Arnold J. Toynbee

The religious background of the present environmental crisis

The damaging effects of the Industrial Revolution are discussed with particular reference to mans improvidence leading to the waste of irreplaceable natural resources and to the pollution of the environment. The role of the British Royal Society is then analysed in the context of technological advances and religious thought. It is claimed that monotheistic religions have removed the constraints on mans greed and have overthrown the traditional balance between man and nature. The present environmental crisis is ascribed to the rise of monotheism. The remedy may consist in reverting to pantheism and the religions of the East.

A Turning Point in History

British standpoint must first ask whether the line taken by Great Britain in 1938 marks a serious departure from the traditional line of British foreign policy. The policy of Great Britain in the past towards Europe has been, like that of the United States, to confine her intervention in Continental affairs to the minimum compatible with her own na tional interests as she sees them. The practical application of this fundamentally identical policy is, of course, governed by each countrys particular geographical situation. The minimum to which the United States can safely reduce her intervention in Europe cannot be even approximated by an island that is sepa rated from the Continent by the mere breadth of the Channel rather than by the Atlantic. This difference has always com pelled British isolationism to stop far short of American isola tionism in practice. If British isolation from the Continent has been relatively incomplete in the past, this difference between Great Britains and Americas respective situations is accentuated at the present time, when the Channel is no longer, while the Atlantic still is, an effective barrier against air attack. In the past, what was the typical Continental situation in which the British Government and people felt themselves con strained to play a part in Continental affairs? The policy of Great Britain towards Louis XIV, Napoleon and William II seems to show that she has generally taken active steps, sooner or later, to join in resisting the domination of Europe by a single Power when there has seemed to be a serious probability that this Power would use its Continental predominance in order to threaten the inde pendence of the British Isles and the security of British interests overseas. This qualification of the main statement is important, because there have been cases in which Great Britain has tolerated

The International Outlook

IT is a particular pleasure for me to be speaking again at Chatham House, to my fellow-members and my colleagues, after an interval of more than eight years. The last time I spoke here was on November 15, 1938, and my subject was the world outlook after Munich. Looking back to that moment, from which we are now far parted by the tremendous experiences through -which we have been living in the meantime, we may take heart from the reflection that, while our situation now may not be much less anxious than it was then, it is certainly much less unhappy. Speaking after the war of 1939-45, I find myself-as many of us do, no doubt-comparing the post-war situation today with the post-war situation rather more than a quarter of a century ago, at the time when this Institute, .and its sister institute, the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, were founded. I am perhaps specially moved to make this comparison between the two post-war periods for a personal reason. I happen to have served as a temporary member of the Foreign Office in two wars, and to have been a member of the United Kingdom Delegation at two peace conferences in Paris: an uncanny experience for a human being, but an invaluable one for a historian.

A Study of History: What I Am Trying To Do

S INCE I927 I have been writing this book A Study of History side by side with the Chatham House Survey of International Affairs that my wife and I began to write in I924. I could not, I believe, have done either piece of work if I had not been doing the other at the same time. A survey of current affairs on a world-wide scale can be made only against a background of world-history; and a study of world-history would have no life in it if it left out the history of the writers own lifetime, for ones contemporaries are the only people whom one can ever catch alive. An historian in our generation must study Gandhi and Lenin and Atatuirk and F. D. Roosevelt if he is to have any hope of bringing Hammurabi and Ikhnaton and Amos and the Buddha back to life for himself and for his readers. The particular generation into which I was born happens to be a revolutionary one. In less than one lifetime the face of the World has changed almost out of recognition, and the Wests position in the World has undergone the greatest change of all. So, if one has been following the course of World affairs since I9I4, one is bound to have gained, from this alone, a good deal of new knowledge about history; and, meanwhile, the forty years that have seen this new chapter of history writing itself have also seen the Orientalists and the archaeologists recovering for us other chapters of history that had been either forgotten completely or had been remembered only in a few shreds and tatters of tradition. In our day the Minoan Civilization has risen from its grave below the Graeco-Roman Civilization; the Shang Culture in China from below the classical Chinese Civilization; the Indus Culture from below Aryan India; the Hittite Civilization from below the Asia Minor known to Herodotus; and at the same time our picture of the Sumerian and Egyptian Civilizations, and of the preColumbian Civilizations in the New World, has been quite transformed by the new knowledge that the excavators spade has brought to light here too. This re-discovery of the rather less recent past, together with the portentous events of our own day, has given us a wealth of new historical information. Our vision of the history of Mankind, since the rise of the earliest known civilizations about 5,000 years ago, has been enormously enlarged and has also been brought into much sharper focus; and, since curiosity is one of the characteristics of human nature, we find ourselves moved, in our time, to take a new look at the new face of history as a whole. This is the origin of my book A Study of History. It is one persons impression of history in the new light in which we can now see it; and of course a number of other people have been tempted, by the same

Civilization on Trial

Publikacijoje kalbama apie pagrindinių civilizacijų svarbiausius bruožus, jų raidos ypatybes, formuluojamos ateities raidos alternatyvos. Vakarų krikscionybė yra viena is penkių siandien pasaulyje islikusių civilizacijų; sios yra tik penkios is maždaug 19 civilizacijų, egzistavusių, kaip manoma, nuo pirmo tokio tipo visuomeninių atstovų pasirodymo apytikriai pries 6000 metų. Įvardijamos siuolaikinės civilizacijos: ortodoksinės bažnycios, islamo, induizmo ir Tolimųjų Rytų. Teigiama, kad negalima perdėti nė vienos gyvuojancios civilizacijos reiksmės. Aptariamos Vakarų krikscionybės ekspansijos ypatybės. Atskirų civilizacijų ekspansijų sekos rezultatas – dabar suvienytas į vieną didžiąją visuomene visas apgyvendintas pasaulis. Vakarų krikscionybės ekspansija tik užbaigė pasaulio suvienijimą, nulėmė paskutinį jo etapą. Teigiama, kad dabartinis Vakarų dominavimas tikrai neissilaikys: vieningas pasaulis vystysis atskirų jį sudarancių kultūrų pusiausvyros link. Formuluojamos žmonijos ateities perspektyvų dvi alternatyvios prielaidos: pirmoji skelbia ramų vystymąsi, antroji – visiską katastrofą.

Philosophies of History

Near the end of the First World War a young and unknown former high school teacher published what is possibly the most characteristic book of the early twentieth century, Der Untergang des Abendlandes. A second volume appeared in 1922, and Charles Francis Atkinson brought out his English translation between 1926 and 1928. With the author’s approval, Atkinson rendered Untergang as “decline,” and the book is known in English as The Decline of the West. But Untergang means “going under”; Oswald Spengler was writing not of the decline or decay of Western civilization, but of its approaching and certain fall. War-shocked German readers in the autumn and winter of 1918 converted Spengler’s book into the first intellectual best seller of the postwar epoch. In all its editions, it has sold well over a hundred thousand copies.

Problems of Research in International Relations

* Dr. Arnold Toynbee is the well-known author of A Study of History. Mrs. Veronica Toynbee is co-editor of Survey of International Affairs I939-46. This article is the substance of a seminar discussion led by Dr. Toynbee at the School on I5 April I960. IT is s a pleasure for us to be invited to contribute an article on this subject to International Studies. We spent thirty-three years (I~24-S6 inclusive) in producing, in partnership, a survey of international affairs for Chatham House. This work brought us up against these problems in

The Writing of Contemporary History for Chatham House

tT HE following considerations on the writing of contemporary history have gradually taken shape in my mind as a result of writing and editing our Chatham House Survey of International Affairs since I924, but the occasion that has led me to put these ideas on paper now is some criticism of a recently published volume (reviewed in this issue of International Affairs on pages 204-5), The Middle East in the War, by my colleague Mr George Kirk, in the Survey of International Affairs series. Anyone whose acts are recorded in history has a right to receive the fair and considerate treatment that is claimed by Othello-