The anthropologist Jonathan Benthall similarly speaks of the “monumentally unfashionable” Arnold Toynbee ( Reference Benthall2010: 5). “Hardly anyone reads Spengler, Toynbee or Sorokin today,” says historian Niall Ferguson ( Reference Ferguson2011: 298 see Burke Reference Burke III, Hodgson and Burke III1993: xii).
Moreover his belief in the “philosophical contemporaneity” and equal value of all civilizations should make him peculiarly attractive to those many today who reject Eurocentrism and who are increasingly persuaded of the need to consider the total human experience from earliest times up to the present. The claim is that, whatever the weaknesses of Toynbee's general approach, the civilizational perspective he adopts allows him to cast an illuminating light on many important historical questions. Why? What is the appeal of civilization today? And might the return of civilization also herald a return to the work of Arnold Toynbee, once regarded as the towering figure of civilizational analysis? This paper considers the history of the concept of civilization, and argues for the continuing importance and relevance of Toynbee's multi-volume A Study of History within that tradition.
After a period of neglect, civilization as a concept seems once more to have regained popularity among a number of historians and social scientists.
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