The Thucydidean Turn by Earley Benjamin;

Author:Earley, Benjamin; [Earley, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2020-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

Thucydides and the cycle of civilizations

As long ago as 1955, the noted British philosopher Ernst Barker argued that Toynbee’s primary ancient influence was Polybius and his conception of cycles, and that Toynbee throughout his life made much more use of Hellenistic than classical Greek history (Barker 1955: 8). However, there is strong evidence that Thucydides (alongside Aeschylus and Lucretius) was key to Toynbee’s idea of the cyclical history of civilization as early as 1921. In that year, Toynbee delivered a lecture before an assembled audience of Literae Humaniores undergraduates at Oxford, which was then published as a stand-alone pamphlet (Toynbee 1921a) and, in a slightly modified form, as part of R. W. Livingstone’s collected volume, The Legacy of Greece (Toynbee 1921b).8 In those essays, Toynbee attempted to justify his vision of Greek and Roman history as the history of a ‘Hellenic’ civilization, which stretched from 1100 BC to the seventh century AD.9 This civilization, Toynbee was already claiming, had undergone a process of rise and fall, which could be understood as a drama divided into acts and scenes, that held relevance to those students interested in the future of modern ‘Western civilization’. As Toynbee notes, the Great War made the task of understanding Western civilization much more urgent. To understand the origins of Western civilization was also to uncover the origins of the Great War and, hopefully, to avoid future conflicts. The ancient Greeks, as a completed civilization, demonstrate how such a study might be undertaken. As we shall see in this section, both essays present Thucydides as integral to Toynbee’s wartime engagement with antiquity, but he is hardly alone: Thucydides’ writings cover only a small part of the history of ‘Hellenic’ civilization and, important as he is, other ancient writers such as Aeschylus, Plato, Lucretius and others are considered to be equally important.

To understand better Toynbee’s idea that classical and modern history were running parallel to each other, we first need to consider in greater depth his idea of civilization. Toynbee concluded in the shattered remains of Europe that the nation state was not the smallest ‘intelligible unit of history’. Instead, he argues, the fundamental object of historical inquiry should be the civilization. Already by 1920 he had sketched out in a very rough way the ideas that would form the basis for the first six volumes of the Study, in which he would attempt to define what a civilization10 is and outline the laws that governed the varieties of human experience and the unity of human nature. In short, Toynbee believes that all civilizations pass through four states: ‘growth, a time of troubles, the universal state, and decay’.11 Growth is the product of a process Toynbee labels ‘challenge and response’, in which a creative minority respond effectively to environmental challenges with cultural or technical solutions (Hall 2003). These responses allow the civilization to survive and eventually thrive. If a culture manages to live in equilibrium with its environment (Toynbee names the Minoans, Inuit and Steppe peoples), then it will never progress to become a civilization.

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