ABSTRACT
One of the earliest uses of the term ‘postmodernity’ occurs in Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, published in 1954. Here he defines postmodernity as a historical epoch beginning in the final quarter of the nineteenth century and marking a period of almost continual strife that has persisted ever since: ‘A post-Modern Age of Western history’, he argues, sees ‘the rhythm of a Modern Western war-and-peace broken . . . by the portent of one general war following hard on the heels of another’ (Toynbee, 1954: 235). This epoch comes at the end of a long and steady progress during which humanity has moved from the ‘Dark Ages’ (6751075), through the ‘Middle Ages’ (1075-1475) to the ‘Modern Age’ (1475-1875). The modern, according to Toynbee, is the period that saw the rise of ‘humanism’, which understands the world in terms of a recognition that human beings are the basis of knowledge and action, are inherently valuable and dignified, and have free will. It is the epoch of gradual emancipation from superstition and mysticism as the Enlightenment, which became central to philosophical thought during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, sought to provide a rational and scientific basis for human experience. If the modern is the zenith of progress and development, then, for Toynbee, postmodernity is a period of decline in which wars rage incessantly and the humanist projects of the
Enlightenment are abandoned in the nationalist conflicts that marred much of the first half of the twentieth century. Presenting postmodernity as a period of crisis and linking it with the decline of humanist and Enlightenment values is, as we shall see, a common and often persuasive gesture, and, as Stuart Sim argues, ‘in Toynbee we have a vision of postmodernity as a journey into unknown territory where the old cultural constraints no longer apply, and our collective security is potentially compromised’ (2002: 17). Since Toynbee’s intervention in 1954, a wide range of critics have adopted the term and developed their own much more detailed analyses of the cultural, political, philosophical and historical stakes of postmodernity. Toynbee’s identification of postmodernity as a predominantly twentieth-century phenomenon is, however, one that most of these accounts support.
