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PARTISAN REVIEW
These misstatements reveal a disregard for the data of history,
an unwillingness to consider factual content except insofar as it con–
forms to the order imposed. That reluctance to bow to the irksome
restraints of his material sometimes reaches the point where Toynbee
not only disregards but consciously defies the facts.
In Volume IV of the original opus stood the assertion that
North Cprolina "produced some of the great men of the twentieth
century" such as Woodrow Wilson. Wilson actually spent four unim–
portant years of his life in. that state before he entered Princeton as
an undergraduate. That brief period had no discernible influence
upon his career or ideas. A review by Charles A. Beard in the
American Historical Review
singled out for ridicule the whole pas–
sage in which this sentence stood. But in the abridgment it still appears
unmodified.
To prove that total war is a consequence of democracy, Toynbee
gives a horrendous and overdrawn picture of the treatment of the
loyalists in the American Revolution. "This first example of 'totali–
tarianism' is significant for the victorious American colonists were
the first democratized nation of our Western society." A footnote
blandly acknowledges that there was a precedent a half-century
earlier in the action of the nondemocratic British authorities in Nova
Scotia.
More generally, this intransigence is reflected in the failure to
use the materials on which modern scientific history has labored in
the past half-century. Toynbee centers his study upon politics and
religion with casual and often inaccurate attention to economics and
ideas. This same stubbornness often leads to a blind contentiousness.
In a long, meaningless quarrel, Gibbon is castigated for marking the
beginnings of the decline of the Roman empire in the second century
A.D.: with infinite pains and much satisfaction Toynbee demon–
strates that Hellenic Civilization had already begun to decline five
hundred years earlier, even before there was a Roman empire. The
struggle with Gibbon has the intensity and reality of a nightmare.
Like the sleeper possessed, Toynbee cannot comprehend that his an–
tagonist
is
not there. Gibbon's problem is altogether different.
III
These illustrations of techniques, selected from among many,
demonstrate that
A Study of History
is
not a work that meets the
tests of historical proof.
If
it merits attention, it
is
as an imaginative
