Arnold Joseph Toynbee: The Role of Life History in Civilization Cycling

Where Edward Gibbon studied the Decline and Fall of Rome, Arnold Toynbee more generally studied the decline and fall of civilizations. The civilizational challenge is followed by a creative and adaptive response, or otherwise conquest and collapse. Across all studied civilizations, Toynbee returns to the theme of internal cohesion and its relation to external competition. In doing so, Toynbee touched upon some universal truths that underlie the cyclical view of history, though he emphasized the spiritual and circumstantial to the detriment of the geographical and biological. Nevertheless, Toynbee’s insights can be productively reinterpreted with life history evolution, such that his valid universal insights are qualified by particular inter-population variation, which ultimately chains cultural decline to its biological substrates.