"It is up to us."- - - Arnold J. Toynbee

              Vahé Baladouni
UNIVERSIT
Y OF NEW ORLEANS
"IT IS UP TO US." - - - ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE
Professor Arnold J. Toynbee, one of the most outstanding intel-lectual figures of our time, died in October at the age of eighty-six. His vast erudition, accompanied with astonishing industry and mag-nificent style, made him a prolific writer on numerous and disparate subjects—ranging from works on the Armenian genocide of 1915 to his well-known twelve-volume work, A Study of History. Alongside his scholarly achievements, Toynbee worked for his government during both World Wars and was a member of the British delegation to the Paris peace conferences in 1919 and 1945. Showered with honorary degrees both at home and abroad, Professor Toynbee will be remembered as a great historian and a man—in the testimony erf those who knew him personally—of extraordinary modesty and humility.
Born in London on April 14, 1889, Toynbee received a classical education at Balliol College, Oxford. After graduating in 1911, he studied briefly at the British Archaeological School in Athens, where, we are told, he first entertained a philosophy about the decline of civilizations. In 1912 he became a tutor and fellow in ancient history in his Alma Mater. After World War I, he was appointed professor of Byzantine and modern Greek studies at the University of London. Some years later, in 1925, he accepted a joint appointment: Re-search Professor of International History at the University of London and Director of Studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs. While holding this position at the Institute, he issued his annual Surveys of International Affairs which soon became well recognized sources of reference. He had travelled and lectured extensively.
Like the German philosopher Immanual Kant and many others before him, Toynbee, too, believed that there must be an order or design in history. It was repugnant to him to think of the history of mankind as a chaotic, disorderly, fortuitious flux. This necessity for a meaningful view of history assumes in Professor Toynbee's Study a moral or religious character. If the religious basis of his work is latent in the first six volumes (the first three volumes were published in 1934 and the next three just before the outbreak of the