Toynbee tiles, mysterious tiles embedded in the sidewalk in several cities
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Arnold Joseph Toynbee CH (April 14, 1889 – October 22, 1975) was a British historian whose twelve-volume analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations, A Study of History, 1934-1961, was a synthesis of world history, a metahistory based on universal rhythms of rise, flowering and decline.
Toynbee was the nephew of the economic historian, Arnold Toynbee, with whom he is sometimes confused.
Toynbee's ideas have not proved overly influential on other historians; yet, his overall theory certainly was taken up by some scholars, for example, Ernst Robert Curtius, as a sort of paradigm in the post-war period.
Toynbee was born in London as the son of the physician Joseph Toynbee, a pioneering otolaryngologist in his time; the more famous universal historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975), with whom he is often confused, was his nephew.
Toynbee suggests to distinguish between "a struggle for mere existence and a struggle for a particular kind of existence." From the very beginning of history, he argues, all human civilization was essentially designed to "interfere with this brute struggle.
For Toynbee, early industrial capitalism and the situation of the working class in it was not only a subject of ivory-tower studies; he was actively involved in improving the living conditions of the proletariat.
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