• DOI:10.1353/jwh.2011.0118
• Corpus ID: 142992220

Globalization and Global History in Toynbee

@article{Lang2011GlobalizationAG,
  title={Globalization and Global History in Toynbee},
  author={Michael Kpughe Lang},
  journal={Journal of World History},
  year={2011},
  volume={22},
  pages={747 - 783}
}

• M. Lang
• Published 25 November 2011
• History
• Journal of World History

This article traces the intellectual history of Arnold J. Toynbee. It centers on early twentieth-century British social thought and its synthesis of idealism and evolution. Toynbee used this framework to interpret imperial and international affairs, and, like his mentors, he focused especially on the unprecedented, progressive possibilities of global integration. With the failure of the Paris Peace Conference, however, Toynbee began to regard globalization as a contradiction between social unity and spiritual disjuncture. A Study of History, his endeavor to bring historical writing into its global present, followed from this opposition, which he sought to explain and hoped to resolve. By the mid 1930s, world events finally overwhelmed Toynbee's commitment to the old conceptual synthesis. He returned to such thinking after World War II, but his brief declaration of methodological limitations illuminated for historical study the antinomy of the global scale.