A Historian and His Critics
FITCH, ROBERT E.
WRITERS and WRITING A Historian and His Critics Toynbee and History. Reviewed by Robert E. Fitch Ed. by M. F. Ashley Montagu. Dean pacific School of Religion; Porter-Sargeant. 385 pp....
...He is a dealer in chimeras, a writer of theodicy, "a kind of Billy Graham of the eggheads...
...The fact that he makes explicit his frame of reference leaves him more open to attack, while some more modest chap who conceals his metaphysical assumptions while making sure that they cohere with the professional prejudices of the time is exposed to a more gentle censure...
...As Ernest Barker observes, "His desire is for the whole...
...I believe I could add to the severity of the critique...
...Also, if it is forbidden to the historian to deal with the whole world—just at that moment, as Tillich has observed, when "the world" has suddenly become an historical rather than a merely geographical expression—then to whom do we turn for enlightenment: to Karl Marx, Wendell Willkie, Ve-danta, World Government...
...He is a metaphysician, a poet, a mystic, an artist, an idealist, a sublime egotist, a "mythical thinker," an intuitionist, a Christian, a theosophist, "really a theologian," a foe of sound theology, "the Attorney General of the Almighty upon the Day of Judgment"—anything but an historian...
...His method is not that of scholarship, but of the "lucky dip...
...Nevertheless, while we yield our assent to the detail of these criticisms, there remain some disturbing thoughts at the back of the mind...
...He is "agile as a gibbon" in selecting instances to support his theses, displays a "hectoring and censorious attitude" toward social phenomena he doesn't like...
...Fall of Sex” If anyone is looking for the ammunition with which to put an end to Arnold Toynbee, he has it in this symposium...
...Norman Podhoretz has recently pointed out some severe failings in Crane Brin-ton's Anatomy of Revolution...
...Here is the aristocratic individualist, with his love of freedom and of self-determination, with his confidence that character is mightier than environment, and with his edifying discourse on the uses of adversity...
...He has given us "a house of many mansions but builded upon sand...
...It is the progression from a Henry V to a Hamlet...
...It is also strange to find men who subscribe to a doctrine of historical relativism suddenly insist on being "objective" when they are dealing with a writer with whom they disagree...
...author, "The Decline and...
...For what Toynbee has to give us is not so much a theodicy as an ethics of history—an instrumental philosophy of growth, which warns us against the idolization of the ephemeral and points to the possibility of plural and positive responses to the challenges of life...
...Toynbee's peculiarly perverse treatment of Israel and of Judaism is ably exposed by Frederick E. Robin, with assists from Walter Kaufmann and Abba Eban...
...And so in the end he is a kind of Plalonisl or Hindu, for whom the polychromatic and variegated human scene becomes increasingly an irrelevance as he is gradually absorbed in the vision of the One...
...The whole of his teaching is flavored with a kind of conventional religiosity—at first Christian, later Buddhist or theosophist—but never of so forceful or distinctive a character that any theologian would want to take it seriously...
...Of the 29 contributors— apart from Toynbee himself—only two have any friendly or favorable words for A Study of History...
...He "lacks the conscience of the sound historian," is guilty of "a certain looseness or even recklessness of thought," and also has "an inclination toward abstraction and pigeonholing...
...But I continue to read and discuss Brinton's book, as I shall continue with Toynbee's books, because it is only by contact with such an order of intellect and erudition that I am provoked to further discoveries in the field...
...Altree has an erudition, a composure of manner, a clarity, order, and force of style such that when, at the end of his essay, we ask what is left now of Toynbee on China, the only possible answer is: Nothing...
...Probably the most powerful and systematic attack is mounted by Pie-ter Geyl, although Pitirim Sorokin enters a good critique of Toynbee's basic assumptions...
...But Mumford's is a still, small voice which is smothered in a chorus of cat-calls...
...On the positive side," says Lewis Mumford, "I would point out that no book that deals with human affairs has been more free from the blatant parochialisms of our age and our civilization: the obsessions of nationalism, the exaltation of Hellenic and later European civilization at the expense of 19 other significant societies, our excessive pride in material conquests and mechanical productivity, our naive submission to the one-eyed methodology of the physical sciences and 'objective' scholarship, the bias of specialism and egocentricity, the notion that our age is the climax of human existence and that its ephemeral values are eternal ones...
...It is curious, for instance, to see how scholars who profess a devotion to a positivist ideal in historical science are capable of "emotive" judgments in the midst of controversy...
...It is not the objective world of historical occurrence which concerns him any longer, but a private world where all the stimuli are internal to the self...
...From the other 27 we get a varied but continuous flow of analysis, polemic, exposition, argumentation, excoriation and condemnation...
...He is anti-neighborhood, anti-Israel, anti-state, anti-football, anti-national, anti-violence...
...To my taste, however, the most devastating assault is that of Wayne Altree on Toynbee's conception of Chinese history...
...And as one recollects J. W. Thompson's two-volume History of Historical Writing, with its indirect documentation of the way the historian's perspective determines the facts, both as to their existence or non-existence and as to their character and significance, one may well ask where lies the authority of the critic's perspective as much as that of Toynbee's perspective...
...We learn of Toynbee that his literary style is cumbersome, involved, over-complicated...
...Toynbee, I think, is to be understood as the last of the great Victorians...
...As a victim of self-deception, he "bears false witness" and falls into a "prideful and sinful, an inhuman and at times slightly ridiculous ostentation of detachment from his own heritage...
...Is it, or is it not, fruitful to read Toynbee...
...In his later development, to be sure, Toynbee exhibits the "ethereali-zation'' which he believes to be the mark of growth in self-determination...
...There are also specialists who deal convincingly with China, Islam, the Jews, the geographic factor and religious forces...
...Is Toynbee being penalized because of his honesty...
...He is like Shelley: He wants one 'white radiance' rather than 'the many-colored dome' which is the actual home of man...
...5.00...
Vol. 40 • June 1957 • No. 26
