Friedrich Engel-Janosi’s journal article examines Toynbee’s historical outlook through the first six volumes of A Study of History and the essays collected in Civilisation on Trial. Its central question is how a comparative history of civilizations can recognize recurrent patterns without sacrificing human freedom, historical individuality, or enduring values. The argument moves from a genealogy of Western historical thought through comparison with Spengler to a theological critique and a concluding assessment of Toynbee’s historical consciousness. Engel-Janosi begins by connecting Toynbee’s civilizational studies with his work on contemporary international affairs: practical political experience and historical reflection illuminate one another.
Three fundamental orientations organize the opening discussion. Cyclical history derives from observable natural recurrences; Jewish-Christian history understands humanity as moving toward a common end; an “immanentist” or romantic approach accords comparable significance to every historical period. Engel-Janosi treats modern doctrines of progress as secular transformations of the second orientation, while warning that the third can culminate in relativism. Toynbee belongs principally to the cyclical tradition, whose genealogy reaches from Polybius through Renaissance and modern thinkers to Spengler. Yet the article’s substantive task is to distinguish Toynbee’s use of recurrence from the deterministic implications historically associated with it.
The comparison first establishes a shared achievement: displacing Europe from the center of universal history. Earlier accounts organized around successive world powers privileged political dominance, while historians of civilization often made French or Western civilization the standard against which all others were measured. Spengler and Toynbee instead recognize a plurality of civilizations deserving investigation:
Von Spengler und Toynbee wird grundsätzlich kein derartiges Auswahlverfahren anerkannt, wobei für Toynbee hinzukommt, daß er selbst ein Mann ist, der mehr als nur eine Zivilisation gelebt hat.
English translation: Spengler and Toynbee recognize no such procedure of selection in principle, with the additional consideration in Toynbee’s case that he himself is a man who has lived more than one civilization.
Toynbee’s twenty-one civilizations thus represent a change in the units and scale of historical understanding, not merely an enlargement of geographical coverage. This expanded horizon has a methodological counterpart: archaeology, biology, mythology, literature, architecture, and religious texts supplement archival evidence. Engel-Janosi acknowledges the achievements of nineteenth-century archival scholarship while rejecting its sources as the exclusive foundation of historical knowledge.
The decisive separation from Spengler concerns causation and the future. Spengler’s crude organic analogy makes civilizations resemble organisms with predetermined life courses; it also obscures cultural interaction and continuity across civilizational boundaries. Toynbee investigates encounters between civilizations and leaves the West’s future unresolved. His caution contrasts with Spengler’s categorical judgments, but the difference is ultimately more than stylistic:
Für Toynbee haben die religiösen Folgerungen die Stellungnahme entschieden: er will seinen Ausblick in Übereinstimmung mit der christlichen Lehre vom freien menschlichen Willen wissen.
English translation: For Toynbee, the religious implications have determined his position: he wishes his outlook to accord with the Christian doctrine of free human will.
Recurrence consequently need not make prediction inevitable or action futile. Nevertheless, Engel-Janosi finds a theological difficulty within the very framework intended to protect freedom. Toynbee treats myth as a means of communicating truths unavailable to other forms of expression. Plato’s cave illuminates withdrawal and return: separation from ordinary social life prepares a renewed responsibility toward others. The language of challenge and response similarly draws on Job and Goethe’s Faust to explain civilization’s emergence through encounter rather than through race or environment alone.
Engel-Janosi’s criticism becomes sharp where this mythic account appears to require two independently acting superhuman powers. If divine perfection cannot initiate the transition from repose to creative movement without the devil’s intervention, God seems subject to external limitations. Despite Toynbee’s qualifications, Engel-Janosi judges this conception incompatible with Christian creation from nothing and closer to a dualism exemplified by Manichaeism. Sympathy for Toynbee’s religious defense of freedom therefore does not entail acceptance of his metaphysics.
The closing discussion places the work between contemporary experience and philosophical inheritance. Its emphasis on dissolution, suffering, and simultaneously existing civilizations reflects its historical moment; Bergson’s vital impulse supplies a major conceptual influence. Engel-Janosi also resists treating creative minorities as sufficient evidence of fascist sympathies, locating the question of elites within a much longer intellectual history.
Finally, he defends Toynbee’s combination of recurrent types and individual lives by comparison with Burckhardt and Weber. The deepest achievement is to historicize the present as well as the past: our age is neither humanity’s privileged culmination nor the fixed template of its future. Yet this opening of historical possibility need not abolish judgment:
Dieses wahrhaft geschichtliche Bewußtsein aber schließt nicht in sich ein Bekenntnis zu einem grenzenlosen Relativismus; es gibt — wenn auch nicht viele, es gibt ständige Werte in und über dem Strömen der Geschichte.
English translation: This truly historical consciousness, however, does not entail a commitment to boundless relativism; there are—even if not many—there are enduring values within and above the flow of history.
The concluding appeal to Vico grounds historical intelligibility in humanity’s authorship of its world. Toynbee’s relevance lies in joining a genuinely plural universal history to an open future, while leaving unresolved the precise metaphysical foundation of its freedom and values.
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