The first three volumes of A Study of History appeared in 1934; the last four are not yet two years old. During the interim the work of Arnold Toynbee has been widely disseminated, thanks to the abridged edition prepared by D. C. Somervell in 1946. Vigorously attacked by historians as soon as it appeared, the work continued to evoke their serious reservations. Some concentrated their efforts on pointing out multiple errors of chronology, fact, emphasis and interpretations: others, attacking the very inspiration or magnitude of the endeavor, judged it to be presumptuous and vain, foredoomed to failure, and all in all more the product of an outmoded concept of the philosophy of history than of proven methods of historical research.

Since the heroic age of Pierre Duhem, to whose amazing energy and learning we owe the revelation of medieval science, much work has been devoted to the study of that subject. The publication of the great works of Thorndyke and Sarton, and, in the last decade, of the brilliant studies of Anneliese Maier and Professor Marshall Clagett, not to mention countless other monographs and papers, has tremendously enlarged and enriched our knowledge and understanding of medieval science in its connection with medieval philosophy—toward whose understanding and knowledge even greater progress has been made—and of medieval culture in general.

One of the important intellectual interests of American scholars and scientists at the present time is the movement toward greater integration of specialized fields and disciplines. The size of the movement must not be exaggerated—it concerns a small minority of scholars, and most specialists are still content to stay comfortably within the cosy walls of their own specialty. Nevertheless there is something which might be called an “interdisciplinary movement” in many areas of knowledge, and if the movement is occasionally more undisciplined than interdisciplinary, this can be charitably ascribed to growing pains.

Among the great creations of the seventeenth century, one of the liveliest and most rich in promise is Don juan. Even the changes that he undergoes from age to age are full of significance. This article will attempt to clarify one aspect of this evolution from a point of view exclusively that of the baroque.

The reader is asked to accept as the basis for these reflections a definition of the baroque which I have given elsewhere, and which I will merely summarize here.

The twentieth century will be known as the period of the discovery of African-Negro civilization. At first it was the sculpture alone that provoked amazement, shock, and finally admiration. But soon Europe discovered stories, poetry, music, painting, and philosophy, in turn.

Now that the first surprise has had its effect, we must define the spirit of the civilization; that is to say, of African-Negro culture. There is nothing more revealing in this regard than the literature and the art of this singularly “machineless civilization.” Philosophical reflection on art, by which aesthetics is defined, is all the more necessary, since the admiration of certain European intellectuals for African-Negro literature and art is not devoid of confusion; it often consists of misconceptions, if not of contradictions in terms.

Since 1927 I have been writing this book, A Study of History, side by side with the Chatham House Survey of International Affairs that my wife and I began to write in 1924.1 could not, I believe, have done either piece of work if I had not been doing the other at the same time. A survey of current affairs on a world-wide scale can be made only against a background of world-history; and a study of world-history would have no life in it if it left out the history of the writer's own lifetime, for one's contemporaries are the only people whom one can ever catch alive. An historian in our generation must study Gandhi and Lenin and Atatürk and F. D. Roosevelt if he is to have any hope of bringing Hammurabi and Ikhnaton and Amos and the Buddha back to life for himself and for his readers.

This article is concerned with the general relations between power and informed public opinion in a Western democracy. It is based mainly on examples taken from France, where the separation between power and public opinion seems the sharpest, but is more or less applicable to all countries having the same political system. Parallel phenomena can be observed in most of the Western democracies, each of which could provide illustrations as striking as those the author has singled out.

The relations between psychoanalysis and sociology pose a difficult problem. The complexity of psychoanalysis, the evolution of certain features of Freud's theories, the diversity of doctrines and interpretations encountered among its representatives (and this is often true even within the same country), on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the youthfulness, one might say, infancy, of sociology—that latecomer among the sciences of man, which derives its concepts and its methods from research itself and from the problems with which our civilization confronts it—all this would justify labelling as imprudent—even rash—any attempt to study their relationship and their prospects for collaboration. We readily accept the reproof. And yet, however rash it might be, this venture, in our opinion, is in no sense a concocted one. The necessity of attempting it is evident. For more than twenty years, the studies, inquiries, researches which we have been involved in concerning collectivities of men at work, the interpretation of their attitudes, of their reactions to new techniques and to the constraints of rationalization from “higher up,” as it evolved from Taylor through the diverse stages of so-called “scientific” organization, the attempts to measure their “satisfaction,” to explain the variations in their output, their absences, their professional fluidity, and, last but not least, their behavior when not at work, the forms and content of their “leisure” —all these experiments have continuously and increasingly stimulated our interest in psychoanalytical concepts and interpretations. Frequently this evoked in us the temptation to indulge in “unseasonable extrapolations,” utilizing analytical theories which, having been discovered in the field of individual psychology, ran the risk, at first glance, of not being transferable to the field of collective behavior.

Twenty years after the first three volumes of Arnold J. Toynbee's A Study of History, the final four volumes have appeared: ten volumes in all, not counting two books still to come, a volume of Maps and Charts, and a book of Reconsiderations. Perhaps no work so comprehensive as this has appeared since the publication of Herbert Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy. The fact that the latter books dealt with the transformations of nature, while Toynbee's work becomes, through its own inner evolution, a study of the transfigurations of the human soul, tells much about the century that has passed and the present crisis.

“Language is eminently a social phenomenon.” From the outset one should expect an interdependence of linguistic and social phenomena, as well as extremely complex relationships of action and reaction. In such matters, oversimplification can only lead to a dead end. On the other hand, a criticism of data that respects their true nature within the framework of their extreme complexity can pave the way for researches from which one may expect solid results so far as future progress is concerned. These researches are necessarily bound up with linguistics (the first human science which, while still very young, assumed a rigorous form), with psychology (better and better equipped and yet disarmed in the face of so many problems), and with sociology, that latecomer in developing well-based techniques, whose theorists still confront each other with diverse points of view.

Jewish mysticism represents the totality of the attempts to interpret in terms of mystical conceptions the meaning of rabbinical Judaism as it has crystallized in the time of the Second Temple and later. Such a development, of course, could take place only after this process of crystallization had attained a certain degree of fixity. This holds good for both the type of legal Judaism which Philo of Alexandria tried to interpret, as well as for the more developed type of Talmudic Judaism which served as a frame for the spiritual efforts of the Medieval Kabbalists. It is not my purpose to discuss here the historical problems of the development of Jewish mysticism, and especially of Kabbalism; I have done so in other places, especially in my book Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. On the other hand, the subject with which I propose to deal here occupies a central place in Jewish mysticism. In a religious system that is based on Divine Revelation and the acceptance of Holy Scriptures which determine its tenets, the questions connected with the essential nature of such revelation in Scripture are obviously vital ones. Moreover, in a time of crisis—andmysticism as a historical phenomenon is a child of times of crises—such questions are especially pressing. Mystics are people who, through their own experience and speculation on such experience, detect new layers of meaning in their traditional religion. If this kind of experience and speculation does not lead them to break away from the traditional institutional framework of their religion, then the first question bound to come up is how to find their own experience reflected or anticipated in their sacred texts; also how to reconcile their vision of things with that accepted by their own tradition. It is, of course, a truism that allegorical interpretation makes its appearance spontaneously whenever new ideas clash with those of a holy book, seemingly standing in contradiction to them and requiring some process of reconciliation. What is true of allegorical interpretation applies even more so to mystical interpretation in a more precise sense.

Among the multiple aspects that are apparent to us in the religious life of the ancients, our attention is quite naturally directed toward the extremely important occurrences which interrupt the normal course of things and reveal the intrusion of the sacred into the life of men. These phenomena, called τέρατα in Greek, prodigia a in Rome, are of diverse, but always significant, value, according to the particular case. They sanction the privileged state of being of people who are marked by the imprint of the divine, they adduce irrefutable confirmation of the will of the gods, they interpret the joy and, far more frequently, the anger of the all-powerful beings who decree the course of the world.

Indian villages are not yet industrialized. Influences of modern technology on village life come mostly from outside. Industrialization has affected the urban centers and is bringing about a change in the relationship between these centers and folk societies, thereby influencing the latter as well.

Indian folk communities have not been isolated societies like the primitive tribes. They were closely connected with non-industrial urban centers and together with them formed regional cultures. Folk and urban cultures maintained a give and take relationship during the ages. “Folk tunes, regional songs and styles, even non-Indian melodies,” says Professor D. P. Mukerji “were incorporated into the classical texture, and the new classical style in its turn was always affecting folk music a great deal.”

The hobo is a man of many legends; these legends are contradictory because they “serve” opposite goals. Like Snow White, Mickey Mouse, or Sherlock Holmes, he has become a hero of comic-strip cartoons for children. Sometimes he is a bugaboo, whose mournful fate serves as an example of punishment for “laziness, that mother of vices.” At other times he is the protagonist of proud and lofty freedom. And is not freedom the purpose of our actions and the reward for the greatest virtues?

Today, the French word “syndicat” designates both an association of workers and a group of producers or business concerns. In the nineteenth century, it was identified with “associations of resistance” which the law called “workers’ coalitions” and which were associations of workers, de facto or de jure, formed to improve the lot of the working class by one means or another. In this study we shall consider such organizations exclusively.

At first glance it may seem paradoxical that a historian as resolutely idealist, in almost every sense of the word, as Arnold J. Toynbee, could be accused by some of his critics of replacing historical method by that of the natural sciences. This charge has been made, however, and upon reflection we realize that, rather than being overcome with astonishment, we must seek to explain the charge and, if possible, to justify Toynbee's method.

The theoretic structure of Marxian economy was elaborated to provide an understanding of the laws of the motion of capitalism. The motion of capitalism, however, is nothing but the process of economic development under conditions of multiple centers of investment-decisions. It becomes, then, an interesting question to ask how much of the theoretic structure of Marx applies to the problems of economic development in general and how much is limited to those aspects alone which follow from the theoretically contingent condition of decentralized investment-decisions. It will not, therefore, be the primary purpose of this paper to examine the adequacy of the conceptual structure of Marxian economic thought, or even its relative advantages or disadvantages over the more widely accepted school, following the inquiries of Walras, Menger, Jevons, and others; but, rather, to assume the general framework of Marxian theory and attempt to seek an answer within its limits.

The search for more general truths in international relations leads to an examination of the basic forces that shape the conduct of foreign relations. This has been a major preoccupation of the new study of international relations. Scholarly observers holding up a mirror to international society note certain common features, some going back to the Greeks, others to the Treaty of Westphalia, others to the French Revolution, and still others to the Industrial Revolution. Some theorists identify a few elemental facts or “laws” of politics whose recurrence spans all historical eras: for example, Thucydides, Hobbes, the Federalists, and contemporary political realists speak with one voice about the stubborn reality of the balance of power. Underlying present-day international relations, however, the basic forces which give content to international behavior are for the most part the product of modern history. Nationalism and industrialization are new-fangled ideas which had to await fundamental social and economic changes. For Arnold Toynbee the fundamental forces of modern international relations are westernization, contemporary nationalism, and the rise of masses. The clue may be found in this triad to much of the bewilderingly complex and rapidly changing movement of international events. Any effort to understand Toynbee's approach to world politics must comprehend these elements in his thinking. With the publication of the last four volumes of his major work, we are able to view for the first time the full canvas on which he has traced their influence.

A considerable body of corroborative evidence, of a linguistic as well as a cultural order, attests to the authenticity of traditional tales referring to contacts between the islands of Oceania and the American continent during the pre-Columbian era.

In the first place, it is well known that there is close resemblance between some words in the languages of the western watershed of South America and those of Oceania, notably the Polynesian. These similarities have to do with words designating certain cultivated plants and other objects.

This principle of the Torah as a living unit connects with the third principle we are now ready to discuss, that of the manifold and even infinite meanings of the Torah. The different limbs in the simile of the organism were frequently interpreted not as coordinate organs on the same level of importance, but as different layers of meaning, leading the mystical student of the Sacred Text from the outer and exoteric meaning to ever deeper strata of understanding. The idea of an organism becomes identified here with the idea of a living hierarchy of meanings.