The tendency of our culture

By the time the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee died in 1975, he was world famous. His multivolume magnum opus, A Study of History (which began appearing in the mid-1930s), had secured his place as an intellectual celebrity—part sage, part scholar. Purporting to demonstrate how civilizations begin, develop, and, inevitably, disintegrate, A Study of History is a curious mixture of recondite learning and moral admonition. Bold, lofty, adventurous, it is an immensely ambitious book. It is also, in many respects, an immensely silly one. In this it resembles its author. For Toynbee, history had the structure of a Greek tragedy. It was the story of Hubris ineluctably calling forth “ate” —infatuation, blindness, delusion—which was followed in turn by Nemesis and ruination. This story has a certain poetic appeal. What it has to do with ...

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