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Toynbee’s central claim is that, for several centuries, the West had been the principal aggressor in the modern world, and that the decisive historical story was therefore the world’s reaction to the West rather than the West’s action upon the world. The book proceeds through six chapters: Russia, Islam, India, the Far East, “The Psychology of Encounters,” and “The World and the Greeks and Romans.”
In the case studies, Toynbee argues that different civilizations met Western power through different mixtures of resistance, adaptation, and selective borrowing. His Russia chapter is especially important: he presents Russia as a civilization distinct from the modern West, repeatedly pressured by Western rivals and driven to defend itself by adopting Western tools. In that context, he treats Soviet Communism not simply as a native Russian product, but as a Western ideological weapon that Russia turned back against the West.
In “The Psychology of Encounters,” Toynbee argues that when one civilization strikes another, its different cultural strands do not travel equally. Technology tends to penetrate more easily than religion or deeper civilizational commitments, because the more central elements provoke greater resistance. His final chapter compares the modern West to the Greeks and Romans, suggesting that just as the ancient conquerors were eventually transformed by religious movements arising from the peoples they had dominated, the modern West might also face a spiritual counter-movement from the civilizations it had disrupted.
• Title: The World and the West
• Author: Arnold J. Toynbee
• Type: Book
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication time: 1953
• Publication place: Oxford, England
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