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Toynbee's Search for Useful Historical Knowledge
| Article
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15025 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1988 |
4,924 Words |
| Author
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Stephen A. McKnight
Stephen A. McKnight is associate professor of European
intellectual history at the University of Florida and the
author of Sacralizing the Secular: The Renaissance Origins of
Modernity( Louisiana State University Press, 1989). |
During the first third of this century, the catastrophic upheavals that led to two world wars undermined the optimistic, progressivist views that had dominated the philosophy of history for more than two centuries. The first work to signal the new tone in historiography was Spengler's Decline of the West (2 vols., 1918-1922); but the premier analysis of the fundamental empirical and theoretical issues confronting historians in the twentieth century was Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History (10 vols., 1934-1954).
From the outset, Toynbee made it clear that his analysis of the "master tendencies" of world history had one overriding purpose--to shed light on the factors that account for Western civilization's unprecedented "Time of Troubles." World history offered the possibility of deriving this crucial information because data from a total of twenty-seven civilizations created the "laboratory conditions" for determining the "species characteristics of society qua society." This empirical analysis, in turn, provided the opportunity to establish the laws of civilization genesis, growth, breakdown, and disintegration. These general laws could then be used to assess Western civilization's conditions and, hopefully, to discover ways of avoiding breakdown and disintegration.
Toynbee launched his mammoth project in 1919, just after World War I, and published the first three volumes in 1934. The next three, written on the eve of the Second World War, reveal increased anxiety over the fate of Western civilization. The third set, published in the midst of the Cold War of the 1950s, shows that his concern to address the problems of Western civilization in its "Time of Troubles" led him to abandon his original perspective and plan of analysis.
The relentless search for useful knowledge, which is at the foundation of Toynbee’s Study, is extremely important to understand, because the basic issues that he faced still confront historians seeking to provide useful knowledge regarding Western civilization's continuing Time of Troubles. Toynbee built its original conceptual framework around a root metaphor introduced in volume 1, and presented the revised program though a shift in metaphor between volumes 6 (1939) and 7 (1954). By concentrating on the theoretical and methodological issues surrounding Toynbee's development of these root metaphors, it is possible to understand the main lines of his original program and the circumstances that led to his thoroughgoing reassessment of "the intelligible field of study" and the "master tendencies" affecting Western civilization's
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