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Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, by William H. McNeill
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Arnold Toynbee was one of the most remarkable thinkers of the 20th century, a man of far-reaching imagination, extraordinary erudition, and an infinite capacity for hard work. At the height of his fame, he was the most renowned scholar in the world, acclaimed as the author of the monumental, 10-volume A Study of History. Indeed, such was the regard for his Study that Time magazine, in a cover article on Toynbee published in 1947, declared that he had found history Ptolemaic and left it Copernican.
In Arnold Toynbee: A Life, William H. McNeill weaves together Toynbee's intellectual accomplishments and the personal difficulties of his private life, providing both an intimate portrait of a leading thinker and a judicious evaluation of Toynbee's work and his legacy for the study of history. McNeill illuminates the strengths and weaknesses of A Study of History as well as the countless other works penned by this prolific writer, examining the responses of other historians (including the devastating attack mounted by Hugh Trevor Roper) and Toynbee's attempts to modify his Study to answer these criticisms. And McNeill also examines Toynbee's tormented personal life, including his troubled marriage to Rosalind Murray (the daughter of Gilbert Murray), and the suicide of his son Anthony. What emerges is both poignant and thought-provoking, a biography and a commentary about how history is written and how it should be pursued.
William McNeill is one of America's most eminent historians, the winner of a National Book Award in 1964 for The Rise of the West, which The New York Times Book Review called the most learned...the most intelligent...the most stimulating and fascinating bookthat has ever set out to recount and explain the whole history of the world. In this sympathetic portrait of a life both triumphant and troubled, McNeill brings his skills to bear on one of the greatest figures in his field, illuminating a career of rare accomplishment.
- Sales Rank: #5417215 in Books
- Brand: Brand: ACLS Humanities E-Book
- Published on: 2009-01-19
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.02" h x .94" w x 5.98" l, 1.47 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 360 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
During the 1950s, Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975) was perhaps the world's best-known living historian; his crowning achievement was the Study of History , which in condensed form became a bestseller. As this sympathetic critical biography shows, Toynbee was a man of many contradictions: he favored a U.N. but believed peace was more likely to be achieved under a world empire. Although his global and prophetic vision was widely and vigorously attacked, Toynbee continued his scholarly activities and in lectures cast doubt on the viability of democracy, reproached Americans for their affluence, endorsed revolutions in Latin America and deplored Christianity's arrogance and intolerance. A shy man, with an almost pathological fear of running out of money, Toynbee endured the suicide of his son Anthony and saw his last years marred by difficulties with his first wife and his oldest son, Philip. According to McNeill ( Rise of the West ), Toynbee extended knowledge beyond the limits set by other historians, but his work is poetic in essence and ought to be evaluated as such. By weaving together Toynbee's thought and times this clear-sighted book may help restore the historian's reputation. Photos.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
It is a rare treat when one eminent historian writes a life of another, and when two of the 20th-century's great practitioners of the craft are author and subject, it is potential cause for rejoicing. This book realizes that potential, in spades. Poignant and perceptive, it reveals the man, with his all too human frailties, who was behind A Study of History . Along with a sympathetic portrait of a troubled individual is an expedition of revelation into the strengths, weaknesses, and impact of his published work. This is the biographer's art brought to lofty heights, and no historian, or for that matter general reader, can fail to be moved by this book. Highly recommended.
- James A. Casada, Winthrop Coll . , Rock Hill, S.C.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
William H. McNeill (1917 2016) was emeritus professor of history at the University of Chicago. He is best known for The Rise of the West which won the National Book Award for history and biography in 1963.
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
His non-Eurocentric ideas are relevant today
By Igor Biryukov
When Henry Luce [a magazine publisher who was called "the most influential private citizen in the America of his day"] met Toynbee in New York in 1942 he was very impressed. In March 1947 Henry Luce put Toynbee's picture on the cover of Time magazine. The enthusiasm Luce and the American establishment developed for Toynbee's ideas suited the American public. They needed guidance in a puzzling postwar world where Russia, a wartime friend and ally, suddenly turned into a potential enemy, while Germany and Japan, the nation's wartime enemies, became, if not friends at least dependants requiring American protection. Traditional U.S. attitudes towards Britain and China, too, were in urgent need of re-definition. The Americans who embraced Toynbee's wisdom and accepted his guidance were, in effect, opting for a special relation between their country and Great Britain.
"America's decision to adopt Rome's role has been deliberate" said Toynbee during an influential series of lectures delivered during the 60s. The United States, like Rome, was "leader of world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in defence of vested interests." By that time [1960s] his popularity in American had waned. The statements above played a role.
This book was written by a brilliant historian -- William McNeill has an excellent reputation. He does a good job illuminating Toynbee's life, explaining his ideas, reversals of his fortunes in America, and what generally made this tragic man "tick". [Toynbee's life was undoubtedly tragic: his father became mad in his early life, one of his sons shot and killed himself, his wife left him for a much younger man, etc. All this is in the book and in great detail.]
After I started reading Toynbee's "A Study of History" - a difficult book - I had to pause and to read something about Toynbee himself. Who was this guy? I was intrigued. I was interested in the man and origins of his ideas more than in the Toynbee's book. "A Study of History" is tough going. It is neither history nor a study. It is a vast essay on the subject of Philosophy of History supported by a vast miscellany of information. Too much information, if I might add. What I liked, though, was his repudiation of Eurocentrism. But Toynbee is a system-builder, and I don't believe in systems. On the other hand, he is a healthy antidote to a crude version of Mackinderesque geopolitical crackpot realism which is again becoming fashionable in the West.
If there is a weakness in McNeill's book, it would be his hesitation to in figuring out the sources of Toynbee's ideas. Spengler, of course, but also, strangely, a French philosopher Henry Bergson among them. McNeill doesn't go into it much. Toynbee considered the moving force in a civilization's development to be the "creative minority". He defined "creative minority" as the bearer of the mystical "elan vital". This concept of "elan vital" Toynbee borrowed from Bergson. Toynbee also believed in primacy of intuition, which is also something he shared with Bergson. This is a first-rate book about a very interesting man whose ideas, I believe, are still relevant today. I recommend it.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
professional and well-written Oxford Press bio of 'clash of civilisations' historian, Toynbee
By White Rabbit
pricing was extremely good at time of review, but even outside this issue a 4/5 biography, smooth and well-researched. 1/4th footnotes.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Splendidly Researched and Written Biography
By Peter Ramming
Arnold J. Toynbee's reputation precedes him rather formidably. Like the Church Fathers Origen and St. Augustine, or modern thinkers such as Immanuel Kant and Sigmund Freud, Toynbee was a man of the highest learning whose immense body of written scholarship is likely seminal in many aspects, but which, due to its massive size, can seem quite intimidating to the average reader who wants to get an idea of the nature of Toynbee's work. Sometimes it can seem easier to begin with a good biography of such influential scholars. For Toynbee, the interested reader has the great good fortune to have at his fingertips William H. McNeill's extraordinary biography, "Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life."
Toynbee was many things in his 86 years: inheritor of a distinguished surname whose family's tight financial circumstances and father's nervous breakdown and institutionalization spurred the young Toynbee to win scholarships to Winchester and then to Oxford; a superb classicist who nevertheless did not succeed as a teacher at Oxford or the University of London; a British government functionary during WWI and at the Paris Peace Conference, and sometime journalist in postwar Anatolia, who came back to London to help found and head Chatham House; primary author through the 1920s and '30s of Chatham House's annual survey of world political affairs; author of the ten-volume "A Study of History" which became a surprise best-seller and established his reputation in Britain and the United States as a great public wise man; and author throughout his life of a continuous cascade of lectures, books, and scholarly tomes.
William H. McNeill (who, amazingly, I had never read prior to this) is a biographer of the highest order, and this book is a delight to read. McNeill had met Toynbee numerous times and had even contributed a section to Chatham House's multi-volume account of WWII before being approached by Toynbee's heirs about writing this biography. McNeill was given access to all of Toynbee's extant papers and correspondence and, in addition to Toynbee's published works, he has assiduously mined these personal materials to create a rich and convincing narrative of of Toynbee's life in both its external and internal aspects. Ever the meticulous historian and with an eye to his future biographers, Toynbee saved as many personal documents as he could, even when their contents were painful and embarrassing, and McNeill's skills as a researcher and writer make the most of these sources.
Toynbee was doted on by his religious mother and two younger sisters and developed a desire for fawning female attention that was not always reciprocated in his adult life. He was a scholarly loner who from a young age developed an immense capacity for hard work that stayed with him through his last years. Unsurprisingly, Toynbee's family life suffered from his work habits, and Toynbee was never fully at ease as a father to his three sons. Toynbee adored his first wife, Rosalind Murray (the daughter of his Oxford mentor and life-long confidant, Regius Professor of Greek Gilbert Murray), but she never felt a similar passion and sought a divorce in 1946. This was one of many agonies Toynbee endured in his life in addition to his oldest son Tony's suicide in 1939 and a brief frustrated romantic infatuation in 1929. In response to these personal crises of 1929 and 1939, Toynbee each time found himself undergoing a mystical experience in which he became convinced that a divine presence was sustaining him, and both times Toynbee expressed his deepest emotional stirrings by composing poems in ancient Greek. McNeill has had these two poems translated and helpfully provides the translations to the reader.
From a young age Toynbee's interest in the Byzantine Empire and the Near East led him to consider the histories of such non-Western civilizations as Persia, the Arab and Ottoman Empires, India, China, Japan, and the pre-Columbian Americas in their own rights and not as mere subordinates of Europe. This more complete world-view comes to its fruition in the eventual twelve volumes of "A Study of History," in which Toynbee discerns a cycle of rise and fall of civilizations throughout recorded human history. Attuned to his Anglican upbringing and personal spiritual crises of 1929 and 1939, Toynbee also saw the hand of God in human history. Toynbee's thesis had a vogue in the 1930s-50s, but began to be more sharply criticized beginning in the 1960s. However, Toynbee's formidable erudition cannot be glibly dismissed, and many of his historical observations remain cogent and sound. William H. McNeill is a historian whose achievement approaches Toynbee's in scope and depth, and this wonderfully written biography provides an exceptional introduction to the life and thought of Arnold J. Toynbee.
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