It received enormous popular attention but according to historian Richard J. Evans, "enjoyed only a brief vogue before disappearing into the obscurity in which it has languished.

He argues that growth is driven by "Creative Minorities": those who find solutions to the challenges, who inspire (rather than compel) others to follow their innovative lead.

He argues that creative minorities deteriorate due to a worship of their "former self," by which they become prideful and fail adequately to address the next challenge they face.

The final breakdown results in "positive acts of creation;" the dominant minority seeks to create a Universal state to preserve its power and influence, and the internal proletariat seeks to create a Universal church to preserve its spiritual values and cultural norms.

He argues that the ultimate sign a civilization has broken down is when the dominant minority forms a "universal state", which stifles political creativity within the existing social order.

Nonetheless an "internal proletariat," untrusting of the dominant minority, may form a "universal church" which survives the civilization's demise, co-opting the useful structures such as marriage laws of the earlier time while creating a new philosophical or religious pattern for the next stage of history.

[6] Before the process of disintegration, the dominant minority had held the internal proletariat in subjugation within the confines of the civilization, causing these oppressed to grow bitter.

Toynbee's "Universal Churches" are written in italic and are chronologically located between second- and third- generation civilizations, as is described in volume VII.

[10] In some ways, it resembles what William H. McNeill calls the "Closure of the Eurasian Ecumene, 500 B.C.-200 A.D."[11] After 1960, Toynbee's ideas faded both in academia and the media, to the point of seldom being cited today.

"[14] In popular culture, Toynbee's theories of historical cycles and civilisational collapse are said to have been a major inspiration for Isaac Asimov's seminal science-fiction novels, the Foundation series.

"[16] Volume 1 of the book, written in the 1930s, contains a discussion of Jewish culture which begins with the sentence "There remains the case where victims of religious discrimination represent an extinct society which only survives as a fossil.

[18][19][20][21][22] In later printings, a footnote was appended which read "Mr. Toynbee wrote this part of the book before the Nazi persecution of the Jews opened a new and terrible chapter of the story...".