Skeptic Project

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give me an example

I am SUPER pissed off now. I go and hook up to my university's proxy to trawl the databases. I find this article in the 1931, and I proceed to read it. Here's how this breaks down, its not technically a "quote mine" which would mean scanning a document looking for a document that will support ones argument. It would like if I wrote this entire post and then wrote about how I think we need to eliminate the entirety of the North American continent if we are to become successful as an organization. Someone then goes and only quote "we need to eliminate the entirety of the North American continent if we are to become successful as an organization" without any context. So, this is not a quote mine because Toynbee actually did think national sovereignty was eroding the fabric of Western civilization. On page 809 he writes

And what is the magic which gives local sovereignty its power? It is powerful, I think, because it has inherited the prestige and the prerogatives of the medieval Western Church, which were transferred, at the close of the Middle Ages, from the whole to the parts, from the great society of Western Christendom to each of that society;s "successor states," represented now by the fifty or sixty sovereign independent States of the "post-War" world. The local national state, invested with the attributes of sovereignty- Invested, that is, with the prestige and the prerogatives of the medieval Church- is an abomination of desolation standing in the place where it ought not. It has stood in that place now- demanding and receiving human sacrifices from its poor deluded votaries- for four or five centuries. Our political task in our generation is to cast the abomination out, to cleanse the temple and to restore the worship of the divinity to whom the temple rightfully belongs. In plain terms, we have to re-transfer the prestige and the prerogatives of sovereignty from the fifty or sixty fragments of contemporary society to the whole of contemporary society- from the local national state by which sovereignty has been usurped with disastrous consequences, for half a millennium, to some institution embodying our society as a while.

In the world as it is to-day [sic], this institution can hardly be a Universal Church. It is more likely to be something like a League of Nations. I will not prophesy. I will merely repeat that we are at present working, discreetly but with all our might, to wrest this mysterious political force called sovereignty out of the clutches of th local national states of our world. And all the time we are denying with out lips what we are doing with our hands, because to impugn the sovereignty of the local national state of the world is still a heresy for which a statesman or a publicist can be- perhaps not quite burnt at the stake, but certainly ostracized and discredited. The dragon of local sovereignty can still use its teeth and claws when it is brought to bay. Nevertheless, I believe that the monster is doomed to perish by our sword. The fifty or sixty local states of the world will no doubt survive as administrative conveniences. But sooner or later sovereignty will depart from them. Sovereignty will cease, in fact if not in name, to be a local affair

Toynbee, 809

Certainly damning, no? It would be if Toynbee was, first and foremost, not talking about the fact that in the interwar period, it had appeared that the experiment of the nation state, only instituted at the end of the 17th century informally, and only realized in the 19th century, was under serious strain. Remember, Europe had just witnessed a war of unspeakable horror that was waged in the name of national sovereignty. Toynbee was working with National Disarmament Conferences to try and reverse the kinds of horror that national wars could bring (ibid 808). Toynbee was a historian who thought that the movement away from a central church and the rise of enlightenment ideals had given way to a decaying force in society. This is where the guys coming from. Unfortunately for him, he was not well received by his fellow historians. According to the Wiki page on Toybee

Scholars were much less impressed. Toynbee has been severely criticised by other historians. In general, the critique has been leveled at his use of myths and metaphors as being of comparable value to factual data, and at the soundness of his general argument about the rise and fall of civilisations, which may rely too much on a view of religion as a regenerative force. Many critics complained that the conclusions he reached were those of a Christian moralist rather than of a historian. Hugh Trevor-Roper described Toynbee's work as a "Philosophy of Mish-Mash" - Pieter Geyl described Toynbee's ideological approach as "metaphysical speculations dressed up as history" [2]. His work, however, has been praised as a stimulating answer to the specialising tendency of modern historical research.[citation needed]

Toynbee was attacked on numerous fronts in two chapters of Walter Kaufmann's From Shakespeare to Existentialism (1959). One of the charges was that "Toynbee's huge success is confined to the United States where public opinion is heavily influenced by magazines" (p. 426); another was his focus on groups of religions as the significant demarcations of the world (p. 408), as of 1956. Critics attacked Toynbee's theory for emphasizing religion over other aspects of life when assessing the big pictures of civilizations. In this respect, the debate resembled the contemporary one over Samuel Huntington's theory of the so-called "clash of civilizations". Because he took Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as a related group, and contrasted them with Buddhism, his analysis was very different.

But who is this "we" that Toynbee refers to? Toynbees political service to Great Britain was certainly non-impactive considering that Britain perpetuated and participated in the sustained proliferation of that nation state system. The entire article makes reference to "this generation" (Toynbee 809) and his argument seems to be that there is a move in general to move away from the dangerous nation state system. Nowhere in his article does he claim to belong to any secret organization. In fact, he seems merely to be speaking for pious individuals in government. Ultimately, Toynbees historical analysis was dismissed, his popularity fleeting, and his impact virtually nil.

Yes. If you read Mark Mazower's "Dark Continent: Europes 21st Century" you really come to realize how bleak the inter-war period seemed. Fascism rose because liberal democracy had failed everyone so completely. Toynbee is making his, albeit bad, case that the nation state only brings about war and that the sovereignty that once belonged to the church (a disputable claim) was divided into the new Europe. I mean, no one cites or takes Toynbee seriously by 1960, and even before that point he was really only a pop-historian.