Arnold Toynbee
Arnold Toynbee Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889–1975) was born in London and trained in classical Greco-Roman history at Balliol College, Oxford. He served in the British Foreign Office during and after the First World War and directed, for decades, the research department of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), combining academic erudition with intense engagement in the analysis of international affairs. His magnum opus, A Study of History, published in twelve volumes between 1934 and 1961, is the twentieth century’s most ambitious attempt to write a comparative history of all known civilizations, identifying roughly twenty-one of them across human history and proposing a common scheme for understanding their genesis, growth, breakdown, and disintegration. ...