, ed. C. T. McIntire and Marvin Perry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), esp. 3–5.

4. See especially Pieter Geyl's “Toynbee the Prophet,” Journal of the History of Ideas 16 (1955): 260–74, and Hugh Trevor-Roper, “Arnold Toynbee's Millennium,” Encounter 8.16 (1957):14.

5. See, for example, McNeill, Toynbee, 239.

6. A. J. P. Taylor, The Troublemakers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792–1939 (London: Hamish Hamilton), 16.

7. The bout of dysentery that Toynbee claimed to have disabled him is discussed in Experiences (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 38–40. It is almost certainly the case that Toynbee was in fact fit and that to avoid service he resorted to having a pacifist doctor judge him unfit. See McNeill, Toynbee, 64–70 and his “Toynbee Revisited,” in Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain, ed. Wm. Roger Louis (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1996), 177.

8. See Richard Clogg, Politics and the Academy: Arnold J. Toynbee and the Koraes Chair (London: Frank Cass, 1986).

9. On Oxford, see Toynbee to Ivison Macadam, 31 March 1947, Toynbee MS 4/TOYN/42, Royal Institute of International Affairs, London; and on Cambridge, see McNeill, Toynbee, 209.

10. See Arnold J. Toynbee, An Historian's Approach to Religion (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), and Elie Kedourie, “Religion and Politics: Arnold Toynbee and Martin Wight,” British Journal of International Studies 5 (1979): 6–14.

11. As Tangye Lean observed, “If direct quotations from [Bergson's] L’Evolution Créatrice itself are rare twenty, thirty, or forty years later in A Study of History, it is because the book has fused into the whole structure of Toynbee's thought” (“A Study of Toynbee,” in Toynbee and History: Critical Essays and Reviews, ed. M. F. Ashley Montagu (Boston, MA: Sargent, 1956), 13.

12. Toynbee's flirtation with Catholicism is chronicled in his correspondence in An Historian's Conscience: The Correspondence of Arnold J. Toynbee and Columba Cary-Elwes, Monk of Ampleforth, ed. Christian B. Peper (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1986).

13. In Maurice Cowling's reckoning, Toynbee's religion was “a sort of pious cement to save civilization, or a post-liberal mysticism to safeguard the higher thinking” (Religion and the Public Doctrine in Modern England, I [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980], 43). For more sympathetic views, see the essays in Montagu, Toynbee and History, and McIntire and Perry, Toynbee Reappraisals (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990).

14. Arnold J. Toynbee, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the Contact of Civilizations (London: Constable, 1922); Hannibal's Legacy: The Hannibalic War's Effects on Roman Life (London: Oxford University Press, 1965); and Constantine Porphyogenitus and his World (London: Oxford University Press, 1973).

15. This marked a reversal of Toynbee's earlier position on Turkey's behaviour during and after the Great War, which had been critical of its government and people. See Arnold J. Toynbee, Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1915).

16. Toynbee, Experiences, 82.

17. McNeill, “Toynbee Revisited,” 177.

18. This thesis is outlined most fully in Toynbee, Study of History, vol. 7.

19. Arnold J. Toynbee, “Post-War Paganism versus Christianity,” The Listener 17.419, 20 January 1937, 124.

20. Arnold J. Toynbee, Nationality and the War (London: J. M. Dent, 1915), 480.

21. Arnold J. Toynbee, “Economics versus Politics,” The Listener 4.95, 19 November 1930, 825.

22. Arnold J. Toynbee, “The Idolatry of Nationalism,” The Listener 4.96, 26 November 1930, 873–74.

23. Toynbee was also concerned with the idolatry of ideologies, nature, race, “parochial” and “oecumenical” communities. See A. J. Toynbee, “The Proper Study of Mankind is Man” (1958), Toynbee MS 2–3, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

24. Toynbee, Western Question, 266–67.

25. See especially Toynbee, Study of History, vol. 4. It is thus an oversimplification to say, as Gordon Martel does, that Toynbee was not “in any way, shape, or form anti-imperialist” (“Toynbee, McNeill and the Myth of History,” International History Review 12.2 [1990], 340).

26. See for example R. H. Tawney, “Dr Toynbee's Study of History,” International Affairs 18.6 (1939): esp. 800, 804–5.

27. This was pointed out by E. H. Carr in an untitled review in International Affairs 16.1 (1937): 280–83. See also Toynbee, The Conduct of British Empire Foreign Relations since the Peace Settlement (London: Oxford University Press, 1928).

28. Arnold J. Toynbee, “After Munich: The World Outlook,” International Affairs 18.1 (1939): 13, and “The Issues in British Foreign Policy,” International Affairs 17.3 (1938): 310.

29. Here Toynbee's aims were congruent with Oswald Spengler's, to whose Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918–23; The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Atkinson [London: Allen & Unwin, 1932]) the Study of History is sometimes compared.

30. See especially Toynbee, Study of History, vol. 1, 1–182.

31. Arnold J. Toynbee, Civilization on Trial (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), 98,103.

32. Toynbee, Civilization on Trial, 71, 79.

33. Toynbee, Civilization on Trial, 84, 90, 94.

34. Arnold J. Toynbee, The World and the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 1–3.

35. Toynbee, World and the West, 6, 8–9.

36. Toynbee, World and the West, 21, 30.

37. For a hostile but perceptive critique of Toynbee's Arabism, see Elie Kedourie, “The Chatham House Version,” in The Chatham House Version and Other Essays (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 1970; rpt., 2004), 351–94.

38. Toynbee, World and the West, 67, 71.

39. Toynbee, World and the West, 74.

40. Anon., “East and West,” Times Literary Supplement 2663, 15 February 1953, 105.

41. W. H. F., review of Arnold Toynbee, The World and the West, International Affairs 29:3 (1953), 340.

42. Anon., “East and West,” 105.

43. Geoffrey Hudson had observed that the Study of History sought to demonstrate that “the intensive development of imperialist power-politics” was a “characteristic feature of periods of cultural decline” in all civilizations (“Professor Toynbee and Western Civilization,” The Criterion 15 [October 1935–July 1936]: 445).

44. Geoffrey Hudson, “Professor Toynbee and the West,” Twentieth Century 153:3 (1953): 210, 213–14.

45. See, for example, Pieter Geyl, “Toynbee as Prophet,” in Montagu, Toynbee and History, 363, 367–71.

46. Hudson, “Professor Toynbee and the West,” 215–16.

47. Hudson, “Professor Toynbee and the West,” 217. See Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals, trans. Richard Aldington (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2007); originally published as La Trahison des Clercs (1927).

48. Hudson, “Professor Toynbee and the West,” 218.

49. Douglas Jerrold was educated at Westminster and New College, Oxford, but did not complete his degree. He was wounded in the First World War, became a publisher and then an aspirant politician.

50. Douglas Jerrold, England: Past, Present and Future (London: J. M. Dent, 1950), and The Lie about the War: A Note on Some Contemporary War Books (London: Faber & Faber, 1930).

51. Douglas Jerrold, The Lie about the West: A Response to Professor Toynbee's Challenge (London: J. M. Dent, 1954), 5–6, 3, 7.

52. Douglas Jerrold, The Lie about the West, 17, 15.

53. Douglas Jerrold, The Lie about the West, 57, 60, 61–62.

54. For a survey of these opinions, see Ian Hall, The Dilemmas of Decline: British Intellectuals and World Politics, 1945–75 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), chap. 8.

55. T. E. Utley was educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, worked at Chatham House, and then became a journalist, writing for The Times, The Observer, The Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph, and later editing The Spectator. T. E. Utley, “Counsels of Hope,” TLS 9 April 1954, reprinted in Counsels of Hope: The Toynbee-Jerrold Controversy (London: Times Publishing Company, 1954), 1, 6, 8–9.

56. Hugh Trevor-Roper, Letter on “Counsels of Hope,” TLS, 28 May 1954, reprinted in Counsels of Hope, 36. The other correspondents—apart from Toynbee and Jerrold—were the Aga Khan, Ignaz Maybaum, Martin Wight, G. E. Fasnacht, and Philip Sherrard.

57. Arnold Toynbee, Letter on “Counsels of Hope,” TLS, 16 April 1954, reprinted in Counsels of Hope, 10.

58. Douglas Jerrold, Letter on “Counsels of Hope,” TLS, 23 April 1954, reprinted in Counsels of Hope, 13.

59. Arnold Toynbee, Letter on “Counsels of Hope,” TLS, 30 April 1954, reprinted in Counsels of Hope, 15–16.

60. On the relationship between Toynbee and Wight, see Ian Hall, “Challenge and Response: The Lasting Engagement of Arnold J. Toynbee and Martin Wight”, International Relations 17:3 (2003): 389-404, and on Wight himself, see Ian Hall, The International Thought of Martin Wight (New York: Palgrave, 2006).

61. See, for example, Noël O'sullivan, European Political Thought since 1945 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2004), 20–23.

62. This thesis is discussed in Stuart Ward's introduction to his edited British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). See also the striking absence of any discussion of empire in Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

63. For contemporary discussions of “Western values,” see the eight essays collected from the TLS, Western Values (London: Times Publishing Company, 1948), as well as Martin Wight, “Western Values in International Relations,” in Diplomatic Investigations: Essays on the Theory of International Relations, ed. Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (London: Allen & Unwin, 1966), 89–131.

64. See especially Kedourie, “Chatham House Version.”