Abstract
On 17 March 1947, Time magazine profiled the British historian Arnold Toynbee, the occasion being the publication later that month of the abridgement of the first six volumes of his A Study of History.2 In part thanks to the Time cover story and more generally publisher Henry Luce’s enthusiasm for Toynbee, A Study of History in its abridged form became a phenomenal best-seller. Toynbee’s biographer tells us that Time received 14 000 requests for reprints of the article,while Oxford University Press, New York,sold 129 471 copies of the book in the first year. During 1947 Toynbee received £8000 in royalties,close to four times his salary as Director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London. His success was repeated, if not quite so spectacularly, in 1954 with the publication of volumes 7–10 of A Study of History.3 He retained a high profile in the United States into the 1960s, though increasingly as a controversialist rather than a sage, as we shall see.
Thanks are due to the members of the conference at the University of Warwick where this chapter was first delivered. I am also grateful to the research seminar of the Centre for International Studies at the University of Cambridge and the Politics Research seminar at the University of East Anglia for further opportunities to present this chapter. John Arnold of the University of East Anglia was a sympathetic but critical reader. The usual caveats apply: I take full responsibility for the final result, though I am grateful to all of the above for their comments.
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Notes
Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), an abridgement of the first six volumes by D. C. Somervell.
William H. McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 212–16, 221.
M.F. Ashley Montagu (ed), Toynbee and History (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1956);
Edward T. Gargan (ed), The Intent of Toynbee’s History: A Cooperative Appraisal (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1961);
Roland N. Stromberg, Arnold J. Toynbee: Historian for an Age of Crisis (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972);
Kenneth W. Thompson, Toynbee’s Philosophy of World History and Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985);
C.T. McIntire and M. Perry (eds), Toynbee: Reappraisals (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989).
A recent brief evaluation of Toynbee is Cornelia Navari, ‘Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975): Prophecy and Civilization’, Review of International Studies, 26, 2 (2000), 289–301.
Besides W.H. McNeill’s biography, mentioned in note 2, there is a brief account of Toynbee and the Cold War in Steven Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 2nd edn. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 55.
Whitfield’s book is one of a small but growing number of general studies of American culture during the Cold War which include Lary May (ed), Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)
M. Henriksen, Dr Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
On the United States Richard Pells, The Liberal Mind in the Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (New York: Harper and Row, 1985) remains the standard work.
Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), vol. 1, 271–99;
Arnold J. Toynbee, Civilization on Trial (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), 3–8.
See especially Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America 2 vols (New York: Vintage, 1945), vol 2, Second Book, chs. II—VIII.
Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, 2nd edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), contains much information about past ideas of individualism as well as an interpretation for the 1990s.
George E Kennan (’X’), ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’, Foreign Affairs, 25 (July 1947), 582.
George F. Kennan, ‘The History of Arnold Toynbee’, New York Review of Books (1 June 1989), 19.
Harry S. Truman, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, 1947 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1963), 178 – 9.
While new material continues to appear on the Hiss case, the best discussions of its cultural significance remain some of the older items. See Alistair Cooke, A Generation on Trial (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1952);
Allen Weinstein, ‘The Symbolism of Subversion: Notes on Some Cold War Icons’, Journal of American Studies, 6 (1972), 165 – 79;
Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (London: Hutchinson, 1978), especially Chapter XIV.
Whittaker Chambers, Witness (London: Andre Deutsch, 1953), 361.
In Allen J. Matusow (ed), Joseph R. McCarthy (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 21.
See Sidney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 950–4.
John Robinson Beal, John Foster Dulles, 1888–1959 (New York: Harper, 1987), 92.
John Foster Dulles, War or Peace (1950; New York: Macmillan — now Palgrave, 1957), 222.
Michael A. Guhin, John Foster Dulles: A Statesman and his Times (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 126, 139.
Adlai Stevenson, What I Think (New York: Harper, 1956), 6.
Walter Johnson (ed), The Papers of Adlai Stevenson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), vol 6, 65.
The fullest collection of responses to Toynbee, in which the pieces by Taylor and Barraclough are included, is M.F. Ashley Montagu (ed), Toynbee and History (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1956).
See Hans Kohn in Ashley Montagu (ed), Toynbee and History, and Geoffrey Barraclough, History in a Changing World (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), 15–16.
Howard Zinn, The Politics of History (1970; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 28, 353.
David Horowitz, From Yalta to Vietnam: American Foreign Policy in the Cold War, rev. edn. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 13. The book was originally published by McGibbon and Kee in 1965.
Arnold J. Toynbee, The World and the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 1–2.
Douglas Jerrold, The Lie About the West: A Response to Professor Toynbee’s Challenge (London: J. M. Dent, 1954), 10, 46, 58, 62.
G. F. Hudson, ‘Professor Toynbee Surrenders the West’, Commentary 15 (May 1953), 474;
Gerald W. Johnson, ‘The Broad View’, New Republic (13 April 1953), 19.
Arnold J. Toynbee, America and the World Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 16–17.
John F. Kennedy, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1961 (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1962), 1.
See McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, 244–5; and Arnold Toynbee, Experiences (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 261–4.
Toynbee, Experiences, 274; and Arnold Toynbee, Change and Habit: The Challenge of our Time (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 138.
George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1925–1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), 8.) This element of detachment from the present, moreover, manifested itself in both writers in a contempt for America’s populist consumer culture.
Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), Vol. 1, 9ff; Vol. VII (1954), 480–3.
See Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘History: The Poverty of Empiricism’, in Robin Blackburn (ed), Ideology in Social Science: Readings in Critical Social Theory (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 107.
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), especially 55.
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Crockatt, R. (2002). Challenge and Response: Arnold Toynbee and the United States during the Cold War. In: Carter, D., Clifton, R. (eds) War and Cold War in American Foreign Policy 1942–62. Cold War History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403913852_5
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