Arnold Joseph Toynbee
Not the same as Arnold Toynbee, economist and nephew of Arnold Joseph Toynbee
British educator Arnold Joseph Toynbee noted cyclical patterns in the growth and decline of civilizations for his 12-volume
Study of History
(1934-1961).
He went to Winchester college and Balliol college, Oxford.
During both world wars, he worked for the foreign office. He additionally published
Nationality and the War
(1915),
The Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation
(1915),
The German Terror in France: An Historical Record
(1917), and
Turkey, a Past and a Future
(1917). He attended the peace conference of Paris in 1919 as a delegate.
From 1919 to 1924, Arnold J. Toynbee served as professor of modern Greek and Byzantine at King's college, London. From 1925, Oxford University Press published
The Survey of International Affairs
under the auspices of the royal institute of international affairs, and Toynbee, professor, oversaw the publication. From 1925, Toynbee served as research professor and director at the royal institute of international affairs. He published
The Conduct of British Empire Foreign Relations since the Peace Settlement
(1928).
His first marriage to Rosalind Murray produced three sons and ended in divorce in 1946. Toynbee, professor, then married Veronica M. Boulter, his research assistant. He published
Civilization on Trial
(1948).
Toynbee served as research professor and director at the royal institute of international affairs until 1955.
People published best known lectures of Toynbee, professor, in memory of Adam Gifford as
An Historian's Approach to Religion
(1956). His massive work examined development and decay. He presented the rise and fall rather than nation-states or ethnic groups. According to his analysis, the welfare depends on ability to deal successfully with challenges.
He also published
Democracy in the Atomic Age
(1957),
Christianity among the Religions of the World
(1958), and
Between Niger and Nile
(1965).
He died in York, North Yorkshire, England.
“Human nature presents human minds with a puzzle which they have not yet solved and may never succeed in solving, for all that we can tell. The dichotomy of a human being into 'soul' and 'body' is not a datum of experience. No one has ever been, or ever met, a living human soul without a body... Someone who accepts—as I myself do, taking it on trust—the present-day scientific account of the Universe may find it impossible to believe that a living creature, once dead, can come to life again; but, if he did entertain this belief, he would be thinking more 'scientifically' if he thought in the Christian terms of a psychosomatic resurrection than if he thought in the shamanistic terms of a disembodied spirit.”
“It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.”
“A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man.”
“The art of handling university students is to make oneself appear, and this almost ostentatiously, to be treating them as adults...”
“Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.”