Arnold Toynbee (historian, born 1852)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Arnold Toynbee died on the 9th of March 1883, aged thirty, after collapsing from exhaustion following two public lectures at St. Andrew's Hall on Oxford Street. He had pushed himself past the limits of a fragile body to rebut what he saw as dangerous economic errors in a popular book. A contemporary named Frederick Rogers wrote that Toynbee "died for truth as he knew it, and those who knew him felt that his death was a national loss." Three decades of life, and yet his name would be given to a settlement house in Whitechapel that is still active today. He would coin a phrase used every day in every economics classroom in the world. And he would leave behind a set of ideas about free competition and state power that read, in many ways, as more urgent now than when he first committed them to paper. Who was this man, and how did someone who barely reached thirty do so much?

• 2. A Family of Scholars

  ›

  Joseph Toynbee, Arnold's father, was a physician and a pioneering otolaryngologist working in London. Growing up as one of nine children in that household meant Arnold was surrounded from the start by people who made their names through sustained intellectual effort. His sister Grace Frankland became a bacteriologist. His brother Paget Toynbee became a Dante scholar of note. The family's reach into British intellectual life stretched across generations. Arnold's nephew, through his brother Harry Valpy Toynbee, was the universal historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee, born in 1889. The two are still frequently confused on account of the near-identical names, a coincidence that has led to decades of misattribution in libraries and catalogues. Arnold the elder attended public schools in Blackheath and Woolwich before arriving at Oxford in 1873 to study political economy, first at Pembroke College and then from 1875 at Balliol College, where he would later teach. It was at Oxford that he encountered John Ruskin, whose influence proved lasting. W. G. Collingwood described Toynbee as one of Ruskin's "warmest admirers and ablest pupils" and judged that Toynbee's philanthropic work illustrated the teaching of Ruskin's book Unto This Last more faithfully than almost anything else written in that era.

• 3. Naming the Industrial Revolution

  ›

  French and German commentators had used the phrase "industrial revolution" in the early nineteenth century, and Friedrich Engels had helped circulate it in German-speaking contexts. But English use remained rare and inconsistent until Toynbee's lectures at Oxford made it unavoidable. His Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England were published posthumously in 1884, and the phrase entered the Anglophone mainstream on the back of that book. Toynbee's account of what the revolution actually was is striking in its specificity. He wrote that its essence was "the substitution of competition for the medieval regulations which had previously controlled the production and distribution of wealth." He identified within it an agrarian revolution that produced "the alienation between farmer and labourer," and in manufacturing, the appearance of a "new class of great capitalist employers." The old ties between masters and workers dissolved and a "cash nexus" took their place. To sum it all up, Toynbee quoted Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations alongside the steam engine as the twin forces that "destroyed the old world and built a new one." Steam-powered factories, competitive markets, the cash nexus, and the rise of pauperism were not, for him, separate phenomena. They formed a single, interconnected transformation. A revised and expanded edition of the Lectures appeared in 1908, extending the book's reach well into the twentieth century.

• 4. Against Economic Orthodoxy

  ›

  Toynbee's core argument as an economic historian was that supposedly universal economic laws were, when tested against history, nothing of the sort. Free trade, for example, was not generally advantageous in itself. It was advantageous only under certain conditions, and those conditions should not be treated as fixed or absolute. The only law he was willing to grant near-universal standing was the law of diminishing returns. From this position he pushed back hard against Social Darwinism, the doctrine that treated laissez-faire capitalism as the natural and beneficial order of things. He drew a clear line between two kinds of competition: the struggle to outproduce rivals, which he saw as genuinely beneficial because it drove technical progress, and the struggle over how the resulting wealth was divided. That second struggle, he argued, produced nothing good. "The stronger side will dictate its own terms," he wrote, and in the early days of capitalism that meant capitalists driving wages to what he called "starvation point." Competition in distribution, he concluded, had to be checked. He noted that in England two remedies were already operating: trade unions and factory legislation. The market itself he compared to a stream, neither good nor bad in essence, but one that required embankments to do its work harmlessly. The danger came when the market began to be "believed in as a gospel," departing from which was seen as "little long of immoral."

• 5. Whitechapel and the Settlement Idea

  ›

  Toynbee did not write about working-class conditions from a distance. He read to workers in large industrial centres and actively encouraged the formation of trade unions and cooperatives. His focal point was Whitechapel, the East London slum, where he helped establish public libraries for the working-class population. He also urged his students to offer free courses in working-class neighbourhoods rather than waiting for the poor to come to Oxford. That direct engagement generated an idea that outlasted him. Samuel Augustus Barnett and Henrietta Barnett, inspired by Toynbee's approach, founded the first university settlement in 1884, the year after his death, naming it Toynbee Hall in his honour. It stood on Commercial Street, Whitechapel. The concept was to bring upper and middle class students into lower-class neighbourhoods, not merely to teach or donate, but to live alongside the residents. Early chairs of trustees included Philip Lyttelton Gell and Lord Alfred Milner. The settlement drew students especially from Oxford's Wadham College and Balliol College, the institution where Toynbee had taught. The idea crossed the Atlantic as well: in 1916, the Arnold Toynbee House opened in New York, founded by members of the Stevenson Club at Madison House with support from the philanthropist Rose Gruening. Eight years after that, it was renamed Grand Street Settlement.

• 6. The Radical Creed

  ›

  Toynbee's response to the bleakness of early industrial capitalism was not revolution but a carefully bounded case for state intervention. He framed it through what he called the "Radical Creed." As he articulated it, the creed did not abandon belief in liberty, justice, and self-help. Instead it acknowledged that under certain conditions people cannot help themselves, and that in those cases the state, representing the whole people, should step in. But that intervention came with three explicit conditions: the matter had to be of primary social importance; it had to be proved practicable; and, crucially, state action must not diminish self-reliance. He insisted that "nothing must be done to weaken those habits of individual self-reliance and voluntary association which have built up the greatness of the English people." This was not a blank cheque for intervention. It was an argument that the degree of state involvement in any economic or social sphere had to be calibrated to the particular situation, because no universal rules existed to govern it. On the 26th of June 1879, he married Charlotte Atwood, a college administrator twelve years his senior and a cousin of Harold Davidson, the Rector of Stiffkey. His social commitments and his scholarly work continued in parallel after the marriage, right up until the exhaustion that killed him at thirty.