Abstract

This article analyses the international thought of Arnold J. Toynbee. However, it does not focus on civilisations, but examines a less investigated aspect of his work: the world state. Between the 1920s and the 1970s, the British historian sought a solution to the crisis of international politics that would guarantee stability and peace in the world. In the atomic age, he identified the peaceful and voluntary unification of humanity as a solution to the danger of mutual nuclear destruction. This analysis assesses the different stages of Toynbee’s international thought. In fact, while in the 1920s and 1930s he developed a liberal approach strongly rooted in the tradition of British imperialism, from the 1940s and 1950s onwards he first moved towards a cosmopolitan perspective built on a capacity for revolutionary political imagination, and finally he arrived at a spiritual and utopian solution