TOYNBEE NUGGET
Hesseltine, William B.
Toynbee Nugget WAR AND CIVILIZATION, by Arnold J. Toynbee. Selected by Albert V. Fowler from A Study of History. Oxford University Press. 165 pp. $2.50. Reviewed by William B. Hesseltine ARNOLD...
...A few years ago a one-volume digest was bally-hooed into a best seller, and the comparatively obscure author thereupon found himself an international celebrity and a pontifical pundit whose Church-of-England theology, classical allusions, and knowing references to long-forgotten people with Old-Testament-like names entitled him to counsel with Princeton's owl-eyed Institute for Advanced Studies...
...From the examples cited it would appear that the greater the improvement in military techniques, the more inevitable is the collapse of society...
...were in conflict...
...If this were the sole burden of these extracted chapters, they might be valued as a solemn warning...
...In rapid order, Sparta, Assyria, Nineveh, Rome, and Charlemagne are summoned to bear testimony that war is ever a proximate, and often a direct, cause of the breakdown of "civilizations...
...If, as philosopher Toynbee contends, there is no hope in "the sword that has been sheathed after having once tasted blood," then military alliances, Atlantic pacts, and preventive wars in Asia, which pundit Toynbee endorses, are not only futile but are the antithesis of the repentance for which evangelist Toynbee calls...
...Now, the publishers have permitted Albert V. Fowler to rework the mine...
...Reviewed by William B. Hesseltine ARNOLD TOYNBEE'S six volume A Study of History is probably going to turn into a gold mine for its publishers...
...A couple of years ago, a set of lectures, drawn from the master-work, presented Civilization on Trial and concluded that the U.S.A...
...From the voluminous caverns of A Study of History, Fowler has gathered the chapters which discuss war and warn, in prophetic vein, against militarism...
...and the U.S.S.R...
...All this adds up to another glittering nugget from the salted diggings of A Study of History...
...The sign of repentance, as any theologian knows, is the abandonment of sin...
...But Toynbee is, in addition to being a philosopher of history, both an evangelist and a bureaucrat...
...As a bureaucrat out of the British Foreign Office he calls on governments to "combine in jointly resisting aggression," praises the "military virtues," and contends that war is a lesser evil than "social disintegration...
...The distilled wisdom of the lectures amounted to an endorsement of the foreign policies of Churchill, Roosevelt, Attlee, and Truman...
...As an evangelist he calls upon the nations to repent, to war not after the flesh, and to spiritualize their aggressive tendencies...
Vol. 15 • January 1951 • No. 1
