PEOPLE | 1889-1975

Arnold J. Toynbee was a prominent English historian and expert on international affairs whose extensive career was deeply embedded within the Anglo-American establishment. He served as Director of the Foreign Office Research & Intelligence Department.

Foundations and Affiliations

Toynbee's professional trajectory was significantly shaped by his family connections. His entry into government service in 1915 and subsequent involvement with the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) after World War I stemmed from the close relationship between his uncle, the elder Arnold Toynbee, and Alfred Milner.

The elder Arnold Toynbee was Milner's closest friend and a dominant intellectual force within the Toynbee group at Balliol, which influenced Milner's ideology and the foundational principles of the Milner Group.

These principles included a belief in the British Empire as an embodiment of freedom, a strong sense of duty to the state, and the importance of social service, particularly education for the working classes. The elder Toynbee is also credited with establishing a methodological approach of quiet organisation, preparatory work, and a coordinated public launch of ideas, later adopted by the Round Table Groups and the RIIA.

The younger Arnold J. Toynbee became a pivotal paid employee of the RIIA, also known as Chatham House, which is regarded as the Milner Group in its widest aspect and the legitimate child of the Round Table organisation. His most prominent role involved holding the professorship and editorship of the Survey of International Affairs, a position established and funded by Sir Daniel Stevenson, which he occupied from its inception.

This publication served as a key instrument for the Milner Group to disseminate its perspectives on international relations. Toynbee was also an active participant and speaker in the RIIA's discussion meetings. The comprehensive A Study of History was edited by D. C. Somervell for Chatham House, further underscoring Toynbee's central role in the Group's intellectual output.

Wartime Service and Public Stances

During World War II, Toynbee's responsibilities expanded considerably. He was appointed Director of the Foreign Research and Press Service (FRPS), which operated as the research arm of Chatham House.

This unit was integrated, initially unofficially and then officially, into the Foreign Office as its Research Department from 1939 to 1946. In this critical wartime capacity, he received substantial support from Lionel Curtis, another key figure in the Milner Group, who acted as the permanent representative of the chairman of the Council, Lord Astor.

This institutional arrangement highlights the direct influence the Milner Group exerted on British intelligence and foreign policy during the war. Other notable members of the Group, including B. H. Sumner, C. A. Macartney, and A. E. Zimmern, were also associated with this department.

Despite his deep embedding within the establishment, Arnold J. Toynbee publicly dissociated himself from the policy of appeasement. This stance was expressed in a fighting and courageous preface to The Survey of International Affairs for 1935, demonstrating that individual members could express divergent views on sensitive policy matters.

His sustained presence and influence within institutions like the RIIA and the Foreign Office's research capabilities established him as a key member and associate who significantly shaped Britain's intellectual and policy landscape throughout much of the 20th century, aligning with the Milner Group's broader objectives.

Theories of Civilisational Development and Decline

Toynbee is internationally recognised for his 12-volume work, A Study of History, which meticulously traced the life cycles of approximately two dozen world civilisations.

In this magnum opus, he developed a distinctive model explaining how cultures develop and ultimately perish.

He asserted that civilisations die from suicide, not through external destruction, claiming that every culture collapses internally due to a divergence in values between the ruling class and the common people.

Toynbee posited that civilisations emerge from primitive societies not due to racial or environmental factors, but as a direct response to unique challenges. These challenges could include pressures from other cultures, difficult terrain, hard country, new ground, or penalisation.

He stated that civilisations come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges, with each challenge representing a golden mean between excessive difficulty, which would crush a culture, and ease, which would allow it to stagnate.

Civilisations continue to grow as long as they meet and solve new challenges sequentially, a process he termed Challenge and Response. This dynamic ensures that each civilisation develops uniquely, as it confronts and overcomes distinct challenges.

Responses to challenges are not enacted by society as a whole, but by a unique class of elites known as creative minorities. These minorities are the problem solvers who discover solutions and inspire, rather than compel, others to follow their lead.

The masses adopt the solutions of the creative minorities through imitation, solutions they would have been incapable of discovering independently. This synchronicity between the creative minorities and the masses propels civilisation to its zenith.

The breakdown of civilisations, according to Toynbee, is not attributable to environmental forces or external attacks by other civilisations. Rather, it stems from the decline of the creative minority, induced by moral decay or material prosperity.

As the creative minority degenerates, they cease to be the effective problem solvers and instead become a ruling class primarily concerned with preserving their power, a group Toynbee designated as the dominant minority.

This dominant minority develops a form of self-worship, becoming prideful in their authority but wholly inadequate in addressing the culture's new challenges. Ultimately, the dominant minority, unable to resolve their culture's actual problems, attempts to shore up their power by forming a universal state, a move that stifles creativity and subjugates the proletariat or common people. The Roman Empire serves as a classic illustration of this process.

The dominant minority endeavours to maintain an inherited privilege by force, despite having ceased to merit it. In response, the proletariat repays injustice with resentment, fear with hate, and violence with violence as society deteriorates.

Within the proletariat, four sentiments emerge:

archaism (idealisation of the past),

futurism (idealisation of the future),

detachment (removal of oneself from a decaying world),

and transcendence (addressing the challenges of the decaying world with a new worldview).

This disunity between the dominant minority and the proletariat, and among the various proletariat dispositions, renders a unified culture impossible, leading to the eventual demise of the civilisation.

Toynbee summarised the decline of cultures by identifying three key aspects: a failure of creative power in the minority, a corresponding withdrawal of imitation on the part of the majority, and a subsequent loss of social unity across society as a whole.